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Shuttle's SS50 mini-barebones system
Cube power
by Scott Wasson -- April 25, 2002

SHUTTLE'S FIRST cube computer, the SV24, arrived on the scene last fall, and it created a sensation. The SV24's compact form factor, wealth of built-in features, and potential expandability left our minds reeling over the possibilities. Sold as a "mini-barebones system," the SV24 could be outfitted with a processor, storage, and a single PCI card as its owner saw fit. We could build a home DVD player, or a purpose-built PC, a web-surfing terminal, or just a nice computer for grandma. Fully decked out with a 1GHz processor, the SV24 could become a fairly powerful little system.

Much as we liked the SV24, it wasn't without its faults. The form factor was, if anything, actually a little too small. The inevitable wave of SV24 copycats and competitors, like the Pandora S, offered more room for expansion and a much-improved vertical PCI slot configuration. And small as it was, the SV24 still sounded like a much bigger computer. The din of the SV24's exhaust fan was enough to lull an overworked tech writer to sleep at the keyboard.

The SV24's biggest drawback, however, was its outdated Socket 370 platform. See, truth be told, we like the cube-PC-as-second-computer thing, but some of us prefer the option of replacing our massive tower cases altogether. Maxed out, the SV24 could accommodate a 1.13GHz Pentium III processor with a 133MHz front-side bus and PC133 SDRAM. That's a recipe for a brand-new Apple or an outdated PC; we considered it a little pokey. An updated version of the FV24 motherboard added support for faster PIII "Tualatin" processors. Yawn.

We said when the SV24 arrived that Shuttle ought to "sell a bundle of these things." And perhaps they did, because Shuttle is already launching a pair of powerful successors to the SV24. These new cubes address most of our complaints about Shuttle's original cube systems. The system we're reviewing today will support Pentium 4 processors as fast as 2.4GHz, and an Athlon version is reportedly on the way. Depending on your needs, this cube might just--maybe, possibly--be able to replace your desktop system altogether. To that end, we've benchmarked this thing to see what happens. Can a cube fulfill a PC freak's desire for both high style and high performance? We'll find out.

The new cube
Shuttle's SS50 is significantly more advanced than the SV24 in a number of ways, but before we get into that, I'm sure you'll want to get a look at the SS50. As you can see below, the new cube is just a little bit larger than its predecessor.

The Shuttle SV24 is just a shade smaller than the SS50

The SV24 has only one horizontal PCI slot while the SS50 has two vertical ones

No, I'm not kidding about the surround sound. It's for real. But I'm just getting started on the specs.

Shuttle's SS50 mini-barebones system
Cube power
by Scott Wasson -- April 25, 2002

SHUTTLE'S FIRST cube computer, the SV24, arrived on the scene last fall, and it created a sensation. The SV24's compact form factor, wealth of built-in features, and potential expandability left our minds reeling over the possibilities. Sold as a "mini-barebones system," the SV24 could be outfitted with a processor, storage, and a single PCI card as its owner saw fit. We could build a home DVD player, or a purpose-built PC, a web-surfing terminal, or just a nice computer for grandma. Fully decked out with a 1GHz processor, the SV24 could become a fairly powerful little system.

Much as we liked the SV24, it wasn't without its faults. The form factor was, if anything, actually a little too small. The inevitable wave of SV24 copycats and competitors, like the Pandora S, offered more room for expansion and a much-improved vertical PCI slot configuration. And small as it was, the SV24 still sounded like a much bigger computer. The din of the SV24's exhaust fan was enough to lull an overworked tech writer to sleep at the keyboard.

The SV24's biggest drawback, however, was its outdated Socket 370 platform. See, truth be told, we like the cube-PC-as-second-computer thing, but some of us prefer the option of replacing our massive tower cases altogether. Maxed out, the SV24 could accommodate a 1.13GHz Pentium III processor with a 133MHz front-side bus and PC133 SDRAM. That's a recipe for a brand-new Apple or an outdated PC; we considered it a little pokey. An updated version of the FV24 motherboard added support for faster PIII "Tualatin" processors. Yawn.

