Silence of the Shuttle Pentium M lunch box

WE HAD a chance to test a Shuttle Pentium M based SD11G5 system. It is a regular Shuttle lunchbox XPC with the exception that it uses an external PSU unit. It still has enough power for a high end graphic card. The machine uses rather chill Pentium M based CPU. It is very easy to cool these CPUs and it is extremely easy to have almost silent machine. That's what Shuttle had in mind.

The machine comes in a rather large and secure box and if you saw a shuttle XPC before you won't have much trouble assembling it. The machine also uses a rather large external notebook-like power adaptor. Once you see it you will immediately have the desire to call it a brick. It looks and feels like a brick and apart from its size it is also rather heavy. But that is the sacrifice that I am willing to make in order to have 220W of silent power.

A great design in white

Shuttle ships aluminium based case in silver but the review unit was white. I have to say that it looks sexy in white. It should have left it in white for consumers as well. Thanks to mighty Intel we managed to get a CPU for this test and the nice company supplied us with a Pentium M 760 clocked at 2 GHz. I have the same CPU in the laptop I use. The only exception is that the laptop uses FSB 400 based Pentium M at 2 GHz while the one we used for XPC test works at 533 FSB. As it is slim and lite notebook that indicates that the CPU is rather chill. We didn't have any problems mounting this 479 pin CPU inside and we remember that you had to screw the CPU in as it is usually meant for transportable systems.

His heart beats at 2004 MHz

The machine used Corsair DDR 2 533 MHz memory. The CPU has 2MB of cache memory and is based on 90 nanometre marchitecture. It is the last of the single core CPUs but I can tell you it was working fine during the test. It might be just perfect for an office machine. Shuttle SD11G5 uses custom FD11V10 motherboard powered with 915GM Northbridge and ICH6M Southbridge. The machine can support both FSB 533 and FSB 400 CPUs including Celeron M.

We plugged two Corsair PC4300 CM2X512 DDR 2 533 modules each 512 MB. We managed to run them stable at 4-3-3-12. We used Seagate NCQ Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB S-ATA hard drive and it didn't have any power insufficiency. It ran just fine all the time. We also plugged in an NEC 16X DVD recorder. We decided to run the machine without an external graphic card even though the machine can accommodate PCIe 16X graphic card. We wanted to focus on the silence and wanted to create rather powerful silent machine. The machine is equipped with a rather nice Soundblaster Live 24 bit card that will be quite enough for good sound and nice DVD playback.

220 W PSU also known as the Brick

The front of the machine features two USB 2.0 ports, a small Firewire connector and headphones and speakers port. The machine uses Intel 915G based integrated graphic that providing you with DVI or VGA out. It has a rather nice choice of video connectors at the back of the machine. You even have an S Video TV out. The machine is equipped with a Gigabit Broadcom Netlink LAN card and two additional USB ports. Of course there is a big connector for an external power supply unit and one additional Firewire port. PS2 connectors for both keyboard and mouse are still there and there is a hardware clear Cmos button next to it. This is a very smart move as you don't want to mess with the inside of the machine every day. Last but not least is the Soundblaster Live 24 and its 5.1 analogue connectors and an additional SPDIF in and out. The machine has a rather sexy CD door sliding mechanism that hides the CD until you press the bottom and you can also hide the front connectors as well.

We decided not to run our usual gaming set of benchmarks. We wanted to test this machine as the one that you would like to have on your business table. We focused on everyday work and actually used this machine as our main work machine. Here are some of the conclusions.

XPC Diagnostic software

Once you turn it you won't believe that it is running. It is so quiet that you can sleep next to it and you still won't know that it is running. We are very impressed with its silence. After three days up, the system was running at 47 Celsius, the board at 46 Celsius while the CPU was at 40 Celsius. The ICE cooler was spinning at 904 RPM only and that is why the machine was so quiet.

The machine runs windows XP just fine. It will run every possible heavily multitasking environment and at press time it runs mail client, Winamp, four Office documents, five Firefox windows and Acrobat readers. Of course each of the Firefox windows has a few tabs inside and I do use Explorer as well. All this takes just five per cent of the CPU power and it occupies some 485 MB of memory. I use to run even more extreme scenarios and I never lacked the performance. The machine can match most of the desktops around if not even outperformed them.

We tried to overclock and FSB 150 was not problem and we even reached FBS 160 MHz and got a nice speed of 2.4 GHz. It was not completely stable but you can get the machine to work at 2260 MHz. If we could only tweak the voltage of the multiplier, but unfortunately the board didn't allow that. It won't overheat even at 2.4 GHz.

Can overclock to 2260 MHz or even 2400 MHz

I tried to run Video, H.264 content and a DVD as well. It can run them all but it wont play H.264 content that smoothly that is the Intel CPU / Graphic limitation. DVD's looks just fine and we just enjoyed this machine as once you get into tensed and quiet scene at the movie you usually hear your PC, well not this time.

Conclusion
Overall this is a great office machine. You can even play games on it but this is something that girls wants in their room or the big bosses want to show off in their offices. It is highly recommended for all people who like super quiet machines as it cannot get more silent than this.

It has all the connectors you need, there are some additional USB ports, and memory card reader that you can buy for the system but overall you won't lack anything from your big and noisy PC. You might object the size of the external power charger but it will run just fine and you won't carry it. It does the job, so that is the important stuff. The XPC case looks extremely nice and it will just look great on any table.

You can only be sad that you won't get the beautiful white reviewer's unit as the all retail units comes in silver colour. I like the white one. The performance is great, it will overclock to 2.4 GHz stabile and it will prove to be a very solid and nicely done machine. µ