Shuttle XPC SN85G4 SFF PC

[DR]

We're trying to pick small faults with what is an excellent addition to the XPC range. Its attractiveness stems from the use of AMD's new Athlon 64 Clawhammer CPU. It has a number of small idiosyncrasies that we'd like to see ironed out, but this is about as fast as consumer-level PCs currently go. Housed in a small, stylish case, the Shuttle XPC SN85G4 has awesome performance potential. Laptop manufacturers often talk in terms of 'desktop or tower replacement'. This XPC could replace almost any home PC. It would have been difficult for Shuttle to go wrong with this design. Thankfully it's a robust and sexy beast of a machine that's sure to sell well. Pricing hasn't been confirmed at present. Expect to see it retail at around the £250 - £270 ma

http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews...lld19JRD02Mzk=

[TiG]

Nice review Guys, I'm always interested to here what shuttle are doing and i'm slightly concerned that removal of the central drive bay seems crazy, having a sn41g2 i'd be amazed trying to put that together with out removing they bay, as changing close to the motherboard would require everything to be removed?.

And out of interest do you reckon there is going to be an FX version of the shuttle at all??.

TiG

[Knoxville]

Nice review, if only i could afford the chip to go with it

btw bit of a formatting error for me on the System setups page

[Richie]

Sorry but its VERY ugly...

[joe]

I have to agree about its looks............perhaps the problem is that Shuttle have so many models in production and feel that they have to look different to each other.This one,and the others in this line,miss the mark by a good way........poor styling altogether.

[Rexticle]

Agreed about the looks.

Do you think that front plastic comes off?

I could fix some mesh there and allow for extra airflow.

Be tricky getting all those buttons and holes to fit nicely though.

What else could you do with that plastic section?

any ideas?

[steve threlfall]

Looks are down to your own perception. Imo its looks great

[[jF]]

Some photo's seem to ugly-fy this but some make it look alright - Think this needs looking at in the flesh b4 a decision is made tbh

[bobharvey]

I'm very dissapointed that you didn't report on this machine under Linux. It's a 64 bit machine, and the only 64 bit OS available for it is Linux. I would have been very interested to read comparisons between it's performance under 64-bit linux and 32-bit linux on the reference systems.

To be honest, I'd appericate all of your hardware reviews including a run under Linux.

[Butuz]

So you want to double our reviewers workload by doing a windows and linux review on each PC - even though linux has a teeny tiny share in the home user market? Ok, it has a bigger share in the "enthusiast" market, but the share is still very small.

Sorry - i just can't see that happening to be honest.

Butuz

[Stoo]

Woah, talk about blast from the past..

[Apex]

Any chance you could review the v3 of this now that it's using the nF3 250 chipset ?

Drew

[DR]

I am sure we can

[Apex]

Cheers , just am in the mood to move to a AMD64 based shuttle , and i got dibs on both a v3 of this and a 3200 chip rather cheap so it wud show me just what the performance is

[directhex]

To be honest, I'd appericate all of your hardware reviews including a run under Linux.

there's an awful lot of work involved in producing a reliable, reproducable and measurable suite of benchmarking applications. some of the 'traditional' linux benchmarks (e.g. kernel compile times) are largely junk, and there are questions of whether focus should be made on 'traditional' linux applications (e.g. mysql benchmarks) or a set which is close in composition to usual windows benchmarks (e.g. pi calculation, media encode, unreal tournament, etc)

[bobharvey]

there's an awful lot of work involved in producing a reliable, reproducable and measurable suite of [[linux]] benchmarking applications.

I don't disagree with that. But there is more to a review than benchmarking. A serious issue with modern hardware is whether it works
at all under linux, particularly manufacturer-specific motherboard facilities or 3D accelaration on graphics cards. The support from the manufacturer varies from enthusiastic to disdain, often centering on indifference.

As to benchmarking, well there are some interesting tools supplied with Linux itself. The bogomips rating from the kernel is interesting, hdparm -t measures disk throughput very easily.

The older benchmarks you don't like are at http://www.silkroad.com/bass/linux/bm.html, and of course quake runs on linux, both as a server and a client.

A standardised set of tests - (e.g. Install Mandrake, enable 3D graphics, check operation of peripherals) would be an interesting aside to your main review, even without benchmarking.