Gutting the beast
Removing the SN27P2's outer skin is a simple affair, but disassembly isn't complete until we remove the system's drive cages.
This is a somewhat more involved process than in older P-series boxes, which included tool-free plastic hard drive cages. Shuttle says the cages would occasionally break when units were shipped with hard drives installed—something it no doubt learned from its foray into system building—so the SN27P2 reverts back to metal cages held in place by traditional screws.
The P series' tool-free design will undoubtedly be missed, but it takes less than a minute to unscrew and pop out the SN27P2's three drive cages, so there's hardly cause for revolt. We'd prefer a more secure hard drive mounting system to one that saved us a few seconds, anyway.
It also helps that the system's expansion slots are accessible even with the drive cages in place. Shuttle puts the PCI Express x16 slot on the outer edge of the motherboard, so it's possible to install double-wide graphics cards like NVIDIA's GeForce 7900 GTX. You lose access to the PCI slot, of course, but Shuttle says the SN27P2's 400W power supply has enough oomph to handle the demands of high-end graphics cards.
Installing a double-wide graphics card into the cramped chassis takes a little effort, and Shuttle's done a good job of ensuring that you don't scratch up the board in the process. A protective layer of plastic covers the area directly to the right of the PCI Express x16 slot to prevent a graphics card's PCI back plate from making direct contact with the motherboard or other surface-mounted components. Little details like this clearly illustrate that Shuttle knows its way around smaller form factors.
Just beyond the PCI slot we find the SN27P2's chipset and Serial ATA ports. There are only three SATA ports on the board, with the fourth routed to the rear port cluster's eSATA port. Note that Shuttle also relies on active chipset cooling. The single-chip nForce 570 Ultra puts out too much heat to be adequately cooled by a passive heatsink in the SN27P2's toasty internals.
On the left side of the system, users have access to the SN27P2's four DIMM slots and its IDE and floppy ports. The CPU socket's over to the right, hiding under the SN27P2's custom cooler.
Cooling a processor within the cramped confines of a small form factor system isn't easy, but Shuttle's XPC designs have always done an exceptional job without making too much noise. The SN27P2's processor cooler is essentially unchanged from previous P-series designs; a smaller fan (to the left in the picture) draws cool outside air into the system and blows it over a series of radiator fins. A larger diameter fan works the opposite end of the cooler (to the right in the picture) and exhausts warm air from the system.
The SN27P2's processor cooler relies on variable-speed fans, so the noise levels it generates depend on the heat output of your processor. In testing, we found the system to be reasonably quiet with an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and GeForce 7900 GTX installed.
In addition to those found in the processor cooler, a pair of smaller fans sits at the rear of the case to provide cooling for the system's hard drives. Again, these are variable-speed units, and rather quiet ones at that.
From this angle, we can also see the SN27P2's power supply. This Silent X model boasts a 400-watt rating and includes a six-pin power connector for PCI Express graphics cards. It also sports power factor correction, a feature that's actually required by the European Union.
