by Platon Scheblykin
07/12/2005 | 10:20 AM
With all these high-tech things around us, it is very difficult for a new product to surprise even a beginner user. The market of barebone systems is not an exception. Despite the efforts of the manufacturers to promote their produce, there are still very few models which can be regarded as truly exceptional. Sometimes, however, such milestones do occur.
One of them is going to be reviewed here. It is a model from Shuttle, a leader in the mini-computers field, and it belongs to the famous XPC series. The SB81P model combines advanced technologies and original design solutions that make it truly special.
And even though the XPC SB81P isn’t a new product (it was released in late 2004), we just couldn’t pass it by.
Shuttle SB81P | |
Dimensions | 320mm x 210mm x 220mm |
Weight | 4.25kg |
Bays | 1 x 5.25 |
Front panel connectors | 2 x USB |
Back panel connectors | 1 x Serial |
Internal power supply unit | 350W |
Special features |
|
And now comes the mainboard:
Shuttle FB81 Mainboard | |
CPU | Intel Pentium4 (Socket 775) / Intel Celeron (533/800MHz) |
FSB frequency | 100-355 MHz with 1MHz increment |
Chipset | Intel 915G |
RAM | Dual-channel DDR SDRAM 400/333/266 (up to 4GB) |
Sound | HD Audio, 6 channels, SPDIF I/O |
Connectors and ports |
|
Integrated IDE RAID | 150MB/s RAID 0/1/0+1 |
BIOS | Phoenix Award BIOS v6.00PG |
Form-factor | ATX 180mm x 270mm |
Special features | Keyboard/Mouse WakeUp, SmartFan, Silent X |
The accessories to the SB81P are:
Opening the barebone’s case I found a bag with absorbing granules inside. Besides the accessories I also received a leaflet for hardware testers and a CD with additional materials for reviews. So, some of the pictures in this review are taken from that CD.
Developing their SB81P, the designers from Shuttle weren’t in an inventive mood, but preferred the time-tested classic concept of XPC series cases. Like in the rest of the models from this series, a few touches were added to give individuality to this particular model. That’s how the SB81P is perceived: you notice its belonging to the XPC family at once, but you won’t mistake it for any other model from this series. The straight lines of the case, the bare front panel and mild single-tone painting give this barebone a solid, official appearance with a hint of exquisiteness. This system case will fit well into any environment.
The XPC SB81P consists of two large parts: a foundation all the details and the mainboard are fastened to, and a casing that you can remove to access the computer’s internals. Besides the screw holes there are vent grids in both sides of the casing for air to come into the computer. Otherwise, the casing is just a polished metal surface, painted black. The polish isn’t perfect, so you can see thin straight lines going along the entire length of the case. But maybe this is just a design feature?
Of course, we are more interested in the design of the front and rear panels of the barebone. So, the front panel goes a little beyond the case’s limits, creating an impression that it just hangs in the air. A special vent grid links the panel and the case. The universal card-reader and the silvery Power On/Off and Reset buttons catch your eyes immediately, but the other things are all hidden under decorative covers. Even the HDD indicator is placed under the translucent plastic of the front panel and you can only spot it by the small concavity against it. The optical drive’s Eject button merges entirely with the decorative silvery strip.
Of course, the fact that the card-reader is placed right in the front panel rather than under a decorative cover brings a minor distortion into the harmony of the sharp lines and the glossy surface of the panel. The Power On/Off button doesn’t feel good to the touch since its circle and the border of the built-in indicator have rather sharp edges. The button itself sinks down suddenly as if with a click. It’s different with the Eject button: your pressure goes to the optical drive’s button through a special mechanism which doesn’t “click” under your finger. So, you don’t know at once if the tray is going to eject or not. You just have to push the button more and more.
The bay of the optical drive can be found under the spring-loaded door at the top of the front panel. You can put a 5.25” drive with almost any front panel in here. The cover under the optical drive’s door conceals the 3.5" floppy drive bay.
Another cover, at the bottom of the front panel, hides several connectors: two USB, one FireWire, a stereo output and a microphone input.
