Cooling and power
The SN25P ditches Shuttle's venerable ICE CPU/system cooler in favor of dedicated cooling zones for the system's processor, hard drives, and power supply and graphics card. Since the CPU zone is the most important one, we'll start there.

Considering that the P-series chassis was originally designed to encase near-molten Prescott Pentium 4 processors, it's no surprise that the chassis pays special attention to CPU cooling. The processor cooling zone consists of a shrouded wind tunnel that's completely isolated from the rest of the system. The tunnel sucks cool air in from the right side of the system with a 70mm intake fan and expels it out the left with an 80mm exhaust fan.

A modified version of Shuttle's ICE cooler sits between the two fans, channeling heat from the CPU up through a quartet of heat pipes into an array of tightly-packed cooling fins.

The cooler sits on a smooth copper base and screws directly into the motherboard. It's actually the only system component that you'll need a screwdriver to remove.

With processor cooling shrouded from the rest of the system, Shuttle can concentrate on dedicated cooling solutions for the system's other components. The hard drive zone is cooled by a pair of 70mm exhaust fans that draw air out the rear of the system, while an 80mm PSU exhaust fan handles the graphics card and power supply zone. All three of the system's cooling zones use temperature-controlled fans with linear speed control, which should keep noise levels to a minimum.

Given the Athlon 64's more agreeable thermal profile, the SN25P should be able to get away with relatively low fan speeds most of the time. The Athlon 64 family's comparatively low power consumption probably won't tax the system's 350W power supply, either. That should leave plenty of juice for high-end graphics cards.