System setup and notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- AMD XP2400 2GHz (133FSB) CPU
- Shuttle SK41G SFF bare-bones unit
- EPoX 8K9A2+ KT400 Motherboard (K9A22A25.BIN BIOS)
- EPoX 8RDA+ nForce2 Motherboard (in dual DDR266 mode)
Common components
- ATi Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB (324/620)
- 256MB Corsair XMS3200 C2 run at 2-5-2-2 at DDR266 mode for the SK41G and 8RDA+ (dual mode, another stick). DDR333 mode for the 8K9A2+ (KT400)
- WD 120GB 120JB hard drive.
- Samsung 181T TFT
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- Hyperion 4-in-1s for the 8K9A2+ and SK41G
- nForce 1.13 drivers
- Plutonium XP 8.1 Radeon Drivers (based on ATI CATALYST build 6166)
- 6.13.10.1083-13.93.48 Savage drivers
- Pifast v41
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album
- Virtual Dub 1.4.10 DVD encoding, DivX 4.12 CODEC
- OcUK SETI benchmark
- 3DMark 2001SE
- UT2003 Demo
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Quake 3 v1.30
Notes
I'll be comparing the SK41G's performance with both its on-board Savage graphics and a dedicated AGP card in the Radeon 9700 Pro. This should tell us if the on-board VGA is anything but a 2D device. The SK41G is run at its optimum combination of 2GHz / 133FSB / DDR266 @ 2-5-2-2-1T.
To see if the SK41G / Radeon 9700 Pro combination can provide a serious challenge, I'll be pitting it against two desktop models based on the KT400 and nForce2 chipsets respectively. The KT400 motherboard will be run at 2GHz / 133FSB / DDR333 whilst the nForce2's optimum setting is 2GHz / 133FSB / dual-channel DDR266. Both the desktop models feature the same R9700 Pro.
The 2D of the on-board Savage8 card was quite good, actually. It seemed to be fairly crisp at all resolution. It's subjectively better than the on-board 2D of the SiS and Intel-based XPC PCs that I've reviewed before. The Radeon 9700, however, was comfortably better than the Savage8 solution.
With no voltage adjustment I was only able to get my XP2400 stable at 2130MHz. Any higher and Windows XP refused to boot. It must be noted that the XPC PCs are not really geared towards overclocking.