The rare panel is used up almost entirely.
A button for resetting the BIOS settings is located near these connectors on the rear panel. At the middle of the rear panel there are a power connector, a power switch and a fan. Two small system fans can be seen at the top.
As I opened the system case up, I was at first taken aback at the total lack of any screws. But the SB81P uses a Type P chassis, so it’s all right. One of the good things about this chassis is that no screws and tools are necessary to install the drives. You can put a new hard drive in without searching for a screwdriver. To avoid problems with the assembly, just browse through the Installation Guide beforehand, which gives clear instructions and colorful illustrations, making the assembly an easy process.
There should be no problems with the processor, just follow the basic rules for installing LGA755 CPUs. It’s easy with the memory, too. Just put the sticks into the slots and fix them with the latches. More intricate is the process of installing the drives. Several configurations are possible, each of which needs a separate approach. These configurations are listed in the following table:
Configuration# | # of PATA HDD | # of SATA HDD | # of optical drives | # of FDD drives |
1 | 1 | 1, 2, 0 | 1 | 1 |
2 | 1 | 1, 2, 3, 0 | 1 | 0 |
3 | 2 | 1, 2, 0 | 0 | 1 |
4 | 2 | 1, 2, 3, 0 | 0 | 0 |
5 | 0 | 1, 2, 3, 0 | 1, 0 | 1 |
6 | 0 | 1, 2, 3, 4 | 1, 0 | 0 |
So, the design of the SB81P allows installing up to 4 hard disk drives. Two 3.5” bays are in the basket and two more drives can be placed right on the system’s chassis with the special fasteners. The mainboard offers four SATA channels and 1 PATA channel (for two devices). So, the table above just lists all possible combinations (a comma means “or”, and zero means that devices of such type are missing). The only thing left to discuss is whether the power supply can handle all these devices, but I’ll check it later on. After you’ve made up your mind as to the configuration of the drives, you can get down to the assembly.
I want to say that it is a real pleasure to assemble the SB81P – all the details fit together perfectly, there’s free access to all the parts and fasteners, so you don’t have to apply much physical force during the assembly.
Shuttle has always taken great care to design a good cooling system for its barebones, and the SB81P hasn’t become an exception. Two technologies contribute to efficient yet quiet cooling of this model: the currently widespread Smart Fan and Shuttle’s exclusive Silent X.
I will discuss them one by one, starting with Smart Fan. The point of this technology is simple: the mainboard controls the speed of the attached fans depending on the temperature of the components. So, the CPU cooler will rotate at a higher speed if the CPU temperature is high. It means that the noise from the cooling system is minimized when the computer is under low loads.
For controlling the speeds of the fans manually, you can enter the PC Health Status page of the BIOS Setup. This page also shows you the current status of the system. There are detailed tips describing the settings, so it’s hard to get anything wrong here.
The cooler itself is composed of two parts: a heatsink and a fan. Six heat pipes come off the copper sole which the heatsink’s ribs are attached to. A fan is placed on the sole to drive cool air to the heatsink. To facilitate the heat transfer, an additional fan sucks the hot air off the heatsink and drives it outside the system case. For the hot air not to linger inside the computer there is a porous-rubber sealant between the fan and the vent grid in the side panel of the case.
I already mentioned the electrical qualities of the power supply. Now I want to say what role it plays in cooling the SB81P. There are vent holes in three of its four side panels, and there’s also an 80mm exhaust fan at the rear panel. The fan is very quiet, so its not having any speed control is of no consequence.
The last special feature of the SB81P barebone is the chassis. The SB81P is the first mini-computer from Shuttle to use the fifth-generation (type P) chassis. Besides being assembly-friendly, this chassis is designed to optimize the airflows inside the system for better cooling and quiet operation.
