One tiny little box
The SS51 is enclosed in an aluminum 'cube' 300mm long, 200mm wide, and 185mm tall. For you imperial folks, that's 11.8" x 7.9" x 7.3".

Sorry, that's not bulletproof glass

Like the SS40G, the SS51 abandons the monotone brushed aluminum exteriors of old and adds a translucent front panel. As far as I can tell, blue is only one color option available for the SS51. Despite the fact that Intel's processors come on green dies, blue is pretty much their unofficial color, so there's some method behind the blue color scheme. In any case, the color scheme matches the blue power LED, whose brightness has been toned down to non-blinding levels since the SS50.

Overall the SS51's case is quite attractive—certainly better than the beige monstrosities I see everywhere, including under my own desk. And not to worry, there's enough of the brushed aluminum to keep you friends from calling the case girly, and the faceplate is held on by Allen screws if the blue really doesn't agree with your testosterone levels.

Like previous Shuttle barebones systems, you're going to ruin the case's aesthetic if you add a beige 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 drive. You can always paint the drive face silver to have it blend in a little better, but getting it to look really good is going to be difficult, especially with the translucent faceplate. If you have a lot of time on your hands, you might be able to whip up a drive cover from the removable drive bay faceplates, but it would be so much simpler if Shuttle went with a sliding or hinged door for the front of the case.

Two rear exhaust fans

The rear of the SS51 is dominated by the main exhaust fan, but also features an array of expansion ports and the internal PCI and AGP slots. All the SS51's external screws are thumbscrews, which is great. You've got to break out the screwdriver to work inside the case, but with such a small form factor, there's just not enough room for internal thumbscrews.

Take everything out and it's not that hard to work on

As you might expect, such a small case gets pretty crowded on the inside. Surprisingly, installation was much less of a hassle than I anticipated. All internal cabling is zip tied or clamped to the case's frame and out of the way, and the cooling apparatus and drive bay are completely removable. The motherboard is remarkably easy to access, and I didn't so much as get a scratch while working inside the case.

Removable bay tray makes installation a snap

The benefits of the aforementioned removable drive bay are twofold: not only does removing the drive bay allow you easy access to the motherboard, it also makes installing your drives a snap.

It's actually possible to install a second hard drive in lieu of a floppy drive and still keep the 5 1/4" bay open for an optical drive, but the two hard drives end up quite close together. Two hard drives might work with slower and cooler 5400rpm models, but the complete lack of air flow around the drive bay makes me leery of risking even a single IBM GXP drive, let alone two.

I suppose this is where I could complain that the SS51 doesn't support more than one 5 1/4" drive, but that's a complaint that's hard to justify. Adding another 5 1/4" bay would necessitate a larger case, and the whole point behind the XPC line is the small form factor. There are a number of DVD/CDRW combo drives on the market already, and recordable DVD drives cover all the optical bases, so the SS51 isn't at a huge disadvantage.

Convenient little door makes card installation surprisingly easy

Shuttle does its best to make sure that AGP and PCI card installation isn't a hassle. A swinging door just above the expansion slot holes makes sliding in even a GeForce4 Ti 4600 easy. Only the All in Wonder Radeon 8500DV's protruding CATV port made for a difficult installation, but a few minutes of ginger jiggling saw it slide nicely into place.

A tiny power supply to run it all

200W via an Achme power supply is all the SS51 needs to keep running, even with a Pentium 4 and GeForce4 Ti 4600 busting out high frame rates. The limited expansion capabilities of the SS51 mean you'll likely run out of space before you run out of power.