Internals
As you can see its pretty compact in there! All of them devices squeezed onto a motherboard that is about half the size of a standard ATX motherboard. After removing the 3 thumb screws, the top slides off revealing the guts of this miniature PC. The HD and CDrom tray has been removed to allow a better photograph of the motherboard. This tray is removable by undoing 2 screws on the top of the chassis. By making this tray portable it enables you to install your HD and CDrom away from your PC. The tray has space for 2 x 3½ inch drives and 1 x 5¼ inch drive. This could be a mixture of HDD's, FDD's. CDrom's, and other such devices.
I run my Shuttle SS51G with 2 HD's and a CD writer. I know some people
have issues about using 2 hard drives in a Shuttle due to the fact of
heat build up. After I installed my 2nd hard drive I noticed about a 3
degree heat increase. In my mind that is absolutely nothing to be worried
about.
The SB52G2 supports upto Intel 3.06GHz Pentium 4 Processors as well as HyperThreading technology. Hyper-Threading Technology, which was first seen on Intel's advanced server processors, helps your PC work more efficiently by maximising processor resources. HT enables a single processor to run two separate threads of software simultaneously. The result is greater performance and system responsiveness when running multiple applications at once. So you can multitask like never before.
One of the main things you notice once you open the Shuttle is the lack of an AGP slot. Now remember this is a PC designed for use as a small server. It's not a gaming PC! With the lack of an AGP slot you are given 2 x PCI 32-bit Bus Master compliant slots. With the 2 x PCI slots it can be easily upgraded with high performance SCSI and fiber-channel cards. They could also be used for video and data capture cards.
The CPU is cooled via the Shuttle ICE (integrated cooling engine) technology. This is basically a heatsink attached to a small radiator via 4 heatpipes. An 80mm Sunon fan plugged onto the motherboard cools the radiator and acts as an exhaust fan. The 80mm fan is also controlled via a feature in the BIOS called “fan guardian”. Once the CPU hits a temperature (set by the user in the BIOS) the fan speeds up to attempt to decrease CPU temperature.