We said when the SV24 arrived that Shuttle ought to "sell a bundle of these things." And perhaps they did, because Shuttle is already launching a pair of powerful successors to the SV24. These new cubes address most of our complaints about Shuttle's original cube systems. The system we're reviewing today will support Pentium 4 processors as fast as 2.4GHz, and an Athlon version is reportedly on the way. Depending on your needs, this cube might just--maybe, possibly--be able to replace your desktop system altogether. To that end, we've benchmarked this thing to see what happens. Can a cube fulfill a PC freak's desire for both high style and high performance? We'll find out.

The new cube
Shuttle's SS50 is significantly more advanced than the SV24 in a number of ways, but before we get into that, I'm sure you'll want to get a look at the SS50. As you can see below, the new cube is just a little bit larger than its predecessor.

The Shuttle SV24 is just a shade smaller than the SS50

The SV24 has only one horizontal PCI slot while the SS50 has two vertical ones

No, I'm not kidding about the surround sound. It's for real. But I'm just getting started on the specs.

from Voodoo Extreme:

Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 CPU

It was just eye candy, but at least its *good* eye candy.

There are also several companies marketting mp3 players with removeble hard drive brackets. The old Xeenon MP Shuttle is a good example. You buy your own drive and install it yourself. I don't think they'd ever impose a levy on standalone hard drives, although copy protection in firmware is a possibility...

Take a look at this.
Scary.

Very interresting If they Pull it out.

THE VIRTUAL PETITION IS USELESS.

The Copyright Board will pay attention only to email sent to majeau.claude@cb-cda.gc.ca, or postal mail sent to the Secretary General.

The electronic petition is a waste of your time. If you want to stop this proposal before it gets off the ground, you need to ACT FAST (you have one month) and SEND YOUR MESSAGE DIRECTLY.

Please take the time to read the proposal itself. And do hit up The Tech Report, which has provided a nice overview of the situation.

ACT NOW! If you don't participate, you will be screwed.

I can second the PS fan noise is the problem!

It's a 40mm x 40mm x 10mm 12VDC fan. I'm in the process of replacing it with a 5V Microcomp fan (MCKD0504PEB3-8) which is rated at 16dBA. It has
about half the airflow, but I'm hoping it will
still be sufficient.

For more information, or to see what others have done, have a look at the informative comment thread on the SV24 article at the Tech Report.

If the standards battle is over, DVD+R can't be the winner, unless the forthcoming models beat the compatability stats for the existing models. According to tech-report.com, DVD-R works in 95.5% of existing players; DVD-RW and DVD+RW achieve less than half that. Of course, DVD+R may prove as compatible as DVD-R, but I think we need to see the stats before declaring a winner.

Personally, I'm impressed with the numbers that the DVD+R/W format has been putting up, the problem seems to be compatibility, where less-advanced and older players are unable to read the format. I'm seeing the same type of compatibility issues that CDR/W had when it first came out.

I took a look at the DVD-player compatibility chart in the Tech Report article mentioned yesterday. A couple of years ago, I snagged an Apex AD600A. The one Apex model in their list didn't fare so well (neither did most of the others), but most of the DVD-ROM drives took anything you threw at them. If I were to get a DVD burner and my DVD player were to have trouble with the type of media produced by the burner, what are the odds that the problem would be solved by swapping out the DVD-ROM mechanism in the player with a newer one? (It would be nice if they had tested the different media against an AD600A, given how many of them got snapped up back when.)

A few observations on these results. First, the DVD-R media does fantastically well; the only player which failed to read it was my own personal player, a Toshiba that is several years old. While such news might not make owners of older players happy, the compatibility percentage of DVD-R was by far the best of the three media types here.

This should be all that anyone need to know to decide whether to go with DVD-R/DVD-RW or a DVD+RW drive. MaximumPC also did a few articles on DVD-R vs DVD+RW and basically slammed DVD+RW for it's lack of compatibility. (MPC's website currently doesn't have reviews of the Pioneer DVR-A03 online, nor HP's DVD+RW, which mentioned these compatibility snafu's in better detail.. maybe someone else can find online versions and post them.)

