Inside the case, you have the pre-installed motherboard, as well as the cooling and hard drive rack. Although one would think that such a small case would be difficult to work with, the Shuttle SS51 is actually a snap to get in and out of.

Removing a couple of small screws allows for the HDD rack to be removed. The stock rack can be outfitted with either a floppy, hard drive and optical drive, or two hard drives and an optical drive. As we've already mentioned, the lack of ventilation or front mounted fan would make me wary of running dual 7200RPM drives. The rack also has an IDE cable management clip, which will securely lock in the HDD cable. The clip isn't too strong though, so you'll have to be careful about snapping it if you forget to remove the cable while pulling the HDD rack out.

Cable management is explained in detail in the installation guide, and I would encourage you to give it a read. It's fairly straightforward, but it's nice that Shuttle thought out the best way to route cabling. Speaking of which, Shuttle includes a floppy cable, and both a short, one device IDE, as well as a rounded cable. Rounding the HDD cable isn't really that important, due the included clip mentioned earlier, but I wish they would have done likewise for the floppy connection.

The power supply is a mere 200W, but don't let that number deceive you as it should be adequate for this setup. At most, users will have two peripheral cards, a CPU, optical drive and maybe two hard drives. I can see that scenario as potentially posing a problem, but that will depend on the hardware. I run a 2.4GHz Pentium 4, with two hard drives, a Plextor writer, and a Radeon 9700 Pro without any problems.

There are plenty of connections, enough to suit most people, and like the IDE cabling, the PSU connections are routed nicely. Shuttle has stated that future FLEX ATX mobos will fit in the XPC chassis, but I couldn't find any information on the power supply itself. It's obviously Pentium 4 compliant, though with new P4s, I'm not certain if the PSU will be up to the task.

There is one issue I did have with the power supply though, it gets very hot. There's a small 40mm fan that exhausts the air, but as other 40mm fans I've looked at in the past, they are not that great. At least it's fairly silent though, and the case fan definitely overpowers the PSU fan in terms of noise.

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