Features

Side vents

To help keep the SN95G5’s interior cool, Shuttle continues to include side ventilation with their G5 chassis. Vents are drilled into both the left and right sides of the SN95G5’s aluminum case cover. While not quite as large as the G2’s ventilation, these vents are still important for keeping high-end graphics cards like the GeForce 6800 and RADEON X800 series cool. Shuttle also includes vents on the bottom of the SN95G5’s chassis.

Shuttle front I/O

Shuttle back panel

Shifting to the back of the SN95G5, you’ll find two USB ports (two are provided on the front of the system) one Firewire port (a second mini-1394 port is included on the front) an Ethernet port, serial port, PS/2 ports, Line-in, SPDIF and audio ports. To the right of them you’ll see a small hole, inside sits a button that is used for clearing the SN95G5’s BIOS when pressed.

Inside the SN95G5, you’ll find NVIDIA’s nForce3 Ultra chipset. If you recall, nForce3 Ultra supports Gigabit Ethernet natively. For SN95G5 however, Shuttle has elected not to use the nForce3 Ultra’s built-in capabilities, instead relying solely on Marvell’s 88AE8001 GigE transceiver. As a result, you lose out on NVIDIA’s dedicated 2Gbps bi-directional link, relying instead on the PCI bus, which is capped at 133MB/sec. This is a significant downgrade in performance.

Besides the drop in performance, this means that you’ll also lose out on NVIDIA’s integrated Firewall software. With Internet security being a hot topic right now, this is definitely a double whammy of missed opportunities for Shuttle.

Realtek’s ALC655 audio CODEC handles audio duties. ALC655 is the successor to the popular ALC650, which was used on practically every nForce2 motherboard that we can recall. It’s a six-channel CODEC that supports HRTF 3D positional audio as well as jack-sensing technology for hooking everything up properly. Audio quality of the CODEC is good, but certainly not up to the levels of the newer Envy24 or Creative Audigy cards. It is adequate enough however for casually watching movies, listening to MP3s, or gaming, provided you’re willing to give up a few CPU cycles for this.

Supplying the SN95G5 with juice is a 240-watt power supply unit. Shuttle claims the SilentX PSU generates just 32 decibels of noise. A medium-sized fan that sits above the CPU, just behind the optical and hard drives cools the fan.

The PSU

Front of the SN95G5 up close

The PSU supplies 16 amps on the 12V rail, which is a pretty healthy amount for a 240W PSU. In comparison, our 480 watt Antec True480 PSU provides 22 amps on the 12V rail. We setup our SN95G5 system with an Athlon 64 3800+, 1GB of OCZ DDR400 SDRAM, a 16X DVD-ROM drive, 250GB Maxtor hard drive, and, most surprisingly, a GeForce 6800 GT graphics cards. The entire system ran with no problems.