The little wonder - Shuttle's SD11 G5

 

Introduction

Today, Vr-Zone will be taking a look at the Shuttle SD11G5, a Small Form Factor Barebone system based on the Intel Pentium Mobile Platform. This little wonder features quite a few new innovations, apart from being based on the Intel 915GM Pentium M platform, the SD11G5 also features a mini-PCI slot that allows users to slot in a mini-wireless card and a Creative Souldblaster Live! 24 bit HD audio solution.

Another honorable mention would be the case of the SD11G5 itself; it is the first Shuttle SFF housed in the G5 chassis that comes in a glossy pearl whilte finish, and I would say that the finish of the case is EXCELLENT. I absolutely adore the case and it was simply a love at first sight.

The features introduced in this little machine is also very ideal for it to be deployed as a Home Theater Personal Computer, with DVI and composite out connectivity options found onboard as well as a pretty decent onboard sound solution.

Later in the review, we will be taking a further look at the interesting features adopted by Shuttle. First, let's take a good look at the specifications of the SD11G5.

Form Factor	Shuttle Form Factor G5 chassis
Processor	Intel Pentium M 533/400 MHz FSB Intel Pentium M LV 400MHz FSB Celeron M
Chipset	Intel 915GM + ICH6M chipset
Memory	(2) 240pin 400/533 DDR2 DIMM slots 1GB per DIMM max 2GB capacity
Graphics	Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900
Serial-ATA	ICH6-M integrated SATA Dual channel UDMA 150MB/s SATA
Audio	Creative Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit 7.1 channel EAX Advanced HD audio Digital SPDIF I/O
Fast Ethernet	Broadcom BCM5789 Gigabit PCI-Express Controller Wake-On-LAN function
Firewire	VIA VT6307 IEEE1394a 400mbps controller
Onboard Headers and Connectors	(1) x ATA100 bus master IDE connector (2) x Serial ATA connector (2) x 4-pin fan connectors (2) sets of 1x5 pin USB 2.0 header (1) set of 2x5 pin USB 2.0 header Front Panel FPC header GPIO header Parallel port header AUX in header Power On header Mini PCI slot
Front Panel	(2) USB 2.0 ports (1) Mini IEEE1394 port (1) Mic in (1) Speaker out (1) Power on button (1) Reset button (1) HDD LED (1) Power LED
Back Panel	(1) x 16 PCI E slot (1) x 1 PCI E slot (1) Set PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse ports (2) USB 2.0 ports (1) RJ45 Gigabit LAN port (1) Optical SPDIF out (1) Optical SPDIF in (1) Set 7.1 audio ports (1) Line in (1) IEEE 1394 (1) Clear CMOS (1) VGA connector (1) DVI connector (1) Composite video out (1) Printer port perforation (1) WLAN perforation
Expansion Bays	(1) 3.5" bay (1) 3.5" bays (internal) (1) 5.25" bay
Dimensions	310(L) x 185(W) x 200(H) mm
Power	External 220W adapter Input: 100/240V AC EMI Certified: FCC, CE, BSMI Safety Certified: UL, TUV, CB, BSMI
Accessories	(1) User Guide (1) XPC Driver CD (1) Shuttle Extras CD (1) ICE Technology CPU heat-pipe (1) IDE Cable (1) PEG power cable (1) Composite to S-Video cable (1) Power Cord (1) SATA cable (1) Heatsink compound Front Feet /Twin Adhesive/Screws

 

A closer look

The interiors

A side view of the bare machine. The little PCB we see on the left hand side of the machine is actually the audio subsystem of the SD11G5, containing the DAC and ADC of the Creative Sound Blaster Live! 24 bit PCI sound on the machine, a good move by Shuttle, as porting the sound subsystem off the main board also means that the subsystem will be less likely to be affected by the electronic 'noise' emitted by the electronic components of the mainboard.

