Article

Some Background

Fast, small, or inexpensive? Choose two. Typically, you have the choice between a gaming monster under your desk that tallies FPS in the hundreds or a small space heater that's good enough to share photos on sites like Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/), but not much else. Some might say a laptop delivers all three choices; fast, small, and inexpensive, but as much as I love my laptop for general use, anyone that claims the latest games can be played at full resolution on a laptop either hasn't played Titan Quest or is trying to sell you one.

Trying to buck this trend, vendors like Shuttle have marketed to the LAN party crowd who move their computers to and fro for some friendly camaraderie and snacks with a little gratuitous virtual gun violence on the side. I've lugged around my monster PC to numerous LAN parties over the years, and while I'm sure my biceps thanked me, my back certainly didn't.

Shuttle has been known for small and stylish computers with boxes that not only take up less physical space, but look good on a desktop. But now they are catering to the performance gamer who cares about performance and portability. With the introduction of the Intel Core 2 Duo powered SD37P2, they now have a box that encompasses all of these attributes, at least with regards to specs.

Instead of reviewing a fully built system, we decided to get a barebones case and use our own components. Would it be worthy of the latest games and more importantly, would any components need to be compromised in the process to fit this smaller, more stylish design?

Components

The Shuttle XPC SD37P2 uses an Intel 975X Express Chipset and contains two x8 PCI Express slots for running two graphic cards in parallel using ATI CrossFire technology. It integrates 7.1 high definition audio, support for DDR2 memory, and advanced cooling technology dubbed Silent X and ICE

We packed the following components into our barebone box:

• Intel Core2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz processor - courtesy of Santa Cruz Electronics

• 2GB Corsair CM2X1024-6400 800MHz DDR2 memory

• NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card

The SD37P2 includes a relatively healthy 400W power supply, so we decided to slap in a video card sure to deliver the horsepower required by the latest games.

 

Go for the gusto with a great video card like the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2.

Again, lucky for us, the video card fairy left us a present: an NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 dual-GPU with 1GB of RAM. Thanks video card fairy! Actually, the card was sent to us by XFX. But is the GeForce 7950 GX2 overkill? If you're playing the latest games, not at all. Besides, we want to leave ourselves some growing room.

We geeks are known for recommending more memory, and we're partial to Corsair memory for two simple reasons: speed and reliability. For this job, we chose two 1GB Corsair CM2X1024-6400 800MHz DDR2 memory modules.

 

For our gaming setup, we're using two 1GB sticks of Corsair DDR2 memory.

For any type of gaming these days, 1GB just isn't enough. Better to have 2GB to be on the safe side. More is almost always better, and your hard drive, which holds the operating system swap file, will thank you too.

The SD37P2 takes an Intel Socket LGA775 processor, which translates to anywhere from a Celeron D all the way up to a dual core Xeon for amazing flexibility. We used a 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 to help us keep up with the latest games.

 

For having helped make this review possible, We'd like to personally thank John Bower and the folks over at Santa Cruz Electronics for donating an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400. It's greatly appreciated!

The Core 2 Duo E6400 is a dual core processor that contains 2MB of onboard cache and supports Intel's 1066MHz FSB. Dual core means two independent processor cores in one physical package, both running at the same frequency and sharing the onboard cache.

Benchmarking

I'll get one little tidbit out of the way right now. I don't care about benchmarks. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a geek, and I really like games. I love the way the CPUs and video cards have advanced the visual and interactive quality of games. In the past, when computers were struggling to keep up with Doom, I was the geek gobbling up the comparative charts that demonstrated how a Diamond Stealth II outperformed--by an order of magnitude--some other card that few of us remember today. But let me be clear: While I understand hardware comparisons on paper, I cannot tell the difference between 90 FPS and 130 FPS in a game. Perhaps this is the reason why I'm not a World-class, top-ranked Battlefield 2 player. I am comfortable with this. Personally, I just don't care anymore, but I want NVIDIA and ATI to care, and I want Intel and AMD to care, and I want all of the other technology outfits out there to care and do their part to advance the state of the art. If they need benchmarks to do their job, so be it. Me? I just want to play games with my friends once in a while and enjoy myself. I also want my games to play smooth, which is what we essentially tested with this system.

The Software

Combined with the GeForce 7950 GX2's dual DVI connectors, we're good to go for the software portion. Windows XP installed without a hitch. Nothing in the Shuttle was too exotic for it to handle. All of the drivers for all of the components including the video card worked flawlessly. That said, we recommend upgrading to the latest drivers, especially after installing a fresh copy of Windows.

For a nice cross section of applications, I installed Doom 3, F.E.A.R., Titan Quest, Battle for Middle Earth II, and Battlefield 2142. This isn't a game review, so I won't go into details about each one. Also, keep in mind that I don't watch for frames per second. As far as I'm concerned, if the game plays absolutely smoothly with all of the settings like resolution and anti-aliasing cranked up to maximum, I'm content.

The Experience

And boy does this box deliver! No stutters. No jitters. Well, no jitters other than the fact that F.E.A.R. will probably give me nightmares. The Shuttle XPC SD37P2 cuts through games like a hot knife through butter. I honestly couldn't be happier with the game performance.

But what about noise? This box is very quiet. Not silent, but quiet. I didn't notice the fans while I was game-playing, and if I don't notice, that's a good game-playing experience for me. It doesn't look like the large video card caused any wind noise due to blockage. The 7950GX2 had its own slight fan noise, but I'm definitely not going to hold our choice of video card against the Shuttle box.

I also kept an eye out for temperature problems. There weren't any. Those Shuttle engineers knew what they were doing alright. The large video card and the front placement of the hard drive didn't seem to cause any appreciable extra heat build up.

Overclocking

Overclocking is the art of pushing computer hardware beyond manufacturer designated levels in order to eke out every drop of additional performance possible without destroying said hardware. With an enthusiast-level motherboard, this is not an issue. Unfortunately, Shuttle's onboard BIOS was limited with regards to enthusiast overclock settings. Specifically, the FSB and CPU voltage settings were limited, and more importantly, the motherboard in the Shuttle box just isn't designed for overclocking (yes, there are boards that are.) However, we did the best we could.

Using an application called SuperPI to calculate pi to one million decimal points, we set about overclocking our system. With the CPU at it's stock 2.13GHz speed, SuperPI took 26 seconds to complete. After pushing the FSB to 300MHz, we got the CPU to 2.4GHz and the time down to 23 seconds. Pushing even further, we achieved 2.56GHz and a score of 22 seconds. Of course, we had to then push memory! Taking the memory latency down from CAS 5 to CAS 4 was the best we could achieve, and it yielded a full second of speed, reducing the SuperPI test to a mere 21 seconds.

In the end, we were able to push CPU speed by 430MHz! A full 17% improvement in processor speed and a noticeable difference in performance!! We certainly cannot complain about that.

Conclusion

Fast. Small. Inexpensive. As far as I'm concerned, you get the whole shebang from the Shuttle XPC SD37P2 barebone machine. The only real problem I see is that friends from out of town might need one. Can my budget survive getting three of these? Time and my bank account will tell. But I won't lie, it's tempting.