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

The SK41G and SN41G2 use identical heatsinks, although our samples had different mounting screws – with the ones on the SK41G being slightly easier to use (see lower left). Other than that one minor difference, the two cooling setups were identical.

Just as with Shuttle’s Pentium 4 solutions, these two XPCs cool the heatsink and its heatpipes with a temperature controlled fan. You can select what temperature you want the fan to kick into high speed from the BIOS, by default it is set to 48C. As the temperature drops below that point the fan will spin at the lower of its two speed settings, thus decreasing overall system noise by a noticeable amount. This brings up an interesting point about supporting faster CPUs; Shuttle has already said that the cooler is designed with support for the Athlon XP 3200+ in mind, but in theory putting an even faster CPU in either of these XPCs wouldn’t be a problem. What this will mean however is that the temperature controlled fan would end up running at the higher speed more often than not because of the warmer running CPU, thus increasing overall system noise. It’s a tradeoff that you’ll want to take into consideration when picking out a CPU to pair with your XPC.

While the SK41G has a total of two fans in the system (main fan + PSU fan), the SN41G2 has one additional fan used to cool the North Bridge.

Although Shuttle originally told us they were working on a fanless North Bridge design for the nForce2 XPC, it appears that they have not been able to accomplish their goals with it. The fan on the North Bridge does contribute to a louder overall system and it does provide yet another point of failure for the SN41G2, but it appears that Shuttle couldn’t have done it any other way. It will be interesting to see if future revisions also have the fan on the North Bridge. The SK41G uses a passive heatsink on the North Bridge and nothing more.