Product Reviews

Considering the full-sized SilverStone chassis comes with disclaimers that it can't handle a single 7800 GeForce graphics card, it's a huge claim by Shuttle that this tiny 218 x 330 x 200mm (WDH) box can cope with the heat of two running in SLI. If true, this chassis virtually consigns the ATX midi-tower to the scrapheap.

Once you've popped off the outer shell, there's a surprising amount of room within. With the drive bay removed, there's plenty of space to unscrew the CPU heatsink and install the two sticks of RAM (maximum 2GB), while all the cables come pre-attached. While this slightly robs you of the 'I made this' feeling, it's still preferable to the 'I tried to make this and can't get it to work' situation.

Shuttle claims that the SN26P will handle the thermal throw-off from any pair of 7800 cards, be they GTs or GTXs. Thanks to the 110nm transistors, a 7800 consumes less power than a 6800 and therefore produces less heat too. We used a pair of 7800 GTXs, although a GT will throw off a similar amount of heat, as it draws only 10W less power at peak load. Although the cards are just 10cm shorter than the chassis itself, we still had enough room to jiggle them into place. There's no room for double-height cards, though, and ours used the stock nVidia heatsink, which exhausts hot air away from the backplate.

After such an easy build so far, we had a satisfying wrestle with the sliding mounts for our optical drive. After half an hour of fiddling, we found that standing the drive on its end while holding the slide-rails and dropping the cage down onto them worked best. We could then adjust the front-button mechanism left or right to ensure it pressed against the button of our optical drive. Drives with buttons flush against the front surface may cause problems, but some ingenuity (sticky tape and a small rectangle of cardboard) will overcome that.

A hard disk can be mounted underneath the optical drive or suspended from a clip-on mechanism

We wanted to push this XPC as far we could, so we teamed our two 7800 GTXs with an AMD X2 4800+, the hottest Socket 939 CPU around. Idling along in Windows Desktop, we hardly heard a sound from the sideways-blowing fan, or from the two stock coolers on the 7800 GTXs. However, when powering up our HDR Far Cry test, we soon hit significant problems. The fans on our cards weren't up to the job of keeping the GPUs cool in such cramped conditions. After roughly a minute, frame rates dropped to single figures; after a few attempted fixes, we removed the cards for closer inspection only to find that one had become so overheated that the plastic decoration on the heatsink had melted. Even the PCBs were hot to the touch.

This is a great shame, as the tiny motherboard has all you need for a powerful PC. There's Gigabit Ethernet, plus a FireWire port at the front and back. There are plenty of USB ports too, and the onboard 24-bit VIA Envy24 eight-channel audio codec negates the need to have a PCI slot for a sound card. It's a good job there are so many integrated controllers, though, as after two graphics cards have been installed there's no room for expansion cards.

This is where the puzzle of SLI economics comes in too; there's no point in putting two 6600 GTs in SLI, as a single 6800 costs the same, gives identical performance and has better upgrade potential. Similarly, there's no point getting two 6800s, as a single 7800 will outperform them and offer the better upgrade path. But if two 7800 cards in SLI in this chassis can't be guaranteed to run, the SN26P is all but pointless.

The SN25P offers the same ease of build and the same excellent integrated controllers and port positioning. It has a PCI Express 1x slot instead of two 16x, and if you choose not to use this you could invest in a double-height 7800 card that exhausts from the rear. A single 7800 (GT or GTX) offers plenty of gaming performance too - Far Cry ran at 55fps with HDR and 8x AF turned on with no reliability problems. And, as it's £100 cheaper, this makes it a much better choice for a tiny high-end system.