Cooling and power
The P-Series' Silent X cooling arrangement is a bit of a departure from Shuttle's other cubes. Silent X segments the system into three distinct cooling regions: the CPU zone, the hard drive zone, and power supply and graphics card zone.

With a toasty Prescott processor, the CPU zone is obviously the most difficult to cool. Shuttle completely isolates the air flow for this zone with a shrouded wind tunnel that sucks air in from the right side of the case and exhausts it out the left. The wind tunnel is powered by a pair of temperature-controlled fans; an 80mm fan exhausts air from the case while a smaller 70mm unit draws in cool air.

Silent X's CPU cooler is actually a modified version of Shuttle's venerable ICE design. The heat sink screws directly into the board, marring what could have otherwise been a completely tool-free system installation.

With the CPU zone covered by the new ICE wind tunnel, our attention turns to the P-Series' other cooling zones. The hard drive zone is cooled by a pair of 70mm, temperature-controlled exhaust fans, while the power supply and graphics card zone relies on the power supply unit's 80mm exhaust fan.

In total, the SB95P V2 is equipped with a whopping five fans—more than most full-size ATX systems, including my own. That doesn't necessarily make the system loud, though. All fans are temperature-controlled and support linear fan speed ramping to avoid annoying oscillations between high and low fan speed settings.

Shuttle powers the SB95P V2 with a beefy 350W PSU that offers more wattage than any other small form factor system. Given the fact that Shuttle's 240W power supplies have no problems handling GeForce 6800 GT graphics cards, I suspect that this 350W unit may even be able to accommodate a GeForce 6800 Ultra or a Radeon X850 XT.