Shuttle SD31P Small Form Factor XPC

How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered the system BIOS and set each board to their "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults".  The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we hit the Windows Update site and downloaded all of the available updates, with the exception of the ones related to Windows Messenger. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers, and removed Windows Messenger from the system altogether. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, and we setup a 1536MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives and ran all of the tests.

Test System Specifications All Intel All The Time

Preliminary Benchmarks With SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing Starts with SANDRA

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran three of the built-in sub-system tests (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth) that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite of benchmarks.  All of these tests were run with the Shuttle SD31P powered by a Dual Core Intel Pentium D 820 at 2.8GHz CPU with 1GB of Corsair XMS2 DDR2 memory which we compared against similar kinds of systems from SANDRA's database.

SANDRA CPU Arithmetic Benchmark Pentium 4D 820 @ 2.8GHz 1024MB Corsair DDR2 (CL3)

SANDRA CPU Multimedia Benchmark Pentium 4D 820 @ 2.8GHz 1024MB Corsair DDR2 (CL3)

SANDRA Memory Benchmark Pentium 4D 820 @ 2.8GHz 1024MB Corsair DDR2 (CL3)

In both CPU and Memory performance, the SD31P produced scores in SANDRA that were quite similar to what was contained in SANDRA's database.  The CPU performance was slightly off for the Arithmetic module, and then slightly better in Multimedia.  The memory bandwidth scores were also slightly down from SANDRA's list, even when using Corsair DDR2 at CL3 ratings versus unknown RAM at CL5 in SANDRA.  The bandwidth we achieved was second lowest on the list of representative systems, only beating out the older i865PE.