Fans of Small-Form-Factor machines will definitely notice something different in the first picture above. There isn't a power supply in the system! Shuttle has ported out te power supply to an external power adaptor, reducing heat output within the system. This means that the irritating 40mm fan found in the power supplies of Shuttle barebones aint there anymore! weee!

The modified power supply within the SD11G5

 

Wait a minute, how will the other components of the system draw power from? There isn't a power supply to provide power connectors for the components anymore! Instead of direct DC power from the power suply, Shuttle has introduced a power output connector from the mainboard itself. From this 10 pin connector, Shuttle has included 2 SATA power connectors, 2 4 pin power connectors and 1 PCI-Express VGA Adaptor connector that subsequently branches out from this connector. I wouldn't say that this is a good implementation, as the manboard base got scorching hot after an hour or two of operation, and heat is afterall, the ultimate foe of any electronic component.

Connectivity Options available

 

The front panel connectors. over here, you'll see a audio in, audio out, 2 USB 2.0 connectors and a 4 pin firewire connector.

A look at the back panel. With the sound subsystem ported upwards, it means that Shuttle has also given themselves more room to play around with the back I/O panel of the machine, allowing them to include more connectivity options onto the backpane of this little monster.

Along with the capabilities of the Intel GMA900 onboard video accelerator, Shuttle has included a DVI-D connector driven by a Silicon Image Sil1362CLU DVI transmitter along with a standard VGA D-SUB 15 pin connector. Shuttle has also included a composite video out connector for HTPC usage for televisions without a D-SUB or DVI connector.

A 'clear CMOS' button is also included in the back panel, beside it is a 6 pin IEEE1394a connector provided by the VIA VT6307 firewire controller. Towards the utmost right, you'll see the 6 pin DC in connector that will draw power via the 220W external power adaptor. You'll also get a RJ 45 jack powered by the Broadcom BCM 5789 Gigabit PCI-Express Gigabit LAN chip, 2 PS/2 ports and 2 Hi-Speed USB 2.0 connectors.

The FD11 mainboard

 

Here, on the right, you'll see the PCI-Express x16 slot, x1 slot, 2 SATA connectors and 1 IDE connectors. on this board, you will not find any floppy connectors. On the right, you can see the heatsinks covering both the northbridge and southbridge.

 

 

From top left to bottom right, in clockwise direction 1) Silicon Image DVI transmitter 2) Broadcom PCI-Express LAN 3) mini-PCI, sound and firewire chip 4) Sound DAC and ADC chips

In the pictures above, you'll see a myriad of black little chips that give the the FD11 mainboard very impressive features. I'll start from the 3rd picture since I've more or less covered the first two in the paragraphs above.

In the third picture, you see a mini-PCI slot beside the Creative sound chip and the VIA firewire chip. That allows users to plug in a wireless card, pretty nifty especially when there isn't any PCI 32bit slots found onboard. The downside being, mini-PCI wireless cards aren't readily available off-shelves in computer stores, as there really isn't a market for them as most mini-PCI slots are found in notebooks.

In the fourth picture, you'll see a Cirrus Logic CS4382 Digital-to-Analouge Codec and a Wolfson WM8775 Analouge-to Digital Codec. Both of these are pretty decent codecs that you'll rarely find as onboard audio solutions. The audio solution found on the FD11 mainboard is exactly the same as the MSI P4N Diamond that we reviewed a while back.

The heatsink

The heatsink provided with the SD11G5 is significantly smaller than those provided with its Athlon64 and Pentium 4 counterparts. the heatsink came nicely spreaded with thermalpaste and a nice shroud to protect the fragile Heat-spreader-less core of the Pentium M processor. Pretty thoughtful of Shuttle here.

BIOS Options

 

 

Apart from FSB adjustments, there's ziltch overclocking options available in the BIOS, definitely a disappointment as the Dothan processors do really overclock well on the desktop platform. Apart from this, Shuttle somehow missed out the option to use USB HID devices in the BIOS; I was unable to use a USB keyboard in the BIOS and there wasn't any options to enable the USB keyboard at all.