Anyways, my overall point being, people SHOULD want maximum compatibility, and if that's your thing, DVD-R and DVD-RW are your only choice. (Afterall, you want your movies and whatnot to play in your nice Playstation 2, right? DVD-R plays in a PS2. DVD+RW (and DVD-RW) do NOT.)

You know, you have this obsession with the DVD Forum that I find most unhealthy, and somehow, you keep getting modded up for it.

For DVD video, DVD+RW has pretty much exactly the same success rate as DVD-RW at being read in standard DVD players, and it handles data much better to boot. (Did you actually read the review, or did you just come here to troll the DVD+RW standards folks?) If it can be played in as many DVD players as DVD-RW, have data read by most DVD-ROMs, read DVD discs, read DVD-R discs, even read DVD-RW discs, it can bloody well put "DVD" as part of its name.

it doesnt look like they paid much attention to bios settings, they said that they were stuck running the sis745 chipset at 2.5 cas latency. The sis chipsets come set at 2.5 default.. but you can change the setting in the bios depending on what kind of ram you put in.

Did you read the article or just skip to the conclusion? I quote from the middle of page 4:

To keep things fair, we tested with the memory timings set as aggressively as possible on each motherboard, so long as the system was stable. Because we were using very high quality memory, using aggressive memory timings generally wasn't a problem. The one exception was the SiS 745, which simply refused to POST if we set the CAS latency to 2, regardless of whether the memory was running at 266MHz or 333MHz. We tried it with several different DDR333 DIMMs, and the ECS 745 board wouldn't POST at CAS 2 with any of them, even with the memory clock set to DDR266. So in the case of the 745 chipset, we had to test at CAS 2.5.

Something that caught my attention in one of the photographs with this article is the funny squiggly PCB lines at the lower left in this image. Any hardware people who can enlighten me as to the function of these squiggly lines? Is this a timing device or some design artifact?

and then they let ATI and Matrox catch up later

My ATI Radeon 8500 get better results than my brother's gf3 does on benchmarks and when playing tribes 2. I don't care that it was released a few months later.

And read this

And 3D API's don't provide functionality. 3D Card manufacturers do. D3D can invent any sort of wonderful function they like but if there aren't cards to support it then it is useless. AFAIK nvidia and other card manufacturers are still committed to providing opengl support. Go to nvidia.com and you can read The NVIDIA DetonatorTM XP Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) delivers new performance optimizations and features in both DirectX® and OpenGL®

Tech Report article

Just a MacGamer short blurb

Actually, according to this, it sounds like the problem is that the http server doesn't obey the other rules you set, i.e. to share or not share certain file types, bandwidth limits, number of upload limits, etc.

I would speculate that the people who posted that are idiots. The guy who had Zone Alarm Pro must have clicked OK when it asked if Morpheus could act as a server, and yet he is shocked that he is able to access it as a client, "penetrating" Zone Alarm Pro.

Since HTTP is the normal method used by Morpheus for file transfers, it is doubtful that the restrictions Morpheus imposes on outgoing connections do not apply just because you use a different HTTP client. I have in fact tested myself and determined that it does not share files you don't choose to share, that it respects limits on both bandwidth and number of uploads, and that such transfers are listed under Uploads on the Morpheus server like any other outgoing transfer.

In short, this is the normal method Morpheus uses for peer-to-peer connections, not an exploit.

As far as being able to access any file on your hard drive, I haven't found anything about that. This also appears to be fairly old news.

Just missed submitting the story myself.

This finding would appear to be a new development since The Register's recent report suggesting Morpheus "is free of malicious code."

Caution of another possible security hole in this software was mentioned by
The Tech Report precisely 6 months ago today (give or take a time zone or two).

Looks like this will keep us on our toes for a while.

Just missed submitting the story myself.

This finding would appear to be a new development since The Register's recent report suggesting Morpheus "is free of malicious code."

Caution of another possible security hole in this software was mentioned by
The Tech Report precisely 6 months ago today (give or take a time zone or two).

Looks like this will keep us on our toes for a while.

• http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2001q3/shuttle- av40r/index.x?pg=4
  
• http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q4/011008 /sis645-05.html

look at post #11 ...heh, couldn't have said it better my self.

