Shuttle SX48P2-E review

Introduction

"Shuttle has a history of innovation." Is that truth or a corporate P.R. line? Let’s take a look at some of their creations:

The SFF barebones itself.

In 2001, Shuttle created the SV24, a major accomplishment in cramming current technology into a shoebox. It was hailed industry-wide as a step forward, suitable both for desktop computing and as a stylish and useful addition to many a HTPC setup. In fact, until other manufacturers realized what a good thing was afoot, the acronym "SFF" even stood for "Shuttle Form Factor."

ICE module

This really needs no explanation in these here parts. In order to keep their cool in such a cramped space, Shuttle created the "Integrated Cooling Engine" – or ICE for short. (Convenient acronym, no?) Combining an efficient heatsink/fan combo with nifty heatpipes to wick heat away from your CPU, they were able to cram a lot of cooling into not a lot of space. On top of the hardware itself, locating the ICE unit’s fan directly against the exterior of the case meant that dangerous heat was immediately exhausted, rather than left to circulate inside as in other designs.  Finally, Shuttle’s introduction of heatpipes themselves helped popularize them throughout the industry.

XPC and other innovations

On the heels of their SV machines came the XPC line, which sold like hotcakes, and in 2004 they got even smaller – the XP17 – an all-in-one LCD solution. Their M1000 was a smart and classy convergence of PC and Home Theater, and their X100 took the term "small" to new heights.. er… lows? Smalls? Anyway, it was tiny and feature-packed.

In 2005, Shuttle was the first manufacturer to create a SFF box capable of SLI, and have throughout their run garnered dozens of awards and accolades. I think it’s safe to say that, yes, they’re an innovative company.

Continuing that path of innovation, today we look at the first and only PCI-E v2.0 ATI CrossFire small-form-factor system in the world: Shuttle’s new SX48P2-E. Having gotten to play with this bad boy, I have to break down and jump to the conclusion: It is NICE.

If you want more details, please read on.

“barebone”

Specifications 

 The full specs (in slightly less objective terms) are as follows:

The test configuration was:

MYSTERY INTEL CPU at 3.0ghz
2GB PC26400 PQI Turbo RAM of doom
eVGA 8800GTS 640MB
Windows Vista SP1

Continue reading…

Pictures and Setup 

The SX48P2 arrived box itself in the now-traditional combination packing/carrying case with a handle. It was at the same time very safely packed, and very easy to get at.

I knew I was in for something special when I read the tagline "Revolution of Hardcore Platform." It’s not every day you get to take part in a Revolution.

Here we have the Shuttle itself wrapped in what appeared to be a bag made of thick spider webbing. You can see the smaller box of accessories tucked in the right.

Included were:

• Sleek black manual
• Driver DVD (not CD)
• IDE/SATA cables
• 6-pin video card power splitter
• FDD power plug adapter
• Heatsink goo
• CrossFire bridges
• Power cable (because you don’t already have 600 of those)
• Baggie of screws
• Shiny (optional) front feet.

I was very disappointed to learn that they did not include snacks. I thought this was cake icing. Oh, well…

Shuttle was kind enough to include an Intel CPU for my testing. Seeing "INTEL CONFIDENTIAL" on it made me immediately start humming the theme from "Mission: Impossible."  Whatever could it BE?

Here we see the outside of the box. They’ve gone the clean and classic route, including stealth doors for your optical and 3.5" bay, and the various front ports.  The stealth optical drive door worked very smoothly, and the button worked with my Lite-On burner without any adjustment at all. (You can see it peeking out in the overexposed center shot there…)

From left to right, we have: Recessed reset button, microphone jack, headphone jack, two USB, mini Firewire, and an unusual plastic plug.

The back is also a fairly juicy array of stuff: Two eSATA ports, a full sized Firewire port, six-count-em-SIX USB 2.0 ports, optical and coax SPDIF out, and individual sockets for 7.1 channel sound. Front and center is a lovely quiet 80mm fan. The outer  expansion slot is a PCI-express x16 slot, and.. wait.. so is the inner one! Above the expansion slots is the "Clear CMOS" button, which I made way too much use of. Oh yeah, you plug in the power cord back here as well.