The review setup

In this review, we'll be using a Intel Pentium M 2.26Ghz Processor, along with a pair of Cosair XMS4200 CL4 512MB RAM and an Nvidia Geforce 7800GTX 256MB reference card. This board will be pitted against the Aopen i915GM-HFS Pentium M Mainboard that we reviewed a while back.

We'll be using the following Benches:

• HardwareOC Halflife 2  v1.6 Timedemo (HOC Highway Demo)
• Hardware OC Farcry V1.4.1 Timedemo (PC Games Hardware Demo)
• Doom III Resurrection Inbuilt Time Demo 1
• Futuremark 3DMark 05 Build 1.2.0
• Futuremark 3DMark 03 Build 3.6.0
• Futuremark PCMark 05
• Futuremark PCMark 04
• Cine Bench 2003
• SiSoft Sandra 2005

While putting the setup together, we noticed an irregularity; the PCi-Express connector doesn't fit really well onto the graphics card, we had to apply quite a bit of force to plug the power connector in as the shapes at the connector ends do not even match with the connectors on the card itself. Just a little glitch I suppose.

Futuremark 3D Mark & PC Mark

Let's take a look at the suite of Benchmark tests by Futuremark first. Futuremark is the company behind of some of today’s most exciting real-time 3D content and innovative web applications.

First, we take a look at the industry-recognized 3D Mark Series:

In 3D Mark scores, the difference between the Shuttle SD11G5 and the Aopen 915GM is less than 1%. This is negligible and we feel that the Shuttle as a SFF should be praised for keeping up with a Desktop board so well.

While 3D Mark stresses on the graphics capabilities of a system, PC Mark is a more all-rounded test. From the read/write capability to the memory performance of a system, it thoroughly explores your computer.

Again we see the Shuttle lagging behind by less than 1%. It is not visible at all, this small a margin of difference.

Sisoft Sandra & Gaming Performance

Sisoft Sandra Benchmarks a much more synthetic compared to Futuremark's. The results obtained are more towards the raw performance of a system.

In the CPU test, there is less than 1% difference between the Shuttle and the Aopen915GM.

In the memory bandwidth benchmark, we see the difference show a bit more clearly between the 2 platforms. The Shuttle SD11G5 is around 2% slower in terms of memory performance. Not a big deal, but the difference is definitely there.

 

Let's check out how the SFF handles gaming.

With the 7800 GTX in the system, all games played very smoothly at 1024x768 High Quality settings. We faced no overheating or power issues either, even with this high-end video card. So this is definitely assuring for readers to know!

Anyway, the Shuttle lags behind just a little in Far Cry, holds the same performance in Half Life 2 but shows a 10% difference in Doom 3. We reran the benchmark a few times to ensure that it was accurate. One explanation would be that since the Aopen has better Memory performance as seen from the Sisoft Sandra Tests, and that Doom 3 is very memory bandwidth sensitive, this difference is largely due to the difference in memory bandwidth.

Professional Work: CineBench

What about professional work? 3D rendering for some of the professionals perhaps a possibility with this Small Form Factor?

The Shuttle performs very decently in Cinebench, a Benchmark test suite designed to test the 3D modeling and rendering capability of a system. In fact when it comes to professional work, the Shuttle even beats the Aopen in certain tests.

A Winner?

Shuttle has the SFF that many would get. Although performance isn't stellar, the SD11G5 has made it a winner with it's pearl white glossy exterior case, full functionality as well as the high gloss finishing on the case itself. Unlike its predecessors, the SD11G5's fan no longer whines upon boot up, and operation is dead silent throughout.
Nevertheless, Shuttle should pay slightly more attention to their BIOS, small but irritating glitches aren't good especially when the Shuttles don't come cheap.

Overall Rating : 85 VRMarks!

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