Shuttle SG33G5: Black Beauty or Black Sheep?
by Matt Campbell on December 13, 2007 12:02 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Crysis
Crysis is the latest machine-killer that can look stunning at high resolutions, but it's punishing to even the most recent PC hardware. This demo also has two built-in benchmarks in the "bin32" folder, one "CPU" and the other "GPU". We ran several configurations to show the scalability of this game. We ran all benchmarks three times. We discarded the first result (it was significantly lower than the others due to caching) and averaged the other two.
There's not much of a spread here at all in terms of average framerates. (Side note: Crysis looks atrocious at 800x600, particularly at the Medium quality setting.) As the variation is slight, let's take a close look at the in between rankings. We ran all tests at "High" quality unless otherwise specified.
While 1280x1024 looks great, it's just not feasible with the 8800 GT; the minimum framerates are too low to make the experience enjoyable. At the risk of stealing thunder from the overclocking section, the "1280x1024, no AA" test was re-run at a clock speed of 2.88GHz with no improvement whatsoever. Crysis is completely GPU-bound at this resolution with the 8800 GT 512.
FEAR
The FEAR multiplayer demo includes a short benchmark with AI and weapon usage. How fast does this older gaming title run on this platform? Let's find out. We run all tests at Maximum detail (with Soft Shadows disabled).
There are no problems here, which makes sense considering this title came out in October 2005.
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complectus - Thursday, December 13, 2007 - link
What is the point of showing graphs of performance figures without anything to compare them to? Are we supposed to have committed to memory a range of Cinebench results so we know where this product stands?JonathanYoung - Thursday, December 13, 2007 - link
I, too, have had negative experiences with Shuttle. One of the worst offenders was their KM400 model. On paper, it supported 333MHz FSB Athlon XPs, but I never found one that could. It was obviously a Shuttle problem because 1) regular ATX KM400 boards supported 333MHz AXPs and 2) there were tons of other users who had the same problem (there was a huge thread over at Sudhian for awhile).To sum it up, Shuttles look nice and appealing, but their QC leaves a little to be desired.
Flunk - Saturday, December 15, 2007 - link
I have a shuttle with a KM400 chipset too and it is currently working just fine with a barton 2500+ processor. One thing though, the board has a physical jumper on the board that you must set to change the FSB, it is listed in the manual. Perhaps you have a similar issue?retrospooty - Thursday, December 13, 2007 - link
I have a shuttle sk43g with K400M chipset. I bought it used, and built it for my son, and it has been working for well, overclocked on the 333mhz bus for over 3 years... In the Arizona heat. Never an issue, never a problem with it at all, and he is often on all day and 1/2 the night. Maybe you just had a bad one.Frumious1 - Thursday, December 13, 2007 - link
My experience with Shuttle SFFs has been ... poor would be a kind way of putting it. We sold these at the computer shop I work at for a while. All was fine for about six months, and then the stupid things started coming back! I bet more than half of them came in for repairs within the two years. Needless to say, we don't carry SFFs anymore.These were the socket 939 models (SN95G5), so maybe the newer ones are better, but they appear to use the same old power supplies. Oh, and these 939 units somehow didn't work with X2 chips when those came out. Anyway, the PSUs were the point of failure most of the time.
I'll stick with regular PCs, thanks. Cheaper, quieter, AND more reliable! Three strikes, Shuttle. You're out.
sprockkets - Friday, December 14, 2007 - link
Out of curiosity, did those systems have the Shuttle branded power supplies or HiPRO? All the OEMs seem to like HiPRO now for simple reasons: They are complete crap and cost less.But hey, I make $60-$240 labor having to replace the power supply which killed the motherboard which then usually requires a OS reinstall, so I guess Dell, HP, Shuttle and others can keep using them.
No pictures of the inside? WTF?