Shuttle SS51 XPC - A True High Performance Small Form Factor PC Review on Anandtech site

[GoatHerderEd]

has anyone seen this?

AMS GBOX

looks rather simaler to the shuttle flex pcs.

I would love to see the usb 2 ports, and the AGP on the ss40g.

As you can see im an AMD fan nord1899 . thats why i said that the p4s run as hot has the athlons.

well, good luck to all.

 

[TrekkieJ]

Does anyone know if there are any plans to bring out an Athlon version with AGP support? Would save me a bit of money if there is going to be one

Cheers.

 

[nord1899]

Well it looks like Slashdot has posted a thread about it.

And it appears that pretty much everyone is complaining about the use of an Intel processor rather than an AMD processor.

I guess never underestimate the zealots.

 

[Tanked]

Unless something's changed, the high end P4's put out as much heat as high end Athlons. On Intel's datasheet about thermal dissapation, they quote "Thermal Design Power" which is more like an average while AMD quotes the absolute maximum.

Intel's TDP for 2.0 GHz = 52.4 Watts
AMD's Maximum Dissipation for 2000+ = 60.3 Watts
AMD's Average Dissipation for 2000+ = 54.7 Watts

So the heat dissipation for both the P4 Northwood and the Throughbred are about equal.

 

[Aquaman]

Originally posted by: TrekkieJ
Does anyone know if there are any plans to bring out an Athlon version with AGP support? Would save me a bit of money if there is going to be one

Cheers.

I'm pretty sure Shuttle will get an AGP version of the SS40 soon

Cheers,
Aquaman

 

[bluemax]

That would be the SN-40 which uses the nForce2 mobo with 1xAGP 1xPCI.

 

[Coherence]

Originally posted by: OdieXPC

Any clue about that stability issue Anand ran into?

I've been working with Anand on the stability issues, and its appears he received a bad board (or the board was damaged in shipment). None of the other reviewers ran into these issues (you can read them at Hexus.net, Firingsquad.com, Viahardware.com, and OCworkbench.com).

Just curious Odie, but did the same test unit get passed on to other news sites? The reason I ask is because the review on tech-report.com (Shuttle's XPC SS51 Good things come with AGP slots by Geoff Gasior ? July 29, 2002) states that he ran into a similar (the same?) problem as Anand did. Here were the issues brought up:

1. CPU heatsink frame sits directly on top of the ethernet and firewire chips. Heat may be an issue for those components as a result.

2. The single fan and heat-sink pipes do a fine job of keeping the CPU cool, but there are no vents or fans to cool the air around the DIMMs ("hot dead air"), the heat rising off of which could cause damage to the hard drive(s) directly above the DIMMs.

3. Stability issues with DDR333.

4. (And this is the one possibly related to Anand's problem) Business Winstone would not run AT ALL. No amount of pushing would get a score out of it.

Did tech-report.com use the same test unit as Anand? Here's what Anand stated in the article:

As impressive as the layout and features of the FS51 motherboard are, it is the motherboard that ended up being our biggest complaint about the SS51. Initially in our testing the FS51 would not install Windows XP with ACPI enabled in the BIOS. A BIOS update from Shuttle fixed that issue but another problem remained - we could not get the on-board ALC650 codec to work. Using a sound card in the PCI slot fixed the problem but that obviously shouldn't be necessary.

We ran into a number of stability issues that could be attributed to the FS51; including a strange problem where a Word document became corrupt while it was open on the system. Shuttle has a new FS51 board on its way to us, insisting that the problem was isolated to our sample...

What wasn't quite clear to me was whether the ALC650 codec issue and the Word issue were both a result of the bad board, or only the Word issue.

How do you respond to these issues? I'm very much looking forward to building my new system out of this unit (it will look great next to my new Sharp LL-T1820B LCD monitor), so I hope thing will be corrected when it's released.

P.S. I've been checking the vendors linked from Shuttle's site regularly. Newegg had it on their site for only about 1 day, with a released date of 8-20-02. (I think the price was $339, and that's also where I found the tech-reports.com review.) Is this date accurate? It was gone from Newegg the last time I checked, though. Ajump lists it on their site as "on backorder" with a price of $389! (Sounds like a premium markup.)

 

[Legendary]

Good read, good review.

 

[chadster]

Can the SS51 support a Radeon 9700 pro? (apg 8x.. and it says it requires additional power.. it has a power connection to the power supply)