Considering how well they run thier site and the relatively steady hits, the last /. ing was a "learning experience" ... I think "Damage" put it.

Well, TR dudes, BOHICA (bend over here it comes again...). {In a nice way, of course}

As always, good review... now if only I could get my account there fixed...tired of being an Anonymous Gerbil...sigh.

.

First thing is, heatsinks are much larger today and probably have a much greater risk of falling off. Not to say that risk in itself is very high. Furthermore, the fact is that Intel does offer this kind of protection now and AMD does not. It's simply one area where the Intel chip beats the AMD, and makes it (to me) seem of higher quality.

I believe that recent AMD chips do indeed have thermal overload protection, though it does require the involvement of the motherboard (I haven't looked into it, but it could be that Intel is just the same. Anyone know for sure?). Nice feature, sure, but to call it a quality issue just seems silly : If they put a titanium case around the processor to allow it to survive 4000G impacts, would that be a quality issue or a unnecessary gimmick?

There are two reasons I'm using an Intel chip and motherboard: Stability, and RDRAM. I know everybody hates it, but some of the things I use are memory intensive and DDR RAM just does not compare.

Totally agree. Dual-channel RDRAM is expensive, but very fast. That solution scales too, doesn't it? (i.e. technically can't they easily make quad-channel, octuple-channel, etc.).

While many companies focus upon optimising for benchmarks, most simply optimise the driver paths for the specific cases that those benchmarks use. Any other app that uses similar settings can gain performance from that work. But ATI have made their optimisations dependant upon the name of the app, so no other apps can benefit from their work. While a Quake3 player might not mind, Q3 isn't as widely played today as it once was, and that same player might be less pleased when the card fails to perform to the same standard on any other of their games.

But what makes this particular "optimisation" underhanded is that it's not better or more tuned code, it trades off quality. Have a look here to see the mess that it makes of textures!

Now, if players wanted to see blurry textures in exchange for more performance, they'd simply lower the texture quality slider in the Quake3 game. ATI's drivers do this for them; they're forcing the mipmaps two levels down - a 16x reduction in texture detail - to get the extra speed. And this isn't optional. You can't turn it off, short of using a hex editor.

Particularly, a reviewer running the standard Quake3 High Quality benchmark will never notice the difference (as the frames run by way too fast). There's no extra sliders in the driver, no other indications or switches, and of course no notification in the driver documentation. All the reviewer sees is higher framerates, because the drivers are, quite literally, cheating. They're giving low-texture numbers on the high-texture setting.

I for one applaud ATI's renewed efforts to improve their drivers (and I still plan to buy an 8500DV alongside my existing QuadroDCC), but I feel ATI really have attempted to subvert the benchmark process, and shot themselves in the foot. The strong implication is that, even though their hardware is fine, they don't feel they can compete with nVidia's driver team so they have to resort to methods like these.

Very unwise - they've lost a lot of the support they had as the underdog to nVidia, through these tactics.

a) There's no way to turn them off, except by hex-editing the app. They happen automatically, and without the player (or reviewer) even realising, especially in the high-speed benchmark mode.

b) This is not just any old game, not even a particularly heavily played game these days. Its major importance is as the #1 benchmark used by gaming sites.

The conclusion is inescapable. This "optimisation" was not made for players, it was made to subvert benchmarks, pure & simple.

And if you claim to prefer a higher image quality, take a look at what ATI has actually done to the visual quality of the game!

"Quack3" (i.e. without the "optimisations") runs nowhere near the speed of a Ti500, and looks almost as good. Not better.

"Quake3" (with the "optimisations") texture quality looks like shit, pure & simple. These screenshots show very clearly what a mess the "tradeoff" is making. It's forcing everything two mipmap levels down, into a blurry nightmare. And it still doesn't beat a Ti500, though it's quite a bit closer.

Developers (Carmack included) have repeatedly hailed nVidia's drivers as the best in the consumer industry, and ATI's drivers as in serious need of work. You are apparently not in good company with your opinions. I'm very glad to see that ATI are working hard to change that, but tricks like these hurt their cause far more than they can afford at the moment.

