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Review: Shuttle XPC SN85G4 SFF PC

by Tarinder Sandhu on 22 October 2003, 00:00

Tags: Shuttle

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qat7

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System setups, notes and O/C

Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.
  • AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Clawhammer CPU. RAM running with an 10 divisor (DDR400, single channel)
  • AMD Athlon 64 FX-51 CPU (2.2GHz) RAM running with an 11 divisor (DDR400, dual channel)
  • Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz ES 800FSB CPU
  • AMD Barton XP3200+ S462 CPU (2200MHz / 200FSB)
  •  
  • Shuttle SN85G4 XPC SFF PC with FN85 nForce3 150 motherboard
  • EPoX 8HDA3+ VIA K8T800 motherboard
  • ASUS SK8N nForce3 Pro 150 motherboard
  • ABIT IC7-MAX3 i875P Canterwood (21/08/03 BIOS) for the 3.2GHz 800FSB P4
  • EPoX 8RDA3G nForce2 Ultra 400 for the XP3200+ Barton

Other components

  • ATi Radeon 9800 Pro (380/340)
  • 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3500C2, run at 2-6-2-2 @ DDR400 for both P4 and nForce2 motherboards. Run with 'Enhanced' on the IC7-MAX3.
  • 2 x 512MB Legacy Electronics DDR400 ECC/Registered memory for the FX-51
  • Liteon 16x DVD
  • Samcheer 420w PSU
  • Dell P991 19" monitor
  • AMD reference S940 / S754 cooler
  • Akasa Silver Mountain cooler
  • Thermaltake AX478 cooler with a 25CFM fan

Software

  • Windows XP Professional SP1
  • DirectX9.0a
  • NVIDIA nForce3 chipset drivers (3.43)
  • Intel 5.00.1012 chipset drivers
  • NVIDIA nForce2 2.45 drivers
  • ATI CATALYST 3.7 drivers and control panel (6378s)
  • Pifast v41 to 10m places
  • Lame v3.92 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album (611MB)
  • XMPEG v5.02 and DivX 5.05 Pro
  • Kribi Bench 1.19
  • ScienceMark 2.0
  • Realstorm Raytracing benchmark v1.10 320x180x32
  • WinRAR 3.20 archiving
  • 3DMark 2001SE v330
  • UT2003 Retail (Build 2225)
  • X2: The Threat - Rolling Demo
  • Comanche 4 benchmark
  • Serious Sam 2: Sierra De Chiapas Demo.
  • Quake 3 v1.30 HQ

Notes

Much like the Shuttle nForce3 150 and EPoX 8HDA3+ full-size motherboards the SN85G4 applied relaxed DRAM timings which were locked out. The difference this time, however, was that the SN85G4's timings were just a little tighter than the full-size boards'.

 


2.5-3-3-8 is a few clocks better than we've seen thus far. 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3500C2 had no problems whatsoever at running these relaxed settings. We just wish that the enthusiast could manually poke around the latencies. Is it a question of AMD not having faith in the DRAM controller's ability or something else ?. Only time will tell.

The SN85G4 installed Windows XP Professional SP1 without a hitch and every peripheral installed and functioned without any problems. Overclocking attempts seemed to falter at around the 2.2GHz mark, with RAM set to either 200MHz or 166MHz. Shuttle may well provide the enthusiast with a decent degree of voltage manipulation but there's only so much that air cooling can achieve in such a small, restricted space. Moreover, it's stupendously quick at default speeds. Benchmarks were carried out at 1024x768x32 85Hz unless otherwise stated. There were no crashes, resets or anomalies in a week of testing. Corsair, TwinMOS, OCZ and Crucial RAM was used interchangeably without issue.


That's more powerful than my personal system. It's all housed in an elegant, aluminium-clad shoe box. The times are a changin'.