Air comes in through the vent holes in the sides and bottom of the barebone. The space inside the system case is divided into three subsections: the CPU section, the section with the hard drives which are outside the basket, and the rest of the internal space. Each section has its own stream of air – that’s why the air doesn’t have time to get hot. The CPU area is cooled by the ICE module I’ve already talked about. The air stream created by this module goes across the case and never mixes with the other streams. Air from the other vent holes is divided into two streams which cool the remaining areas. The hot air is exhausted from the case through the power supply’s fan. The HDD section is cooled by two 60mm fans located at the rear panel, above the power supply.
They are connected in parallel to one fan connector and are recognized by the system as one fan.
That’s how the technologies mentioned above work. My task now is to determine their efficiency. I didn’t find a Windows-based monitoring utility among the software supplied with the SB81P, so I had to use a standard toolset consisting of S’n’M for loading the processor up, 3DMark05 for loading the whole system, and SpeedFan for monitoring the system’s status. I performed my tests at 200MHz FSB (regular mode) and 214MHz FSB (overclocked mode). The testbed was configured like follows:
The results of the tests are listed in the following table:
FSB frequency | Idle mode | S’n’M | 3Dmark 2001SE | HDD temperature, Сo | |||
CPU, Co | SYS, Co | CPU, Co | SYS, Co | CPU, Co | SYS, Co | ||
200MHz | 52 | 36 | 63 | 36 | 62 | 36 | 33 |
214MHz | 25 | 34 | 64 | 35 | 62 | 36 | 33 |
And this table shows you the speeds of the fans in different tests:
Benchmarks | FSB=200MHz | FSB=214MHz | ||||
CPU | Sys1 | Sys2 | CPU | Sys1 | Sys2 | |
Idle | 1223 | 879 | 1548 | 1188 | 870 | 1548 |
S’n’M | 2557 | 2557 | 1520 | 2722 | 2637 | 1534 |
3 Dmark05 | 2597 | 2527 | 1520 | 2677 | 2560 | 1563 |
Not bad for a barebone. The CPU temperature only grew up by 11°C under load – that’s good. And the result almost didn’t change in the overclocked mode – that’s excellent. The temperature in the system case remained almost the same throughout the tests, proving the highest efficiency of Silent X technology.
As for the noise the working SB81P produces, there’s not much to talk about. When the system isn’t fully loaded, the barebone is almost silent. Its barely audible hum isn’t annoying at all. When there’s a 100% load on the computer, the noise is somewhat louder, but remains acceptable nonetheless.
Thinking about the widest functionality of the SB81P, one might conjure up a vision of a mainboard all strewn with chips, heatsinks and connectors, and with a whole bunch of cables going out of it. In reality, the developers managed to put all the components on the 280x205 piece of textolite in such a way that they seem to be at a big enough distance from each other. It’s because the components are soldered in groups: the connectors form one group, the controllers form another, etc. Moreover, the mainboard was originally developed with a specific case in mind, so the developers had opportunities to do some optimizations which they actually did.
To avoid confusion I will refer to the part of the mainboard which is closer to the barebone’s front panel as “front part” and to the part which is closer to the rear panel as “rear part”.
The ICE module I have already told you about occupies a big portion of the PCB space. It is located in the front part of the PCB and covers the hottest components, i.e. the processor and its voltage regulator elements.
The chipset’s North and South Bridges are located almost in the center of the mainboard. They are both covered with passive aluminum heatsinks. By the way, you can note a certain rule here – the component density is higher as there’s a bigger distance to the heating components. So, almost all the controllers the mainboard owes its additional functionality to can be found in the rear part of the PCB. Most of the connectors and slots are soldered up here, too. In the assembled system, the power supply hangs over them, thus concealing this densely populated part of the PCB. That is why it seems that there are few components on it at first sight. The highest density is in the mainboard’s right rear corner where there are the following chips: a FireWire400 controller, a hardware monitoring controller, a BIOS chip. The Gigabit Ethernet controller is located to the left, and the audio codec is in the left rear corner.
