Installing components in the Shuttle is very easy virtue of its well thought out design. The smart aluminium housing slides off smoothly once the Lian-Li style thumbscrews have been removed. This reveals the cage in which the hard drive, floppy disk drive and single optical drive sit. This too can be removed by unscrewing the top screws and sliding it out.
Towards the front of the case are the DIMM slots, supporting a maximum of 2GB of PC2100 if you use the new 1GB DIMMs. Towards the back is the CPU slot. The XPC has a patented and very innovative cooling solution. Due to the small confined nature of the XPC case, Shuttle have cleverly integrated the CPU cooler and case fan into one solution.
This is done by use of heatpipe technology (as used in modern laptops). The CPU cooler features a high quality copper base forged onto an aluminium heat sink. Heat pipes run through this heatsink and lead to a water-cooler style radiator block. Once installed on the processor, the case/CPU fan assembly blows air through the radiator. Shuttle call this solution the "ICE" which supposedly stands for integrated cooling engine. Something tells me they thought of the acronym before the actual meaning on that one ;).
The XPC features a 200W mini power supply, which does not seem too powerful given the high drain of modern Athlon systems. However AMD has to recommend 300W+ power supplies mainly due to the poor quality and exaggerated ratings given in bog-standard case-bundled PSUs.
A 300W power supply in a $30 case might only provide 250W maximum drain reliably. Other units, for example those made by Dell, are good to their maximum stated value and beyond. I am assuming the Shuttle is one such device, as even with a XP2100+, 1GB of RAM and both PCI slots used up, I had no problem with random reboots or instability.