Opening the case is easy like Sunday morning. Four thumbscrews in the back and the shell lifts off in one big matte black piece. Here we see the two PCI Express slots, and all kinds of shiny shiny copper. Shuttle has dubbed this cooling system "OASIS" Cooling technology. Heatpipes connect the North Bridge, South Bridge, and MOSFET modules, and the normal air convection in the case keeps them all nice and comfortable. Note also the excellent cable routing. Installation of drives is a snap as a result. You have 10.75" clearance for your video cards, an inch more if you can squeak it past the 4-pin motherboard power header at the front. On the left, you see the intake fan for the ICE-2 unit – the
CPU will sit roughly underneath that.

On the flip side, we have our DDR2 slots – up to 8GB max – and the larger exhaust fan for the ICE-2 system. Note that all the capacitors you see in this system are 100% solid. There will be no leaking from them, ever.

More pictures here!

Pictures and Setup 2 

Inside the top of the unit are two SATA drive bays. The prerouted cables end up coming in on the right (they’re tucked inside the railing at this point.)

Eight screws later, we have access to the optical and lower 3.5" bay. Two 60mm fans help draw air across the top of the case, and the big black flat thing is the prerouted IDE cable. You can now see the SATA cables flopping on through, and finally I found my big bag of candy!

D’OH! Maybe I should just run to the corner store.

The optical/IDE drive tray lifts out without any more unscrewing – the eight screws that held the SATA bays in place also held the lower tray. It was extremely easy to lift out when empty OR fully loaded, and just as easy to slide back into place. With it out of the way, you can more clearly see the layout of the OASIS system, and the large ICE-2 block at the very bottom.

The copper base of the heatsink isn’t a mirror finish, but it’s not the worst I’ve seen, either. The bolts holding this unit down are fairly easy to get to, but you’ll want a long screwdriver with a narrow handle to reach the one tucked inside the front left. The springs keep you from over-tightening and damaging your processor. Four heatpipes and over 60 aluminum fins mean that your CPU stays nice and cool.

Your typical lift-the-lever ZIF CPU install… One thing I was extremely impressed with was the sheer volume of NOTHING inside this case. Shuttle has so expertly designed the motherboard and routed the cables that it was a piece of cake to get my hand in there and spread heatsink goo. (I was careful not to eat any. Tempting, though!) I thought my Biostar IDEQ 200N had nicely-routed cables, but they were AMATEURS compared to this rig.

What you see here is a classic example of RTFM. The hinged ICE exhaust fan can swing out of place after the ICE unit is removed. I neglected to swing it back INTO place before bolting down the heatsink, and once it was in place, there wasn’t clearance enough for the fan to rotate. The manual very cleverly omitted the "Swing the fan out of the way" step, and had your humble reviewer not been so cocky as to attack this without checking the documentation, he might not have had to remove the ICE unit, re-apply goo and reseat the whole shebang. Ah well, live and learn.

After removing the ICE unit, I checked to see what kind of contact the copper base was making with the CPU. Here’s the result – draw your own conclusions, but the temperatures were just fine.  This shot was before any sort of burn-in, also.

You know it’s fast because it has those >> symbols on it! Vroom!

I am using a spare IDE hard drive, unfortunately only ATA100 and very unlikely to really give the motherboard’s I/O system a workout. Note the little plastic clips that are holding the wires and cables onto the PSU. They are very handy – when you need a cable, you unclip it, and when you do not, you clip it back out of the way. A very nice touch! You can also see in this picture the “80 PLUS” logo on the power supply. This is a rating that ensures that this PSU is over 80% efficient – a rarity in the PC world, and a comfort to know that your quad-core, disc burners AND Crossfire cards will all have plenty of juice.