As for the connectors and slots on the mainboard, there are four fan connectors located near the places where fans are supposed to be. When the cooling system is in use, one connector is left empty, probably to permit you to put an additional small fan on the chipset’s North Bridge. The mainboard’s power connector is split in three parts: in the mainboard’s top right corner, at the rear edge, and in the center. Two parts are placed in such a way that the attached cable wouldn’t block the airflows inside the case. The third part is always empty in our sample of the barebone. The connectors for the front panel of the case are soldered in parallel to the mainboard’s PCB. That is, the mainboard connects to the front-panel ports not with wires but rather by plugging directly into them with its onboard connectors. The rest of the onboard headers are all grouped together in the top rear corner of the mainboard: four SATA slots, one USB 2.0, one LPT, one FDD, one CD_IN, one CD-IN (mini), and one AUX_IN. The IDE slot is located to the left of this group. Despite their being so close to each other, it is easy to connect cables to the connectors. The IDE slot is the only one which is not easily accessed – it is too far below the power supply.
The mainboard’s connectors that go out through the rear panel have been enumerated above.
So, the PCB design of the mainboard is overall good. There are much more good designing solutions than bad ones here.
The reviewed model can make a serious competitor to desktop PCs in terms of functionality. Yes, it cannot take in as many add-on cards as desktop mainboards, but this is in fact the only aspect where it is inferior. For example, not all modern mainboards can boast the same RAID-related functionality as the SB81P’s mainboard. I’m going to give you a thorough description of its capabilities in this section of the review.
So, the mainboard employed here is called FB81 and it is based on the i915G chipset from Intel. The chipset is intended for Pentium 4 and Celeron processors in LGA775 packaging and with 533/800MHz FSB. The three-channel CPU voltage regulator is made on capacitors from Ost. The chipset’s North Bridge (i82915G) contains a memory controller, a PCI Express x16 controller, and a graphics core Graphics Media Accelerator 900. Here are the basic characteristics of the GMA 900: 300MHz frequency, pixel shaders 2.0, DirectX 9.0 support, anisotropic filtering support, 400MHz RAMDAC. This is enough for office work and for simple games, but for a real gamer this graphics core isn’t of much use. That’s why they implemented PCI Express here – you can add an advanced modern graphics card instead of the integrated graphics core. Note, however, that the PCI slot will be blocked if the graphics card’s cooling system is too big. The memory controller allows installing DDR400 SDRAM modules into the two available slots (the maximum amount of memory supported is 4 gigabytes or two double-sided modules by two gigabytes each).
A 2GB/s bus links the North Bridge with the South Bridge (ICH6R). The latter supports one PCI slot, eight USB 2.0 ports, one PATA channel for two devices, and four Serial ATA-150 channels. If you’ve got two or four SATA drives, you can unite them in a RAID array of type 1, 0 or 1+0. The rest of the mainboard’s capabilities are implemented via the external controllers.
A VT6307 chip from VIA is responsible for the two available FireWire 400 ports.
The Gigabit Ethernet port is implemented through a BCM5751 chip from Broadcom.
ITE’s IT8712 controller performs hardware monitoring and is also responsible for the floppy drive, card-reader, and COM and LPT ports.
And lastly, Realtek’s ALC880 chip is used as an audio codec for the High Definition Audio standard supported by the chipset. Among other thing, this codec can reproduce eight-channel sound, dynamically configure the audio connectors, and use the SPDIF I/O interface.
I tested the audio section of the mainboard with the help of the RightMark Audio Analyzer.
Frequency response (from 40 Hz to 15 kHz), dB: | +2.43, -5.06 | Poor |
Noise level, dB (A): | -65.0 | Average |
Dynamic range, dB (A): | 62.9 | Poor |
THD, %: | 27.626 | Very poor |
IMD, %: | 30.166 | Very poor |
Stereo crosstalk, dB: | -59.6 | Average |
IMD at 10 kHz, %: | 33.123 | Very poor |
General performance: Poor
These are rather doubtable results since the sound seemed to be quite good – without any noise or distortions – by the ear. This may be a defect of the particular sample of the barebone or an incorrect reaction of the test program to the new audio standard. Anyway, I do doubt these results strongly.