AMD Zone gives this summary at the end of its review: "No architectural or marketing changes with this release ... expect the previous CPUs to decline in price ... expect a bit higher performance and power consumption."

Anandtech agrees, saying the chip will not offer any significant extra performance over the 1800+, so early adopters need not sweat too much about being left behind. The site believes that AMD is currently the performance leader on desktop processors.

VIAHardware.com reckons users could be just as well off picking up the 1800+ at 1.53GHz and simply overclocking it to 1.6GHz. Users already owning a high-speed XP chip are better off waiting for the next upgrade on the platform to significantly increase performance.

Tech Report has some extensive benchmarking, putting the 1900+ slightly ahead of Intel's P4 2.0GHz in most of them, while SimHQ.com gets very excited about the new chip.

Amdmb.com also has a piece showing the expected five to six per cent performance increase.

Tech Report has some extensive testing of 1900+ on a KT266A platform versus P4 2GHz.

Tech Report has some extensive testing of 1900+ on a KT266A platform versus P4 2GHz.

Here. Here. Here.

There's also a review of it at Tech Report, right here.

There's also a review of it at Tech Report, right here.

Why, did it happen to be Photoshop 6.0? I wonder why? Why don't they benchmark the mac with anything other than PS, ever, ever, ever, ever? How could anyone question the validity of an application that has always been primarily a mac application? Who could dare question the absolute paragon of integrity, Apple Computer? They merely dispell myths and educate us, why, they don't even have a marketing department, just educators to let us in on the 'truth.'

A guy writes a propaganda chart, saying an L3 cache is four times as important as a floppy drive, and other dubious, yet totally subjective claims. He says, "If you don't like my results, come up with your own chart. YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY."

Then, some other guy writes a piece saying how wrong he feels this post is.

Then some third guy (Hemos) posts the 'story' to ./ and they put it up saying that the 'some guy' is flaming the outrageous claims of Apple.

The only thing newsworthy about this article is that /. actually thinks someone flaming Apple is newsworthy, and the utter lack of investigation, in thinking the referenced piece is a flame against Apple, and not some other guy's homegrown opinion.

Get a grip. There's plenty of cloning stories to post about before we let drivel like this make it to the top of the page.

The 1.4 ghz athlon has been out for a couple months now... the 1.1 ghz athlon has been out for at least 10 months.

Here is a june 6 pcworld review where an amd 1.4-GHz system is "the fastest system yet tested by PCWorld.com" beating out 5 systems based on the 1.7 ghz p4.

Here is a tech report review of an amd 1.33 vs intel 1.7 where they conclude: "Intel's new entry, the 1.7GHz Pentium 4, performs about like a 1.2GHz Athlon in most situations."

You cant get duel processing power from a pentium 4 like you can with an athlon.

In case you don't know what Jackson Technology is, here's an article over at Tech-report. However, is appears that Intel has sold their soul to Lucifer. Ah well, let 'em join the ranks of other companies to have done the same. :-) http://www.tech-report.com/onearticle.x/1947

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing

(The original Tech Report article is here, and has some more interesting tech data.)

Bottom line, they are going to try to get you any way they can.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Somehow, I manage to keep my overclocked K7-1050 at a relatively cool 42C, but I have the feeling that it could vaporise an ice cube in five seconds if I were to remove the heatsink.

(end comment) */ }

The Tech Report have written up a complete article about intel's new P4 1.7ghz. They stack it up to 4 other CPU's, most notably the athlon 1.33ghz ddr, using an intensive set of benchmarks. It's interesting that intel dominates in the quake3 benchmarks, but trails in most of the others. I wonder how these puppies will overclock?

The Tech Report have written up a complete article about intel's new P4 1.7ghz. They stack it up to 4 other CPU's, most notably the athlon 1.33ghz ddr, using an intensive set of benchmarks. It's interesting that intel dominates in the quake3 benchmarks, but trails in most of the others. I wonder how these puppies will overclock?

