Exterior

No more plastic "brushed aluminium" surface, this is the real stuff.
Glossy plastic trims and shiny buttons adorn the facade of the unit. Beware of the magpies!

Plenty of ventilation holes ensure that your spanking new graphics card and Quad-core processor won't cooked inside.

Pop the cover and the 3.5" bay is exposed to the world. Put your favourite card reader or *gasp* floppy disk drive in there if you wish.

From left to right, we have the Biometric sensor, mic-in, headphones-out, 2 USB ports, 4-pin Firewire port and a button that says Speed-Link.

Fingerprint sensor & Speed-Link

As you may have noticed, the Prima series XPC comes with a Biometric sensor on the front panel. This would certainly come in useful when there is a need to protect important documents from wandering eyes or maybe those naughty-naughty home videos you took some time back. hrmm....
Speed-Link on the other hand, does the reverse. It is an interesting feature coming from Shuttle to enable ease of file-sharing between computers. By enabling Speed-Link, one can connect a USB cable from the associated USB port to another computer for file sharing.
The included software utility allows you to set specific folders to share and depending on whether you wish to allow the files to be modified, it will show up as a USB CDROM or Portable HDD.

Performance computing is provided for by the inclusion of a pair e-SATA ports on the rear I/O plate removing the bandwidth bottlenecks of USB.

For those times when overclocking fails, a clear CMOS button is conveniently located on the rear.
Opening the chassis to clear the CMOS is a thing of the past with the Prima series XPC.

Let us move on to the interior where the driving force of the unit comes from.