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
Other components
- ATi Radeon 9
Software
- Windows XP Professional
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'.