I installed a SATA 3.0GB/s drive from another machine for benchmarking. Take a peek at the SATA data cable in the front – they designed these cables with little metal clips that keep the plug firmly in place. Gone are the days of a little jog bumping your SATA cable out! Thanks, Shuttle!
At this point, I need to mention the only single small challenge I had with the system. It’s a Crossfire machine, so allows for two PCIExpress cards to be installed – but getting the inner one in might take some squeezing.

I actually got nervous trying to push my dual-slot card into place. It slid into the location alright, but I had to apply a fair bit of pressure to cram it in against the PSU wires and screw it down. I was concerned that once I let go, the force pushing back from the wires would have ill effects on the slot itself. You can see the (lack of) clearance in this shot – a thin, molded 90-degree conduit coming out of the PSU would help immensely. Or simply (says the armchair engineer) redesign it so the cables come out the top or front.

However, I did get the card in, and it worked flawlessly, and came out smoothly – so my concern seems to have been for naught. And there is plenty of clearance as far as height and length to get your cards in.

Compared to my trusty IDEQ or theoretically larger-and-therefore-more-spacious X-QPack case, both of which required taking most everything apart before the video card could be put in, this case allowed it to just slide right in the side. No structural obstructions, no removing drive cages or power supplies… It was very refreshing. And of course, the 6-pin video power cable was hanging right there to be plugged in.

Let’s check out the BIOS…

BIOS

Okay! Now the hardware is in place - let’s crank this baby up!

A quick jaunt into the BIOS before we really get going. It contains the standard stuff..

Date/Time, memory and drive detection… yawn.

The "Advanced Features" include your boot priority and security setup. And as fetching as the Full-screen shuttle logo is, I opted to turn it off. Inside the "CPU Feature" menu, we have…

Comments in this section are (paraphrased) from the manual…

Standard Integrated Peripherals stuff. Turn on and off SATA, IDE, Gigabit LAN, Sound… An addition under the USB settings is to specify whether USB thumb drives show up as hard drives or floppies to the system.

Similarly standard power management features.

Alarming that it thinks there’s no ICE intake fan, but otherwise standard info here.

And now the juicy stuff. Shuttle has been listening, and provided a plethora of frequency and overclocking options. (Of course, you overclock your system at your own risk, etc etc.) The CPU clock can be set to any frequency from 133 to 600 MHz simply by typing the value in. I personally found great value in the CPU Clock Ratio selector. The manual states that options are available from 3x to 50x, but I only saw 6-9 – and by changing it from 6 to 9, my CPU leapt from 2GHz to 3GHz. Whee!

FSB Ratios available are Auto, 5:4, 5:3, 2:1, 1:1, 4:3, 8:5, 6:5 or 3:2. When I set “Auto,” CPUZ described it as 5:6, which is interesting in that I could not manually choose that in the BIOS if I wanted to.

If you enable the “DRAM Timing Selectable” option, you can manually set memory timings for:

• CAS latency
• RAS/CAS Delay
• RAS Precharge
• tRAS
• Write recovery time
• Refresh Command Period
• Write to Read Delay
• Row Active Delay, and
• Read to Precharge Delay

Shuttle has also included a section for “Dynamic Over Clocking,” as it is called. Options are Disabled, 3%, 5%, 7% or 10%. Enabling this will theoretically let the system automatically overclock a certain percentage on demand. I had better results doing it manually, as every time I tried to select a DOC value, it simply would not reboot. (I had to invoke the very useful rear Clear CMOS button.)

In the above shot, I’ve bumped the clock frequency slightly past the CPU’s default of 333, to 350, and bumped the voltage slightly to compensate as it was getting a little freaked out on me. Sadly, I didn’t have time to really do the frequency->voltage->frequency->voltage dance and really see what I could unleash.

Speaking of which, selectable voltage ranges were as follows, in addition to "Auto":

On the subject of the BIOS, I was disappointed to discover (when I had to do it) that there is no built-in feature to upgrade the BIOS from, for example, a thumb drive. You are still required to make a boot floppy with the BIOS updater and BIN file, or use WinFlash.

