System Setup, 2D and benchmarking notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.
- Intel Pentium4 2266MHz S478 Northwood B CPU
- Shuttle SS51G Bare-bones unit (incorporating Flex-ATX Shuttle FS51 motherboard).
- ABIT BD7II-RAID.
Common components
- ABIT Geforce4 Ti 4200 clocked at stock speeds (250/500)
- 256MB Samsung PC2700 run at strictest timings
- 120GB Western Digital 120JB 7200rpm hard drive with 8MB cache.
- Pioneer DVR-104 DVD ReWriter
- 21" Sony G500 FD monitor
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- Detonator XP 29.42 drivers
- Sisoft Sandra 2002 Professional
- Pifast v41
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end
- DivX encoding using Virtual Dub and DivX4.12 CODEC.
- HD Tach
- 3DMark 2001SE
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Quake 3 v1.30
I will be benchmarking the Shuttle SS51G using both the on-board graphics and a standalone GeForce4 Ti 4200. The former should give you an idea of how it performs straight out-of-the-box, and the latter should show how it performs with a dedicated AGP card.
Windows XP installed without a hitch and the accompanying CD contained all the necessary drivers. The 2D quality of the on-board SiS315 graphics was subjectively reasonable at 1280x1024x32 but rather poor at 1600x1200x32, with general blurriness permeating the screen. I'm rather particular about the way my 2D should appear so this may not be of concern to you. I'd quite happily use it at 1024x768x32, though.
The quality of the on-board graphic's DVD and DivX playback was pretty good, definitely more than acceptable. You can perhaps already see on of the uses that this little box of wonders could be put to ?.
Although the motherboard supports PC2700 memory, I had a very difficult time in getting my Samsung PC2700 memory stable at 166MHz. I'd get random crashes during benchmarks. The fact that we couldn't manipulate DDR voltages compounded the problems. It boiled down to a choice of either using very poor timings at DDR333, or using performance-enhancing timings (as shown on the BIOS page) at DDR266. I'll have to investigate why my memory, which runs at 200MHz in other motherboards, refused to do so here. Heat could be an issue.
Anyway, on to the benchmarks.
