Introduction
6 months ago most people would have been wondering what on earth SFF stood for and for anyone that isnt sure its Small Form Factor. These have been around for some time, but the solutions always left something to be desired, whether it be style or upgradeability there was something missing. That all changed with the introduction of the Shuttle range although even the early ones had something missing the all important AGP slot. That isnt the case these days starting with the SS51G not only was there onboard graphics and a 4X AGP slot but the level of integration reached new heights. All was well in the Intel camp when hot on the heels of the SS51G came the SB51G this time using the latest Intel chipset I845GE which supports Hyperthreading technology.
Where was the AMD offering..... Well wait no longer because today i'm having a look at the SN41G2 shuttle featuring the brand new Nvidia Nforce 2 chipset. As with its recent predecessors Shuttle have NOT skimped on the integration with 6 channel sound as well as 3 Firewire ports, 4 USB ports, Lan, 8x AGP, and optical out like previous versions, this time Shuttle have also included TV-Out and 2 VGA outputs. Do I hear you saying "Dual Monitors" ?
All of this in an aluminium case less than 8" tall.
The question we all want answered is " Can this little system cope with the heat from an XP? ". Well I want it answered anyway, especially if its being used in conjunction with a high end graphic card.
We'll get more into the specifications a little later, but on first impression it looks like Shuttle have made the wait worth it. Can it live up to my expectations? Well keep reading and we'll find out together.
There are no voltage options either on the motherboard or in Bios as with previous editions. Although there are a multitude of different bios settings to run the Fsb and Memory in a variety of configurations, even though I was able to overclock this CPU upto 2180Mhz all of the benchmarks are run at stock speed. So in order to judge the performance we are going to compare it using a Radeon 9700 Pro, a GF4 MX440, and its own integrated GF4 MX graphics.
Let’s have a look at it in more depth...