There seems to be nothing extraordinary about the BIOS of the XPC SB81P: the popular Phoenix Award BIOS v6.00PG microcode with typical menu items and navigation. Yet I think this is a real masterpiece. I don’t mean the settings which are sufficient but not outstanding in this BIOS. I mean the design of the menus. First, the main menu contains only the settings that are directly relevant to it. There’s no extra or missing thing here. Second, the settings on each menu page are either combined into submenus or separated with headings which tell you about the nature of the settings that follow. It means you don’t have to seek for a necessary setting in the whole list after selecting a submenu with many items (like Frequency/Voltage Control). And third, many items in the menus come with a detailed tip on what they mean. To cut it short, I simply enjoyed dealing with such a BIOS!
I said above that the BIOS offers a sufficient number of options. I meant all options, but overclocking-related ones are the most interesting, of course. Here’s the full list of them I could find in the SB81P’s BIOS:
The last setting is rather tricky. It was present in the menu of the BIOS we received the SB81P with. But after I reflashed it with a version downloaded from the Shuttle website, it disappeared. These two BIOS’s also differ from one another in the following way. The first BIOS allows choosing the general ratios of the graphics memory areas for the integrated graphics core. In the second version you could change the size of each memory area independently.
Another distinguishing feature of any BIOS version of this barebone is that you can adjust the brightness of the indicators on the front panel. So, if the light from the indicators is too strong for you, make it softer or turn it off altogether.
I tried to overclock the processor by adjusting the FSB frequency and testing the system stability with S’n’M (if the system couldn’t pass the test fully, it was considered unstable). As the result, the maximum stable FSB frequency was found at 214MHz. The system would hang up or reboot spontaneously at higher frequencies. My tweaking the memory timings didn’t bring any perceptible performance gains, so the end result of my overclocking was a CPU frequency gain of about 252MHz, which was not so bad. The results are shown below:
The testbed was configured as follows:
We tested the barebone 1) with its integrated graphics core and 2) with an external Leadtek WinFast PX6600 GT TDH 128MB graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT).
The first table compares the reviewed barebone with its competitor, Qbic EQ3901M, in which we installed an Athlon 64 3500+ processor (Newcastle) and the same memory as in the XPC barebone. I didn’t have two graphics cards that would differ in the interface only at the time of my tests (the Qbic only supports AGP 8x), so let’s compare the two barebones in tests that load the CPU only:
Benchmarks | Qbic | XPC |
Sisoft Sandra 2005, | 5887 | 4322 |
WinRAR , KB/sec | 529 | 364 |
SuperPI 4M, sec | 197 | 184 |
Of course, it’s hard to make any judgments basing on so few applications, but it’s clear the Qbic performs better in memory-related tests.
The second table illustrates the performance of the SB81P in various modes:
Benchmarks | FSB=200MHz | FSB=214MHz | FSB=200MHz | FSB=214MHz |
Sisoft Sandra 2005, | 4522 | 4745 | 4322 | 4635 |
3Dmark 05, Default | 3607 | 3643 | 277 | 294 |
3Dmark 2001, Default | 18753 | 19450 | 5427 | 5816 |
PCmark0 4, Default | 5425 | 5709 | 4694 | 4971 |
WinRAR, KB/sec | 375 | 395 | 364 | 390 |
SuperPI 4M, sec | 183 | 171 | 184 | 172 |
Quake 3 Arena (four) | 364.1 | 398 | 125.4 | 134.3 |
Doom 3, Medium quality, | 69.1 | 72.2 | - | - |
FarCry (Regulator), | 52.79 | 52.77 | - | - |
Half-Life 2 (xdog), | 62.68 | 66.55 | 0.27 | 0.31 |
Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo, | 90.61 | 91.97 | 23.95 | 25.63 |
The empty cells mean the test wasn’t passed due to technical reasons.
The XPC SB81P stands up to Shuttle’s expectations. This system can really become an equivalent replacement of a desktop PC. We can confirm the manufacturer’s statement that the tested barebone can perform any function from a modern gaming center to an industrial server. It can be recommended to all categories of users.
Highs:
Lows:
