Let's take a look at the SS40G both outside and inside. As I alluded to earlier, the SS40G has a different look than the SS50, with a rounded, beveled design for the front face with a glassy-looking finish. The left and right edges on the top of the case are also more rounded than the SS50, giving the whole box a softer look.
A kinder, gentler cube
The front of the case has openings for one 5.25" drive and one 3.5" drive. The case comes with pre-installed blanks for these openings that match the front of the case. One nice touch here is that the blanks screw into the drive tray inside the case. This provides two benefits; first, it ensures that when the blanks are installed, they're perfectly flush with the front of the case. Second, it means that they can't be accidentally moved; many cases with "snap-in" blanks can be frustrating to deal with, as if you bump the blank with something, it will sometimes push into the interior of the case. Fixing it usually means taking the cover off the case. With the screw-in blanks of the SS40G, if they're installed, they're staying put unless you want them to move.
Also present on the front of the case are the requisite power and reset buttons, and power and hard drive LEDs. Once again, however, the SS40G's makeover is obvious. This time, these four components are within a darker gray bar that extends across the front of the case. It's impossible to see in the photos, but the plastic covering the dark gray bar is raised slightly from the rest of the front face in a slight rounded hump. The buttons are rounded to match and are flush with the rest of the raised area. The effect is very nice and coordinates well with the sleek lines of the front face.
Front ports make for convenient connections
The other interesting feature on the front of the case is the front ports. These include (from left to right) an S/PDIF digital connector, a microphone input, a headphone output, two USB ports and an IEEE 1394 Firewire port. Basically, just about any port that is convenient to have up front is present here.
Moving around to the back of the case reveals even more ports from which to choose. Starting at the top left and working right across the top row, we find two serial ports, the 10/100 Ethernet connector, a PS2 mouse port and two audio ports, one for center/bass channels and one for surround channels. Moving on to the bottom row, there is a DB-15 VGA connector, an S-video connector, two IEEE 1394 ports, two USB ports, the PS2 keyboard connector, and the audio port for the front channels.
There are a couple of other interesting things to see here. First is the existence of two vertical PCI slots, a feature sorely lacking on the SV24 that was first introduced by the SS50. To add or remove PCI cards, you remove the screws for both of the PCI backplanes. This lets a hinged piece on the back (which normally presses down and holds the PCI backplanes in place) swing up out of the way, allowing cards to be installed or removed.
Ports a'plenty
The most prominent feature of the back of the case is the large spot reserved for the cooling fan. There are four thumbscrews here that hold the cooling fan in place; we'll examine why that is shortly. To give you a hint, look closely at the openings for the cooling fan and you can see some very thin fins on the inside of the case. This is part of what I think is one of the SS40G's best features, its unique processor cooling system.
Now that we've taken a tour around the outside of the SS40G, let's open up the case and look inside. Doing this is a simple affair; three thumbscrews on the outer edges of the back of the case secure the cover; simply remove these and slide the cover back a half-inch or so, and it will lift right off, at which point things look like so:
It looks a little dark and scary in there at the moment, but that's OK; the main thing to see here is the drive tray. If you look closely, you can see it has a stair-step shape to it that maximizes usage of the available space in the top portion of the case. Up to three drives stack up in here; the hard drive on bottom, followed by a floppy drive then a CD-ROM drive.
Installing all these drives is easy because of the design of the drive tray itself. You'll notice a single screw on each side of the tray, on the outermost flap that sits on top of the case rails. Remove these two screws, and the whole drive tray will slide back until the drives (or blank plates) clear the front face, at which point the tray will lift straight up and out. Once the tray is out, it's a breeze to install or remove drives as necessary. Removing the drive tray also provides access to the rest of the innards, as you can see here:
With the drive tray out of the way, we can see the rest of the machine fairly well, though there are some cables in the way in this photo. You can, however, spot the two DIMM slots towards the front of the case, as well as the heatsink which covers the processor socket. Look closely here and you'll see a couple of anomalies. First of all, when was the last time you saw a passive heatsink on an Athlon? Are these people crazy? Ah, but here's where the second anomaly comes in; there are four pieces of copper tubing coming out of the processor heatsink. Indeed, the processor cooler for the SS40G is less a heatsink and more a heatpipe, as we'll discover next.
