Digital Home Thoughts: Shuttle’s ST62K XPC: Small & Silent

Now let’s look at what this unit supports and what it doesn’t. First, it’s an Intel-compatible box, so that means a Pentium 4 or Celeron in the 478-pin package. It supports 400, 533, and 800 MHz bus speeds, and hyper-threading, so it’s compatible with all current processors (including, I believe, the newer Prescott chips). The chip-set on the motherboard is the ATI R300, which brings with it support for up to two gigabytes of DDR200/266/333/400 RAM with two slots available for use.

Integrated ATI Radeon Video
The integrated video is worth mentioning, because more often than not, integrated video completely sucks in the performance department, even for the most basic of games. The exception to this is the nForce chip-set, which offers up a decently-performing nVidia video GPU. And now we can add a second exception to the list: the R300 chip-set from ATI includes a Radeon 9100 GPU, which certainly isn’t cutting edge, but good enough for most basic gaming at lower resolutions (and superior to any sort of integrated video from Intel). It has 533 MHz of bandwidth and operates at an 8x AGP speed.

What’s even more interesting about the integrated video is the ability of the chip-set to assign between 32 and 128 MB of RAM to the video card. Does this impact 3D video performance? Yes, although not as much as I thought it would. Using 3D Mark 2003, the ST62K spit out 695 3D MARKS when the video RAM was set at 32 MB. When the RAM allocation was set to the maximum of 128 MB, the final score was 785 3D MARKS, a 12.5% improvement. Curious about the impact of the CPU on performance, I overclocked it by 100mhz to 2.9 Ghz, and received a score of 818 3D MARKS, a 15% improvement above the baseline.

By way of comparison, I ran the same 3D Mark test on my Shuttle SB65G2, which was equipped with the same CPU, same RAM, but a Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600 PRO video card. The core chip set is different (Intel 865PE), so this isn't a direct comparison, but the system scored 3401 3D MARKS - quite a leap over the 785 3D MARKS on the ST62K. It seems evident that the integrated Radeon 9100 GPU is fine for light gaming at low resolutions, but not for anything high-resolution. That's unfortunate, because anyone who pairs the ST62K with an LCD monitor will want to play at the native LCD resolution, which will probably be 1024 x 768 or 1280 x 1024, and I think the Radeon 9100 GPU would struggle with that.

The video also includes support for NTSC or PAL S-Video output to a TV set at a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768, and the box includes a small adaptor to convert the S-Video to a composite video signal. Unfortunately, there’s only one VGA output, so those of you addicted to a dual-monitor experience (like myself) are out of luck since there’s no AGP slot. The quality of the video signal will depend on your TV set and other factors, but the Windows interface in default mode is almost illegible on the screen. It’s passable if you set the font and icon sizes to large, but only barely.


Figure 3: The video signal being pumped out to a TV set.


Figure 4: Windows Media Player in full-screen mode.

The most common scenario would be to use the TV as a secondary monitor specifically for video projects (Figure 4 shows a video being played), but I was unable to configure the setup to work as a true dual-monitor mode. I was able to configure the ATI driver to pump the main Windows desktop out to the TV set, but I was unable to configure it to leave the desktop on the computer monitor and use the TV set as a secondary monitor. I’m sure it’s possible, but after spending five minutes mucking around with the display settings, I was unable to get it to work. I’m familiar with dual displays, so I was surprised when I wasn’t able to get it working. If this is, in fact, a hardware limitation – only being able to use one video output at a time - this video out port is completely useless in my opinion. I'm going to assume that it was simply a configuration issue I wasn't able to solve. ;-)