How proprietary are the Shuttle SFF cases?

[hberg]

I was wondering if anyone could summarize what is proprietary (if anything) about the shuttle SFF cases and motherboards? From the review of the SB51G here it looks like the heatpipe screws into the case through 4 holes in the mobo, but I wondered if there was other proprietary stuff.

I'm toying with the idea of building a tiny PC that has the ultimate gaming power, virtually no cables, makes virtually no noise, can disappear into a cabinet or drawer, and will not overheat and cause a Chernobyl-like meltdown (probably a crazy quest, but hey, who needs sanity?)

This fan http://www.silentpcreview.com/modules.p ... =44&page=1 is interesting, but I wonder if these things are generally standardized enough to swap between cases.

Any ideas?

Henry

[DiMaestro]

On the cubes the only propeitary items are, or really hard to find: PSU, Mobo, and Heatsink.

You can use standard drives, 1 PCI, 1 AGP card, up to two 3.5 inch drives and one 5.25 drive.

My 2.4b w/ 8500 hardly makes any noise under full load. The HSF combo is controlled by the bios to spin faster on a higher heat load, and with the unit folding for a good 20 hours, it hadn't speed up to full speed. Yes, you can hear it, but it is not a wind tunnel like device. Which is really nice.

The IDE Cables that come with it are designed for the cube. The primary is short, and routes underneat the drive cage. The secondary is halfway rounded, so keeping them out of view is made a trifle easier.

I'd say just a stock cube would work really well.

[Freon]

I'm pretty sure the 4 holes that the heatsink is screwed into are the same spacing as the standard P4 heatsink. The clips look like the clips used on many standard P4 heatsinks.

[DiMaestro]

But Freon, the question is *why* switch heatsinks? I think the heatpipe is one of the best designed heatsinks out there, most especially for that application.