And how about some benchmarks?

Benchmarks

If you benchmark a Shuttle in the forest, and have nothing to compare it to, does it still count?

Microsoft Vista Home Premium installed without a hitch on this system – the 64-bit version of course – and the chipset drivers included on the DVD as well. My only real regret is that I lacked a pair of single-slot ATI cards to test the Crossfire performance.

Incidentally, I was a little confused that they included Crossfire bridges with the case. My understanding is that video cards include those these days – but then I realized that most other systems are expecting an extra slot between the video cards, which this one obviously doesn’t have. So thanks to Shuttle for providing the shorter bridges for their single-slot card solution.

I felt a little odd running benchmarks, realizing that these tests are primarily CPU and video tests. As such they won’t say much about the barebones itself. But hey, people love numbers, so away we go!

CPUZ identifies our CPU for us:

And RAM:

I was giddy to see this CPU!  It’s probably the closest I’m going to come to a Core 2 Extreme until they’re being clearanced at Wal-Mart.  It booted up at 2GHz (333×6) and I was able to easily boost it to 3GHz by flipping the multiplier to 9 – all the benchmarks, temps and sound levels you see in this review are with an overclocked CPU.

The comparison system is:

The first thing I tried to do was beat it down with a little quad-core Prime95. After 5 hours, core temps were as follows.

Note that this is comparing a quad-core 3Ghz Intel processor with a dual-core 2.4GHz AMD.  They’re not quite apples-to-apples, but it is notable that the ICE-2 module is beating the Zalman flower-style cooler by a couple of degrees at both end of the spectrum. The Opteron is rated at 85W by AMD, and the C2D at a slightly higher 95W – so it is not only cooler, but dissipating more heat at the same time. Hats off AGAIN to the Shuttle engineers!

During the whole testing process, the sound at 12 inches never got above 55 decibels. Most times it was too low for our sound meter to detect, although I could hear a faint whooshing from the case.

It struck me, while doing this review, that running performance benchmarks against my "antiquated" dual-core Opteron would be largely meaningless. The architecture of the SX48P2 is such a step above my Socket 939 that even simply using it as a baseline doesn’t give us much information.  Plus, in reviewing a box with very nearly the best CPU out there, it’s not going to be a stretch to say that it will perform (cough) well.  However, some very interesting things turned up.

The software I tested with was:

• SiSoft Sandra Lite
• Crysis Demo
• 3DMark05 and 06
• HL2′s Lost Coast Demo
• Bioshock

A few of the SiSoft Sandra numbers:

The combined rating is something you can use at home. Run the tool on your own PC and see how far down you are on the technological ladder.  I’ll tell you, nothing’s given me the upgrade itch like reviewing this system!  The Shuttle almost triples the overall score of my own machine, which is a box I used to be satisfied with!

As this was intended to be a review of the barebones system, and not the CPU/Video card combo, I took a couple of other numbers that seemed relevant: SATA and Data Bus throughput.  The SATA performance was on par (thank goodness SOMETHING was) with the older chipset, which makes sense – SATA 3.0 is SATA 3.0.  And the other I/O max throughput was impressive: 10.4GB/S on the Shuttle’s Intel X48 chipset versus 8.75GB/s on my NForce4 machine. An improvement, significant but not overwhelming.  And the memory throughput, at 12.5 versus 7MB/s, is almost double, which is what you’d expect from a DDR2 versus DDR situation, both being 400MHz- rated RAM.

Overall, SiSoft Sandra told me what I already knew: The underlying hardware makes for very speedy machine and one that was physically a pleasure to work with. This was a very
fast box, and whatever sort of horsepower I choose to fill it with, it would make me very happy.

Yes… even MORE benchmarks!

More Benchmarks

The rest of the lovely, lovely charts.  We do so love our charts…

Again, an unsurprising victory for the Shuttle in both 3DMark tests. It would seem that an extra 600MHz and two more cores makes for a higher score!  (It was delightful to watch the 2006 demo run, I have to admit.)

