More on the Insides

The Cable Holder

Once on the inside, removing the drive cage is an absolute necessity if you want to get to the innards of the machine. Two screws, a quick slide out, and you are on your way to the core. On the under side of the drive cage is a little plastic clip that serves as a cable holder, thereby cleaning up the inside for optimal airflow. This is almost secondary to the pre-sliced IDE cable, more on that later though.

Copper base

Retention mechanism

Slots

Moving over to the add-in card slots, we were greeted by a little flap. Most unusual but very, very secure. This little rotating hunk of metal latches down onto the cards after you install them, making sure they are going absolutely nowhere. The cards are a little hard to get in, but it just requires a bit more finesse in terms of positioning to get the right angle.

The card latch

Fan and heatsink

Cooling in a case as small as this requires a bit of ingenuity. Knowing full well that there were going to be some high-end parts in these boxes, Shuttle had the foresight to design this box with much more than a 5400RPM hard drive and a Celeron in mind. The heatsink alone is quite a marvel. From a copper base attached to an aluminum sink spews four heatpipes leading to a chunk of aluminum attached to a massive 80mm Sunon fan. If you thought describing this thing took more than its fair share of a sentence, just look at the picture. The copper base wasn’t as smooth as we would have liked it to be, but once again this is just nit picking.

Sunon fan

Oh but it gets even better, the heatsink clip is about the easiest thing we have ever seen. There are little latches on the retention mechanism that can actually fit human fingers. It’s about time people got to doing this, nearly stabbing motherboards to death with screwdrivers is NOT the way a heatsink should be attached. With force that a child of four could muster, the latch easily rotates open for removal or attachment.

To add to the cooling goodness, if you flip over the box, you have the option of attaching small aluminum feet, that are slightly taller than the rubber feet. These aluminum feet raise the front end slightly higher, and allow air to come in from the vent holes on the bottom. Also note the vents on both sides of the case cover.