System setup and notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz HT S478 Northwood CPU (800FSB)
- AMD Barton XP3
Other components
- ATi Radeon 9800 Pro (380/340)
- 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3500C2
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- DirectX9
- Intel 5.00.1012 chipset drivers
- NVIDIA nForce 2.03 drivers
- ATI CATALYST 3.2 drivers and control panel (6307s)
- Pifast v41 to 10m places
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album
- SiSoft SANDRA 2003 (9.4
Notes
Everything behaved just as it should. Memory latencies were correctly applied on this Shuttle, meaning DDR400 running with 2-6-2-2 timings. The unit booted and operated perfectly over almost a week's worth of running. It's a slight departure to see Shuttle get rid of integrated graphics for this newest AMD small form factor PC, but with a number of discrete AGP cards available at modest prices and a separate nForce2 (166FSB support) cube that carries all the extras that this one misses out, we're not too worried about it not sporting on-board video. Further, there's literally no currently viable method of including on-board video with the Ultra 400 chipset.
We'll be testing this cube against the current performance Intel cube, the SB61G2. We'll further add two decent examples of Canterwood (DFI PRO875 LAN Party) and nForce2 Ultra 400 (EPoX 8RDA3+) to see how this small PC measures up.
Overclocking-wise, it's a little difficult for present nForce2 chipsets to surpass the 220FSB barrier with any kind of regularity. Add to this the passive cooling, lack of adjustable Vdd, and restricted airflow present in the SN45 Shuttle. These factors combine into making overclocking a perilous business. We managed to hit 213MHz with reasonable stability and synchronous memory running. Any higher and the cube decided to do the rebooting jig.
The SN45 ran the XP3200 test CPU at 2205.21MHz, just a shade over specification, and at the same speed as the comparison EPoX.
