To get to the inside of the SN27 its a case of emoving the satin black lid which is a simple process, it is held on with 3 thumb screws for easy accessibility. The insides are to the usual Shuttle standards, that being exceptionally well laid out ensuring you can install all necessary components with ease, it uses a modular system that lets you install Hard disks, optical drives and floppy disk drives from outside the system and they simply slot into place. Without sounding like a sales representative for Shuttle it really is worth pointing out how well everything slot into place – you will not find any issues.

All of the cables are also supplied at the correct lengths for a snug fit which also promotes good airflow. The power supply inside the shuttle has a 350 watt rating which may seem to many as being severely underpowered, however these supplies really are built to the highest standards. Our editorial director Allan “Zardon” Campbell ran a shuttle system comprising a Prescott 3.8ghz, DVD burner, 2 gig of DDR2 and a 7800GTX from a 250 watt Shuttle supply for over a year so the higher spec 350w model should be able to handle anything thrown at it for quite some time. As with most cube style systems the location for the floppy drive could easily be used to house another hard disk drive however being that it already takes two drives a third may be overkill. It is also worth mentioning. Although these chassis are exceptionally well designed it is best not to overpopulate as heat levels will rise.

The main board itself has the following connectors:
• 3x SATA
• 1x PCI
• 1x PCIe 16x
• 1x IDE
• 1x FDD

Clearly there are more people installing the option of windows 64bit and Shuttle supply both sets of driver disks.

Having the SATA drivers on a floppy disk is always needed as XP will not find any SATA hard disks on install without it. The manual provided is mainly for the nvidia Raid that is built onboard, this allows you to build in fault tolerance for your hard disk by mirroring or striping your disks before loading an operating system on them.

After connecting all of the remaining components it was time to get the system fired up.

The bios supplied is a standard Phoenix affair allowing you to change Cool and quiet options, HT speeds and Dram timings. The BIOS has some CPU clock change options meaning if you really want to you can crank it up a notch to get a little more performance (at the cost of heat), being that the fan inside is custom built for this shuttle there will very little you will be able to do to provide extra cooling. Obviously some people may very well add an external water cooling kit and then it would be safe to increase core voltages, however we feel this is somewhat defeating the purpose of a shuttle in the first place. Voltages for the RAM and chipset are also changeable.

Installed components:

• AM2 64 3800+
• 2x 1Gb GEIL DDR2 8500
• BFG 7900 GT OC 256MB
• 1x 16x LG DVD R/W
• 1x Mitsumi Black FDD
• 1x Seagate 160Gb SATA HDD

In the creation of this article showing the Shuttle system as an general use machine we felt a "real world" selection of hardware was more feasible. This is the kind of portable system you could use at the heart of a media center as well as being able to play the latest games at a reasonable resolution. Just as importantly, it won't break your bank balance either.

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed. Following the completion of the installation, the ATI/Nvidia drivers were installed. The only updates applied were SP2 and .NET Framework 2.0 (latest service pack). Next, the latest builds of the benchmarking tools were installed and finally, the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test, the Nvidia drivers (91.31) were set to default quality/optimizations.

Good Benchmarking Practice:
Where possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times and the median result for each resolution/setting is shown in the tables that will follow. All games/applications had their latest patches applied.