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Shuttle Zen (ST62K) XPC - P4 BIOS Shuttle selected the Award BIOS for the Zen XPC. We're going to jump right into the meat here. Within the Advanced Chipset Features menu, you find your CPU and memory adjustments. Processor front side bus speeds can be set only to automatic, 100, 133, 166 or 200MHz. No 1Mhz increments here, sorry.
Overclocking options are present. The 'CPU Over Clock by' selection allows you to add anywhere from 1 to 15 extra MHz. Not a lot by most overclocking standards but then again, the Zen XPC isn't specifically built to be in a benchmark rodeo. Memory adjustments are also present ranging from auto to DDR400.
The last shot we have here in our quick run through the BIOS is of the PC Health screen. For the peaceful serenity searchers out there, if the "Smart Fan" aka auto, setting it too loud you can manually adjust things to run from Ultra Low to Full. To be honest there was a difference between auto and Ultra Low... I think. The Zen XPC is one very quiet machine.
Overclocking We mentioned that you can overclock from 1-15MHz. In the screen shot of that particular BIOS screen, you may have noticed a graph of bus speeds at various overclocks on the bottom right. The added MHz are relative increases to a 133MHz bus. Say for instance you choose to select to overclock by 10MHz. This is an additional 10MHz on a 133MHz bus making 143MHz. This is relative and not an actual megahertz for megahertz increase for a 100MHz, 166MHz and 200MHz front side bus system however. For example, that same added 10MHz on 100MHz, 166MHz and 200MHz box would correspond to an increase of 7, 15 and 14MHz respectively. The maximum allowed overclock is '15' which translated to an extra 23MHz on our P4 2.4 C processor which it took in stride.
Performance A lot of thought went into how we were going to show performance with the Zen XPC. Our first thought was to do a head to head comparison as see where the dust settled. We decided that doing the traditional 'drag strip' type testing isn't exactly relevant here. So we are going to split up our testing some. Productivity testing will be head to head while the more game oriented benches will not be. The absence of an AGP slot on Zen XPC rules it out as a track star but not necessarily as a competent LAN box. When you get down to it, can your box run a playable frame rate or not? Your eyes can only track 30 fps, nuff said. Our benchmarking suite today will consist of Business Winstone 2002, Content Creation 2003, SiSoft Sandra 2004 Pro, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. Resolution for the on board graphics seemed to cap us at 1280x1024. Gaming benches will be run at 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024 resolutions. Test Bed
Pg 1 - Introduction
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