External Appearance
If you're read any of my previous XPC reviews, you'll know I'm a big fan of Shuttle's G5 XPC chassis, especially in black. To my eyes it's a much more attractive looking chassis, compared to the P-series that you see above. While the P-series isn't ugly, its front area doesn't share the clean lines of the G5. That section of the P-series is divided up into five sections, broken up by the recesses in between, which are different colour of plastic.
At the top you can see the integrated card reader. The stealthed bay for the optical drive is underneath, followed by a push-action cover for the external 3.5" bay. A non-moving section sits underneath that, containing the power button, power and activity LEDs and the XPC logo on the left. The power LED is blue with the drive activity light a boring orange.
Pushing the bottom panel near its top right corner reveals the front ports. Microphone and headphone audio sockets sit alongside a pair of USB2.0 ports and a lone, powered, FireWire400 port.
Having a peek round either side of the XPC will give you the view in the photograph above. Shuttle don't bother with an embossed company logo on the SB95P v2.0, above the row of exhaust vent holes. There's a square set of vents close by that allow air to be drawn in for the CPU's cooler. Identical vents exist on the other side, although for exhaust of hot air in both cases.
Round the back you can see the backplane space for the two expansion cards on the left. The two fans at the top, covered by odd grille designs, are exhaust fans for the hard disk space at the top of the chassis, which I'll show you soon. Underneath those fans is the power supply's cooling fan. Airflow from that 80mm fan is impleded less than the fans above it, the chassis having a completely open cutout for the PSU and the grille covering on the PSU itself is much more open. I'll talk about noise in later pages.
To the right of that fan is the switch and cable port for the power supply, to control the supply voltage you feed it. All of that lot sits above the port cluster, in a layout so sensible it hurts. The port cluster gives you a serial port, for, err, God only knows these days, along with the tiny Clear CMOS button, FireWire400 port, PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard, USB2.0 and GigE networking and the eight separate connectors for plugging in devices that make or accept noise.
Should the looks appeal, click to the next page for a look inside the SB95P v2.0.
