This is one nice looking white plastic and aluminium barebones system, with smooth lines and compact minimalism. This is a stylish system if ever we’ve seen one. The optical drive is stealthed behind a slab of white plastic and doesn’t hinder the look at all. One minor issue is that what looks like a reset button on the main panel is actually an eject button -- elegant, but potentially confusing if you want to eject your CD’s in a hurry.

The internal layout is inverted. In order to assist with easy installation the motherboard sits on top of a divider that splits the Kloss halfway up, with the drives and power supply underneath. The motherboard power cables are mounted underneath the board and this helps to increase the amount of room for components. One unusual part of the motherboard layout is that the power/reset/HDD activity pins are actually built into an IDE slot: this could cause confusion if you try to add an IDE drive as it’s marked ‘IDE primary’, which it obviously isn’t. 

Aside from that, working on the Kloss is fairly painless as this system is designed for simplicity of use and maintenance. The two RAM slots are situated at the extreme left and the PCI-E and PCI slot at the left. This means you don’t need to remove drive cages to add new RAM, for example, which you would with other small form factor (SFF) systems.

Being a SFF PC makes ventilation vital, and the Kloss is built from the new BTX standard, which was designed with thermal effectiveness in mind. As a result all the components flow from front to back to help airflow. But unfortunately this philosophy doesn't extend to the power supply, and this is where the Kloss is lacking. The 250W power supply puts out a lot of heat. A lot. And there is only a small 40mm exhaust fan on the PSU itself to dissipate it. The trapped heat ends up transferring to the PCI and AGP slots directly above, and to the case -- which becomes almost unbearably hot. There [I]is[/I] space for a second 40mm fan next to it, and adding one would help to keep the heat levels down. The CPU heatsink is ducted and is very quiet, and also very efficient. This is possibly the coolest part of the case.

After installing a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM and an NVIDIA 6600GT in this system, we ran the PCMark04 benchmark. The Kloss achieved a score of 4111. This is about the limit of the i915 chipset although a better graphics card would help the score along, and the chipset is not as future-proofed as the i925 that the Shuttle SB95G offers is (page ^^).

The Kloss is an easy to upgrade and maintain system built on a chipset designed to ease the transition to PCI Express based computing. And of course there's that sumptuous housing. The only real issue, and surprise given the BTX heritage, is the poor thermal management which could cause some problems, particularly in hot conditions.