Introduction

With AMD fully committed to their new Socket 939 interface, hardware manufacturers in the AMD ecosystem have been slowly introducing new products that are built on the new interface. Shuttle is the first small form factor manufacturer out of the gates with a new product in the form of their SN95G5. This probably shouldn’t come as to much of a surprise to you if you’ve followed the small form factor (SFF) market closely, as Shuttle was also first to market with Athlon 64 and Athlon XP solutions. For that matter, they were also first to market with Intel-based products as well.

This little black box is based on NVIDIA’s nForce3 Ultra chipset and packs enough performance to keep a smile on the face of the most demanding gamer, but more on that later. We’ll first go over the SN95G5’s key features and take a look at some of its critical components before it goes on the test bench for benchmarking.

Stylish black chassis

Note the drive doors

G5 chassis

The first aspect you’ll notice is Shuttle’s new G5 chassis. Unlike a lot of small form factor (SFF) manufacturers, up until now Shuttle has resisted using drive bay doors. This gave their previous SFF designs an ungainly look when they were paired with beige floppy or CD/DVD-ROM drives.

Drive doors closed

3.5 inch drive door opened

For G5, Shuttle has integrated three stealth drive bay doors. One for the I/O ports on the bottom of the chassis, one of the 3.5” drive bay, and a third for the 5.25” drive bay. This gives the new G5 chassis a clean look.

Shuttle has also redesigned the I/O ports for better functionality. The USB ports are spaced further apart from each other. As an example, this change allows a user with an oversized thumb drive or USB dongle like Metapass to connect this and a second USB device at the same time. Shuttle has also moved the line-in jack to the SN95G5’s back panel.

Oversized thumb drive fits now

Another change Shuttle has implemented with their new G5 chassis is the removal of the integrated card reader. First introduced with their G4 chassis, the card reader sat in the 3.5” drive bay and support six different media formats, including SmartMedia, CompactFlash and Memory Stick. This feature was pretty convenient for digital photography buffs as you had front panel access built right into your SFF PC. Sure, you lost the use of a 3.5” floppy drive, but with only 1.44MB of storage and outdated performance, most have ditched the floppy disk drive anyway.

But many gamers and hardware enthusiasts complained both in public (on web forums) and privately in emails to Shuttle. Many of these guys used the external 3.5” drive bay for adding a second hard drive. Because of this, Shuttle decided to ditch the media card reader on G5. If you want the media card reader, it can still be found in Shuttle’s “P” series SFFs (an nForce3 P-series variant hasn’t been announced), but everyone else misses out. (In case you’re interested, Shuttle also offers it as an optional accessory on their website for $24.)