While Shuttle had “upgraded” the chassis for their Intel based XPCs with the release of their 915 platform, AMD enthusiasts were still stuck with the small sized chassis that didn’t have as much room for expansion. With their nForce4 based SN25P, Shuttle changes that and allows for a RAID setup as well as a hefty 350W PSU in an XPC for the first time.

The Looks

The SN25P looks almost identical to the 915G based SB81P except that its blue from the front instead of black. In our opinion, the black looks better, however, we think that Shuttle’s SB86i remains their best looking XPC and hope to see that in an AMD platform soon.

The top of the XPC has the memory card reader while the optical drive bay and an external 3.5” bay are hidden beneath it. Right at the bottom, Shuttle has the front panel connectors such as the USB, Firewire and Audio and again, they are hidden and can be access by flipping the bottom panel. The back panel has most of the options that we’re familiar with.

Features

The SN25P is powered by the nForce4 Ultra chipset meaning it supports the latest features such as PCI-Express, SATA II with nvRaid and Gigabit Ethernet with nVidia’s Active armor firewall along with ten USB 2.0 ports.

For audio, Shuttle uses the VIA Envy24PT solution which is definitely better than the Realtek Codec used by most manufacturers. Like the Realtek, the Envy also supports eight channel output however, it also allows 24 bit resolution and 96HKz sampling rate.

BIOS

The BIOS on the SN25P has all the goodies that you normally expect on nForce4 boards which include setting the timings and frequency on your memory modules. You can also enable/disable most of the onboard peripherals from the BIOS, however, we did not find a way to disable the onboard LAN.

Overclocking options are also reasonable on the SN25P. You can adjust voltages on the CPU, memory and chipset by 1.7V, 2.9V and 1.7V respectively. You can also reduce the HT and clock multiplier which is great as all Athlon64 CPUs are multiplier unlocked. FSB speeds are supported between 200MHz to 300MHz.

We were able to take the SN25P all the way upto 300Mhz easily by lowering the clock multiplier and reducing the RAM ratio so you should not have any problem overclocking this puppy.