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

The SN41G2 Motherboard

Moving on to the SN41G2, we have NVIDIA’s nForce2 IGP at the heart of the FN41 motherboard. By going with the nForce2 IGP, Shuttle was able to outfit the SN41G2 with two VGA connectors to take advantage of the on-board nView support; this makes the SN41G2 the first XPC from Shuttle with on-board multi-monitor support, a neat feature for those using the box for more than a gaming solution.

The feature set of the nForce2 chipset is what provides the SN41G2 with all it needs and more. Shuttle went with the more expensive MCP-T solution in order to provide on-board Firewire, without resorting to an external chip. This highly integrated MCP also offers integrated USB 2.0, 10/100 Ethernet using NVIDIA’s MAC (a 3Com MAC is also present but unused in Shuttle’s FN41 design) and nForce2 audio with Dolby Digital Encoding support. The major benefit of going with the MCP-T is that it clears up a good deal of space on the FN41 motherboard itself, that would normally be occupied by additional chips providing things like Firewire support. Simplifying layout is quite important as it not only makes producing the board easier, but it also means ensuring stability isn’t as daunting of a task for Shuttle. For information on the strengths of the nForce2 we’d strongly suggest you take a look at our nForce2 review as well as our most recent 6-way nForce2 motherboard shootout.

The SN41G2 is clearly much more performance oriented than the SK41G, especially considering that the nForce2 is the highest performing Athlon XP chipset available and the KM266 is based on a two year old design. With this obviously comes a higher price tag, but also a much more desirable XPC capable of giving even Shuttle’s P4 line a run for its money.

One of the major features of the nForce2 chipset is its dual channel DDR memory architecture, which is obviously supported by the FN41 motherboard. There are only two DIMM slots on the board, so by populating both you’re taking advantage of a full 128-bit wide memory bus. The integrated GeForce4 MX GPU benefits the most from this wider memory bus, but as we’ve shown in benchmarks there are other applications and scenarios not involving the integrated GPU that benefit from the DualDDR architecture. It doesn’t cost significantly more to go with two DIMMs instead of one, so there really no reason not to take advantage of this feature.

Although simplified, the FN41 motherboard layout suffers from the same problem that the FX41 did – a hard to reach clear CMOS jumper. And the same AGP/GeForce FX limitation exists as well, although any other single slot graphics card should work fine in the XPC.