Inside
A quick removal of the top, courtesy of three thumbscrews, reveals the interior. As you might expect, the lack of space, coupled with the wealth of extras, doesn't leave much free 'board space. The hard drive / DVD drive tray comes away with the removal of two small screws, we are then presented with this overhead view.
Note the novel CPU cooler, I'll talk about this a little more later. The cables you see coming from the right power the various ports on the front that I spoke about earlier, they simply hook-up to various headers on the motherboard.
Clearing away the cooler and cables gives you easy access to the SiS-powered motherboard, the Shuttle FS51 to be precise. The motherboard houses the passively-cooled SiS651 North Bridge memory controller with official support for DDR333 (PC2700) memory. It also features a built-in 3D graphics engine under the name of SiS315. Not meant to be a contender to dedicated mid-priced graphics cards, its foremost duty is to provide a workable solution for those looking reasonable graphics without additional expenditure.
Linked via a bi-directional 16-bit 266MB/s bus is the SiS962L South Bridge. The SiS962 SB is specified with internal support for 3 Firewire ports and LAN. I presume the 'L' version found on this motherboard does not support this feature as we have VIA's on-board Realtek 8100B ethernet controller and VIA VT6306 Firewire controller chips sitting just below the CPU bracket. One aspect we can take for granted, however, is the use of the SB's USB2.0 capability, powering our 4-ports. The SB also supports the newer ATA133 standard of hard drives, although I view this as a rather academic inclusion.
2 184-pin DDR DIMM slots that are capable of housing up to 2GB of system memory sit astride the two IDE ports. You can gauge just how small the motherboard is when you consider it in relation to the length of the memory slots.
Being of such a compact design allows us only one PCI slot. More pleasing is the inclusion of a 4x AGP slot, laid out so that even a monstrous GeForce4 Ti 4600 can fit within the case. Due to the lower power requirements of this particular motherboard, we see no 4-pin P4 power connector.
