Internals I
The SN45G's dimensions are a tiny 300 x 200 x 185mm, and with the judicious use of aluminium and plastic it weighs in at slinky 2.85kg. Portability is the name of the game here. Taking off the aluminium cover is no more difficult than removing three screws on the back. You probably saw their locations on the previous page.
We are then left with this most regular of XPC setups. A large drive holder on the right allows you to slot in your choice of hard, optical or floppy drives. The front panel has cutouts for a single 5.25" and 3.5" bays.
Take your pick as to how you would like to arrange your storage. The recent emergence of the all-in-one DVD ReWriters has been a boost for Shuttle. Taking up only the single 5.25" bay at the very top, they're versatile enough to meet most peoples' requirements.
An obstructed view when looking from the top of the cube.
Just to reiterate, this FN45 motherboard is based on the performance NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset, one that is guaranteed to support the newest 200FSB Barton CPUs. As such, Shuttle wisely include 2 passive heatsinks for the SPP and MCP-T bridges. As mentioned, the nForce2 SPP has the ability to run 200FSB CPUs and DDR400 memory straight out of the box. Add to this 8x AGP support and some nifty pre-fetching technology under the acronym of DASP. Do we really need a potential 6.4GB/s of bandwidth from the dual-channel memory controllers when the CPU, at best, can only make do with 3.2GB/s at 200FSB ? The answer to that question remains that more is always better.
There may be no integrated graphics sapping the bandwidth here, but theoretical bandwidth figure of 6.4GB/s is always open to memory controller inefficiency. We'd expect a small rise when going from single to dual channel memory with a 200FSB CPU, assuming that no bandwidth-sapping devices are present. The MCP-T is NVIDIA's highly integrated Southbridge, featuring, amongst other goodies, hardware DD encoding, USB2.0, FireWire, 6-channel sound and 10/100 LAN.
The 8x AGP slot sits just in front of a single PCI slot. The obvious spatial confines here don't lend themselves to the usual 5 or 6 slots we see on ATX motherboards. This SN45G Shuttle, like almost all of its predecessors, is a cube packed with features, so one can argue that there's little need for a number of extra PCI slots. You may just be able to see the standard primary and secondary IDE ports on the right of the above picture. The remaining floppy port is on the other side.
