System setups and notes
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)
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz ES 800FSB CPU
ABIT AB-2003 DigiDice SFF system
Shuttle SB65G2 XPC SFF platform with FB62 motherboard
Shuttle SN85G4 XPC SFF platform with FN85 nForce3 150 motherboard
Other components
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (380/340)
2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3500C2, run at 2-6-2-2 @ DDR400. Single-channel running on the SN85G4.
Toshiba 8x DVD
IBM 120GXP 40GB hard drive
Dell P991 19" monitor
Software
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX9.0a
Intel 5.00.1015 chipset drivers
NVIDIA nForce3 3.43 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 320x180x32
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
It's a battle of the SFF cubes. The ABIT AB-2003 DigiDice and the Shuttle SB65G2 both feature derivatives of Intel's i865 chipset. We've said it before and we'll say it again. The 2D quality is subjectively poor at 1280x1024x32. It turns a decent monitor into a bad one. Characters are blurred and text just doesn't seem right. Using a discrete card solves the problems but then questions the usefulness of the onboard solution.
There were no problems to report during installation and testing.
Benchmarks were carried out three times and the lowest and highest results were discarded. The running speed of each of the protagonists was as follows:
3208.3MHz - P4 3.2GHz / ABIT AB-2003 DigiDice SFF system (Springdale i865G)
3207.7MHz - P4 3.2GHz / SB65G2 (Springdale i865PE)
1999.8MHz - Athlon 64 3200+ / SN85G4 (nForce3 150)
