PCMark05 Results
Longer bars are better
3DMark06 Results
Longer bars are better
COMMENTS
Form factor
My biggest beef with these Shuttle et al barebones systems is their size and shape: they're not wide enough to perch a monitor on, too fat to sit behind one, and too squat to sit happily on the floor.
Bog standard slimline desktop PCs do it for me every time.
faster RAM tests mostly pointless
Since data to/from RAM has to pass through the FSB on this system, and RAM run at DDR2-667 in dual-channel mode already fully saturates the 1333MHz FSB bandwidth, there's not much point in running the RAM at DDR2-800 or DDR2-1066.
Although..
The Shuttle box in the review does indeed look like it IS going to have cooling issues. I haven't seen any of their boxes which look like that for several years. I wouldn't even want to consider putting a 4850 in that as it WILL be a problem come summer.
Did you not think to test it with another OS?
Just because Vista doesn't work better (at the moment) doesn't mean Ubuntu, for example, wouldn't.
I disagree
I built a Shuttle SX48P2 for my daughter about a month ago and once you add case, PSU (its rare to find decent cases with a PSU now) and motherboard you are pretty much in the same ballpark cost-wise.
I put an old E6600 core2duo cpu in, a Radeon 4830 (perfect for 19" and below), 500GB h/d and 4GB geil memory. All in it was £500 and is pretty much silent.
I think the mechanical engineering on the P2 series is simply superb - airflow is maximised, fan noise minimised. Fitting a Radeon 4870 to my wife's Shuttle box did sort of destroy the quiet ;) Works perfectly though which is nice for me as I borrow it for Eve - the only game I've ever had which has destroyed two graphics cards ;)