Super PI, with a freakishly large spread on the Y-axis. Maybe 4 million digits would have looked better than 1M on this scale.  In any case, the times for the SX48P2 were roughly half those of the Opteron system in every case. And half the time means twice the goodness!

As far as game benchmarks, Crysis was done at 1280×1024, 8xAA. Other games at 1680×1050, no AA.  Lost Coast enjoyed about a 20% increase (120fps versus 99, averaged over 4 runs).  World of Warcraft appears to be software-capped at 60FPS, and both sets of hardware maxed that out handily.

Bioshock, however, is a mystery to me. At >40FPS, both appeared smooth to me as it played, but the recorded averages are just odd. The only things I can think of are that (a) under Vista (on the Shuttle) it was running with DirectX 10, whereas on my NF44 box it was running DX9, or (b, more likely) I messed it up somehow and didn’t actually have the same visual settings.

The Crysis chart is running it in DX9 – I tried to keep an apples-to-apples comparison, although it was under a 64-bit OS, rather than my 32-bit Windows XP installation.  Even under DX10, though, the system averaged 42FPS as opposed to the 48 shown.

So, what’s the bottom line?

Conclusion

I may have mentioned this once or twice in the course of this article, but the Shuttle SX48P2-E is a delight to work with.  Excluding a touch of stress getting the inner PCIE slot populated, it was the smoothest build that I’ve had the pleasure to undertake. Everything fit together perfectly, and all software installed and ran without a hitch.  Let’s break it down a bit more:

Ease of build:  9/10
Smooth as a hot knife through butter, only without the greasy aftermath and heart disease.  Shuttle continues their tradition of making systems that users want to use. The PSU wires made it challenging, but no damage was done. My next-door neighbor actually bought one of these boxes and had trouble (which I verified) with the optical drive stealth door – so it’s not a flawless system – but darned if I don’t think it’s close.

Performance: 8/10
It performs exactly where I think it should on the curve.  Benchmarks were on par, not abysmal and not outstanding.  I found the "Dynamic Overclocking" feature to be twitchy and ineffective, but doing it manually via FSB and voltage manipulation seemed very straightforward and anyone who’s done it in the past will find no surprises here.
(On a side note, I really really really want a Core 2 Extreme. Dang.)

Aesthetics: 8/10
What can I say? I like the classic, uncluttered look. Having to open a door to get to the 3.5" bay gets in the way of that, as does the door to the ports at the bottom of the front: If you tend to keep something plugged in all the time, as I do, doors just get in the way. I understand that’s a matter of opinion, so add a point back on if you like that sort of thing.

Noise level: 7/10
I found it to be quite acceptable. My office has the box under the desk, where it was scarcely audible and kept my toes nice and warm. After running it for 3 days straight, it seemed a little louder than it had been, but I didn’t have the sound meter with me at that point so this is more of an observation rather than an official measurement.

Features: 9/10
Untested features include: Front and back firewire ports, 7.1 surround sound *including* Dolby Digital and DTS output, ATI Crossfire support, two eSATA ports, Gigabit LAN and a mini PCIE slot. Tested features were numerous and valuable. A user new to the world of barebones and looking for an entry-level system to upgrade as time (and budget) allow might find the lack of onboard video to be a drawback, but on the other hand, most people building a rig of this caliber are already investing in a medium-to-high-level video card anyway.

Overall: 8.2/10
I love this box. Able to work with Intel Core 2 CPUs from low-end to high-end, and either one or two video cards and up to 8 GB of DDR2, this can be an entry-level workstation or a cutting-edge screaming machine. I look at the paltry 8.2 average, and I actually feel like I gave it a bit of a bum rap. I honestly can’t recommend this system enough.  A big thumbs-up to Shuttle for keeping things fresh in the marketplace, and a big thanks for them for making it available for us to give the once-over. My only regret was having to send it back after the review period was over, but they wouldn’t take a kidney in trade, so there ya go. Maybe next time….

Sudhian thanks Rob Russell for this review.