Shuttle SP35P2 Pro XPC

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 torture test on all cores and expanding to a looping 3DMark06. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

• Shuttle SP35P2 - BIOS SP35S10O
  
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.67GHz
  
• 2GB DDR2 800MHz at 3-3-3-9-2T timing
  
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT
  
• Seagate 7200.10 250GB SATA Hard Drive
  
• Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
  
• Nvidia Forceware 169.25 WHQL

Unfortunately we believed Shuttle and expected the machine to take a dual height Nvidia 7900 GTX to compare it to previous Intel P35 motherboards. However, unfortunately it doesn't.

We've updated the system with an Nvidia 8800 GT - the fastest single slot card available, but this also means we are without directly comparative numbers for other systems. However, in the some respects you can't really compare an SFF to a full ATX motherboard - the two markets are different, although you shouldn't also need to compromise performance because it's a smaller system.

We used the latest WHQL certified Nvidia Vista drivers and Intel infs, and the board readily accepted enhanced memory timings of 3-3-3-9 at 2.3V. Due to the lack of Command Rate option it also defaulted to 2T. The Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT was left at default clock speeds and we still tested the system in a couple of games at a medium-high resolution to give an idea of its capability.