Verdict: RELAUNCHED SHUTTLE FINDS MORE SPACE
Having the most well known name in a particular market has its downsides - everyone targets you as the one to beat and your products' failings will be compared with other manufacturers' new achievements. So we couldn't help pointing out in a previous SFF bare bones Labs test that Shuttle's classic XPCs had been overtaken in terms of expansion potential and design by newer SFFs from Biostar and AOpen.
However, one area in which Shuttle still remains ahead of the pack is integrating the latest chipsets. The company was the first to design an Intel 875P SFF and support Athlon 64. It's now supplied us with our first taste of Intel's just-released LGA775 CPU in an SFF chassis. The more modest 915G chipset is used rather than 925X, but this still incorporates goodies such as support for PCI Express, integrated graphics, and on-board 7.1 audio.
The new chipset is accompanied by a radically revamped chassis. The classic G chassis has been replaced by the taller P-series model. The internals have been entirely reorganised, with the CPU at the front, expansion card slots switched to the right side and the DIMM sockets easily accessible on the left. The esoteric ICE cooling system, which used to handle CPU cooling, has been replaced by a much more conventional heatpipe-based HSF design served by two temperature-controlled fans (one 80mm and one 70mm). Two additional 60mm fans provide system cooling and there's an 80mm fan in the PSU.
Despite all these fans, the SB81P is pretty quiet in normal operation. This is because Shuttle has upgraded its Smart Fan system so that there are a lot more speed levels. The two CPU fans have eight speed levels, ranging from 30 to 100 per cent. This equates to 800 to 3,800rpm for the 70mm fan, and 1,000 to 4,200rpm for the 80mm fan. The twin 60mm fans operate as a pair, and have the same eight levels, which equate to 1,600 to 3,900rpm. However, setting all the fans to 100 per cent will have you lurking by the air conditioning system for a bit of peace and quiet.
One of our criticisms of XPCs in the past has been how difficult they are to build compared with many more modern SFFs. If you didn't install components in the right order in an old XPC you'd later have to remove some of them in order to access others. Overall, the SB81P is an improvement, although Shuttle's tool-less implementation is somewhat overcomplicated.
Another weakness of the classic XPC design was the lack of space, with room for just a single optical drive, one hard disk, and a floppy drive or media card reader. However, with the P chassis, the SB81P can accommodate three hard disk drives and an optical drive, or two hard disk drives, an optical and a floppy.
However, the method of installation for all these drives is far from straightforward. Instead of simple screw fittings and removable bays, a bag containing no less than eight mounting brackets is supplied - two for a floppy, two for an optical, and two sets of two for mounting S-ATA hard disks to the top of the case. If you're opting for just a single hard disk, this can be simply clipped onto the bottom of the removable drive cage, although we didn't find it easy to install. The optical drive brackets were awkward to fit as well, and sliding the drive in required a worrying amount of force.
The optical drive bay is hidden behind a solidly built flip-down flap, and its mechanism worked well with our Samsung test drive. However, we needed to press the eject button quite forcefully. The front fascia sports two other flaps, one hiding the front-accessible 3.5in bay, and the other the front audio, USB and FireWire ports.
The SB81P's FB81 motherboard is bang up to date for I/O, too. Shuttle clearly expects you to go for S-ATA, perhaps even S-ATA RAID using the ICH6R Southbridge. A full complement of four S-ATA ports is integrated, so you could go entirely serial if you use a S-ATA optical drive, such as Plextor's PX-712SA. There's only one EIDE channel, although a cable with two headers is pre-installed. A single PCI slot is available, along with a 16x PCI-E slot for a graphics card, so there's no AGP slot.
As with all other XPCs, the blanking plates are secured using two external screws, both of which need to be removed before you can add an expansion card. The PCI-E slot is the furthest out, but as it's on the right, a dual-width graphics card will be possible unless you've also fitted a PCI card. There are few upgrades you'll need anyway, except for a PVR card perhaps. Gigabit Ethernet is integrated, and as it runs on the PCI-E bus it will operate at full wire speed, and not be hobbled by the bandwidth limitations of the PCI bus. Intel's Azalia 7.1 surround audio is also integrated and implemented by a Realtek ALC880 chip. It's not the best surround combination around, but should be sufficient for most home theatre or gaming needs.
The rear panel houses a useful selection of ports. There's a single serial port for legacy devices, plus D-SUB, FireWire, two USB 2, and LAN. Audio connections include optical S/PDIF audio in/out, coaxial S/PDIF audio out, line-in, and a plethora of outputs for the 7.1 surround sound. There's a CMOS clear button on the rear as well. This could come in handy, as we found the need to call upon it when we tried out the SB81P's overclocking potential.
On paper, the options are extensive for raising clocks and tweaking voltages. The FSB can be varied from 100 to 355MHz, and the PCI-E / PCI clock can be locked or synced with the FSB. The CPU core voltage can be changed between 0.8250 and 1.5875V, and the DDR voltage set to 2.7, 2.8 or 2.9V. Even the chipset voltage can be varied between 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8V. Amusingly, the LED brightness can be dimmed as well.
PERFORMANCE
The results from our new Media Benchmarks certainly weren't disappointing. And although the SB81P couldn't give any of our Dream PCs in this month's Labs test (see p66) a run for their money, it's no slouch either. Using the integrated graphics, our Unreal II test returned a modest 21.3fps. But that's without any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, as neither is supported.
Overclocking proved to be slightly disappointing, although with the new LGA775 CPUs so hot off the press we can't yet be sure if it's a thermal or chipset limitation. The maximum setting at which we managed to run the SB81P stably was an FSB of 214MHz (effectively 856MHz), raising the CPU frequency to 3.6GHz. Even that required pumping the CPU voltage up to maximum, and the chipset to 1.8V. We also found we had to manually turn the fans up to 100 per cent to maintain the system's stability, as the SmartFan control didn't kick in automatically. The fans clearly do their job well, though, as setting them to full speed dropped the CPU temperature by ten degrees. However, the noise was scarcely worth the performance gain - a speed increase of 6 per cent in our Media Benchmarks, and less than 5 per cent extra fps in games. Gratifyingly, we found the fans didn't ramp up noticeably during our benchmarks at standard clocks though.
CONCLUSION
Compared with the 875P-based Shuttle SB75G2's legendary overclocking capabilities, the SB81P is a fairly modest machine. It's clearly not an overclocker's dream box, and it's not as easy to build as the tool-less design would imply. However, it looks good, and the much better-endowed chassis makes it considerably more flexible than its predecessors. Shuttle hasn't quite taken back its old crown, but there's clearly life in the old dog yet.
