Shuttle’s SN41G2 & SK41G: Two Athlon Small Form Factor PCs

The SK41G Motherboard

Let’s start off with the KM266 based SK41G; the XPC is based on Shuttle’s FX41 motherboard and by far its biggest limitation is official support for only 200 or 266MHz FSB Socket-A processors. This limitation categorizes the SK41G as a XPC that’s not meant for the highest performance offerings, but rather the more cost effective solutions. Remember that only the absolute highest speed Athlon XPs are only offered in 333MHz FSB flavors, so you’re not losing out on too much but be mindful of the limitation.

Selecting the 200 or 266MHz FSB can be done via JP2 on the motherboard itself or through the BIOS.

The KM266 chipset itself has been around for quite some time, and as you can guess is a derivative of VIA’s older KT266 chipset. The ‘M’ in the name as well as the ProSavageDDR brand indicate the integrated graphics capabilities of the chipset, more specifically the KM266 features a ProSavage8 graphics core. The ProSavage8 is nothing special; a derivative of the now archaic Savage4 core that has been refreshed countless times.

The chipset supports a single 64-bit DDR memory channel, thus memory bandwidth will peak at 2.1GB/s. As you can also guess, DDR333 is not supported - once again, contributing to the value aspect of the SK41G package; this isn’t the XPC for performance nuts.

Just like all other XPCs, Shuttle gave the SK41G Firewire, USB 2.0 and 10/100 Ethernet support. Shuttle relies on Realtek to provide 10/100 Ethernet and Audio controllers and then turns to VIA for Firewire support, which is fairly common given the other XPCs we’ve seen from them.