Shuttle SN27P2

Taking the black outer shell off using the supplied thumbscrews reveals that the insides are no longer tool-less. Unfortunately, the upgrade has forced the requirement of a Philips head screw driver to remove the two hard disk racks and then the 5.25" rack underneath. The hard disk racks take individual hard disks; the rear one being cooled by two 60mm fans and the front one has a cut out for a 40mm fan should you feel the need for one. It isn't included, though.

The top racks are also specifically designed for to use SATA hard drives with the cabling specifically routed for data and power connectors. An IDE hard disk can be used, if placed under the disk drive since the IDE cable is capable of handling two IDE devices.

Motherboard Specs

• Support for all socket AM2 AMD Althon 64/X2/FX processors;
  
• NVIDIA nForce 570 Ultra MCP;
  
• One PCI-Express x16 and one PCI slot;
  
• Four DDR2 memory slots with support for up to 8GB of DDR2 800;
  
• Three internal & one external 3Gb/s SATA ports;
  
• One IDE port;
  
• Eight USB 2.0 ports (six rear, two front);
  
• IEEE 1394a Firewire with two ports (one 4-pin front, one 6-pin rear);
  
• 7.1 Channel Realtek ALC882 High Definition Audio
  
• Marvell PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet

The ICE heatsink unit is unchanged from the original P-series chassis conception. Air is drawn from one side of the case to the other rather than in from the sides and out the rear like on the G chassis. The unit is unscrewed using thumbscrews on springs to retain the correct tension, however to get appropriate contact and due to the space constraints you’ll probably want to use a screwdriver again to finger tightness. The integrated heatspreader included on all Athlon 64 processors prevent the core from being crushed as a result of poor heatsink mounting or over tightening the retention screws.

The actual heatsink is a typical heatpipe design, that uses a 60mm fan to push air through to a 92mm fan and out the case. However, the whole area inside the shroud on top of the CPU core is simply open space! We feel it would have been better use to extend the copper base into an extra heatsink to aid CPU cooling, even if it means a slight redesign having the fan push air in over the heatpipes first to retain efficiency.