First off, I read a good portion of the reviews that I found linked from Blue's News:
Source Magazine
Target PC
Hardware Unlimited
Tech Report
Gamer's Depot

What's the upshot? That even with each processor's "ideal" system (DDR on the Athlon, RAMBUS on the P4)-- well, the P4 kicks ass at Quake 3: Team Arena. I mean, it's really really good at Quake 3. So good, in fact, that-- well, you won't be running anything else, I hope?

Because in almost every other app, the cheaper Athlon 1.2 equals or outperforms the P4. That even includes apps such as POVRay that did some early optimizations for the P4's extended instructions. I recommend reading the Tech Report's overview if you're interested in that; they have more details on exactly which instructions were used, and the current state of Intel's compilers for the chip.

Keep in mind, of course, that the compilers are still a bit beta-ish-- sometimes they actually make the programs run slower. But they never appeared to actually make it faster than an Athlon 1.2.

Debate what you will about future extensibility, and so on-- but unless you're going to be playing a whole lot of Quake, if you're looking for a new system you should grab one of those cheap Athlon CPU/Motherboard combos selling for $300 at Fry's.

Nice and small, but plenty powerful, and extremely well-built -- of course you'd have to add a monitor...

---

The hardocp article doesn't fully address overall system architecture. Although the article was interesting in is broad coverage of the memory latency/bandwidth bottleneck, I am warry of articles that don't use entire systems architectures in their performance reviews.

This review http://www.tech-report.com/reviews/2000q3/kenwood7 2x/ found significant problems with the quality of the Kenwood's Direct Audio Extraction. They were particularly a problem for a less than new disk which may not be an issue for the person asking the question.

BTW, "128MB" on a V5 6000 is no better than 32 on a GeForce 2 due to the multiprocessor design. But the GF2 can have up to 128MB, which would be like a V5 with 512MB on-board. heh.

------

I often wish I had a degree in psychology, then I could go around saying, "I'm a psychologist, obey me" like these types do.

I wonder how long it will be before I see them on Sally Jesse Raphael (is that still on TV, I remember they used to have the anti-D&D fanatics on there during the 80's), touting there new book, Columbine: Why video games were the cause..

I'm always happy when someone who knows about video or computer games can attack the integrity of the anti-gamer people by pointing out that the anti-gamer people never bother to do any investigation into the subject they are studying, video and computer games, before making their sweeping condemnations.

That such disparate games as Myst and Castle Wolfenstein were judged to be so very similar to one another calls the selection process into serious question, as well. -- quote from, BFG vs. Ph.D.: Examining a study on video game violence by Andy Brown

I was about to make a post with lots of resposnes to the recently published article on video game violence before actually reading the response that was posted here. That guy says everything I was going to, however, and a little more, so I just wanted to tell everybody that if you intend to enter debate about the violence in video games topic you should really read both the original journal article and this guy's response (I recommend skimming the actual article).

The most important point from this guy's article is that a correlational study is not a causational study...it's not even close. Correlational studies are what are done to feel out the territory, not to make any conclusions. In fact, any rational person would expect these peoples' correlational study to turn out as it did...not because video games cause violence but because violent personalities are probably more inclined to play violent video games. Which would take all responsibility for this violence off of the video games' shoulders.

One note, however. The guy in the article also criticizes the authors for sensationalizing the issue, but I think this is a slightly less valid point. He cites the fact that in college most of the studies he read were dry and tame, and this article is different in the amount of sensationalizing of the topic. I've read journal articles that are this fervent before, though...it doesn't stem from poor authoring, it just stems from the issue being new. When issues in psychology are new and important, emotions tend to run a little higher as people get all worked up about who's right and all that...just my $.02

• The Tech Report
• Ars Technica
• AnandTech
• HardOCP

The other sites are www.cnet.com and www.sysopt.com if you wondered. :)

Watch for AMD to beat this by 50MHz or so pretty soon...

800 Mhz Athlons are already out. I'm not familiar with the exact details but suffice to say that the K7 was designed to scale much more easily in clock speed than Intel's parts. Coupled with the good luck AMD is having with yields it looks like Intel is going to be playing catchup for the foreseeable future.

And don't forget that and the same clockspeed Athlon delivers up to 40% more floating point power, making this the world's finest Quake II engine. Then there are the 3D now instructions. :-)