Shuttle’s SN41G2 & SK41G: Two Athlon Small Form Factor PCs

SK41G Chassis – Tried and True

Moving on from the motherboard, we can start by looking at the outside of the SK41G, which is clearly reminiscent of previous Shuttle XPC designs. The removable face plate has a small amount of green thrown in, probably a reference to the Athlon XP support, but other than that looks just like the more recent Pentium 4 XPCs from Shuttle.

As usual, Shuttle has done a great job with making sure that all ports are easily accessible on the SK41G. Whatever ports are present at the front of the chassis are also at the rear, and having front facing mic/headphone outputs are very useful for those that have speakers without a headphone jack.

The mic/headphone out 1/8” jacks make up two of the 6 ports on the front of the SB51G. There’s the obligatory optical out port, which we also saw on Shuttle’s earlier design. The usefulness of having single cable 6-channel speaker output on the front of the XPC is debatable but it’s not hard to include and increases the “cool” factor of the machine, so why not. The true benefit of this port is more easily realized with the nForce2 version – the SN41G2.

To the right of all of the audio jacks we have two front facing USB 2.0 ports and a powered Firewire port (IEEE-1394). There’s nothing special about the two USB ports but there is something special (or expected?) about the Firewire port. After our testing of the Pentium 4/SiS 651 based SS51G we mentioned that we would continue to stress the system to figure out if it was a viable solution for power users. One problem we uncovered during our long term testing of the machine was that none of the Firewire ports on the system were powered. The difference between a powered and an non-powered Firewire port is, as you can probably guess, that a powered port can supply power to devices connected to it while non-powered ports will require that the device have another power source (e.g. batteries, external AC adapter, etc…). In normal situations, all 6-pin Firewire connectors are powered while the smaller 4-pin connectors are non-powered. But for some reason, the SS51G’s 6-pin ports were non-powered. The non-powered ports became an issue for a number of reasons, one example was when we tried to use the SS51G to transfer MP3s to an iPod. The iPod has a built in battery so it could work just fine while connected, however because of the intense file transfers and the fact that the SS51G wasn’t recharging the iPod while copying MP3s, the iPod’s battery would wear down very quickly. The only solution for someone in this case would be to populate the only PCI slot with a Firewire card in order to have powered ports, obviously not the best solution.

Thankfully the SK41G did not have these problems as both the front and rear Firewire ports were fully powered and worked with all devices we threw at them. We’ve attributed the powered ports to a combination of the motherboard and the new power supply that ships with the SK41G. We have a feeling that the ports were specifically not routed the additional power lines on the SS51G’s motherboard because of inadequacies of the older power supply. Regardless, the problem is fixed with this and all other recent Shuttle XPCs.