Opening 'er up
What lurks beneath the SN95G5's demure exterior?

A little crowded, but it's a cube, not a Tardis

With its outer skin removed, the SN95G5's internals look a little crowded. Fortunately, the cube's drive cage, which houses external 5.25" and 3.5" drive bays in addition to an internal 3.5" bay, pops out easily.

From the left...

With the drive cage removed, the SN95G5's internals are easily accessible. Like all G-series cubes, the AGP slot is mounted along the outside edge of the motherboard, precluding the use of double-wide graphics cards. The cube's bright yellow CMOS reset jumper is also relatively close to the edge of the board, making it easy to access without completely disassembling the system.

And the right

From the right side of the cube, you can see the cube's easily accessible DIMM slots and neatly wound and sheathed power cables. Shuttle specs the SN95G5 with a 240W power supply that should be able to handle just about anything you can cram into the cube.

Time to pop out the motherboard for closer inspection.

The cube's FN95 motherboard, naked

Since Shuttle has taken to carefully routing cables, motherboard layout doesn't matter much for XPC systems. I have to admit that I'm not too crazy about the Serial ATA connectors being so close to the CPU socket, though.

Shuttle goes with an interesting cooling solution for the motherboard's nForce3 Ultra chipset. The cooler blows from side to side across the board, taking advantage of venting on the SN95G5's side panels.

ICE cooling: now with four pins instead of three

The SN95G5 uses the same ICE cooling system as Shuttle's cubes of old. The design has been tweaked over the years, and this latest iteration includes rubber grommets at each screw mounting point to dampen vibrations. The fan also has a BTX-style four pin power connector.