Usage

The Shuttle XPC SN85G4 is a wonderful system to construct and use. If you're not familiar with the Athlon 64 processor - don't worry. Putting this machine together is no different than any other system out there. This is by far the fastest machine that we've ever scrounged up here at WhiningDog - though of course there are faster machines out on the market now. I must say - once you worked with an Athlon 64 processor - it's very hard to want to go back to anything else. The CPU is fast - relatively cheap when compared against an Intel Pentium 4 processor, and is future proofed for 64 bit Operating Systems when they come out in full force. This is not to say that the Pentium 4 Processor performed badly. There were some tests that showed the Pentium 4 processor to perform well WHEN Hyper Threading is enabled. Some will argue that this is not an apples to apples comparison if the HT is enabled since the OS is fooled into thinking that there are two processors. However, in our opinion - this is just another technology that differentiates one processor from another so why not enable it to see what it can do to system performance. As you saw, HT doesn't always mean better system performance - plus clock for clock, AMD's Athlon 64 performs far more efficiently than the long pipelined Pentium 4 Northwood.

The SN85G4 is a stable system that runs reliably day and night. We threw all sorts of applications and games against the machine and there were no problems at all. In the near future we will evaluate the evaluation version of the 64 bit version of Windows XP for the Athlon 64 processor.

The only major hiccup came during Windows XP installations. The very first time you install Windows XP on a clean new hard drive with no preexisting partitions, Windows XP mistakenly names the hard drive's main partition as something other than C:. The C, D and other drive letters afterwards are taken up by the 6 in 1 card reader. If you find this as annoying as I did - don't worry - there is a fix. You will need to install Windows XP once again - wiping out the partition that now exists on the hard drive. Once Windows XP comes up, you'll notice that the main partition is now drive C. It's a strange anomaly but nothing too hard to overcome. EDITORS NOTE: A reader pointed out that this is a known installation problem with Windows XP. It's still a "hiccup" during our setup which is why it is listed here but we will remove it from the negative list that we originally created since this is more a Microsoft problem than a Shuttle issue.

The new case design of the SN85G4 is certainly flashy with the mirror front finish. Shuttle bundles a cloth to wipe down the surface in case you get smudges or dirt on it. I personally prefer the older case design but this new design has its appeal as well. If you've been visiting Shuttle's website, you'll notice that Shuttle hasn't stopped here with case designs - there are a number of other designs planned for the coming year.

The case is very well insulated from the internal system noise resulting from the system and power supply fan. There is some low ambient noise from the system but nothing overwhelming at all. Speaking of the power supply - we ran into a small problem with the fit of the power supply coupled with an IDE hard drive. The placement of the IDE connector on our Western Digital hard drive caused us headaches since the IDE cable ran right up against the inside wall of the power supply. You may or may not run into this problem depending on the manufacturer of the IDE hard drive. Serial ATA drive users won't run into this problem at all.

We've been using this machine for nearly two weeks now and there hasn't been a single problem with it at all. There have been some who have had issues with the network interface on the box but we've yet to see it here at WhiningDog. Those who want a gaming box will surely not be disappointed with the performance of the system. Sure - it would have been nice to have an integrated graphics solution on this box but if you're going to build a powerhouse machine using an AMD Athlon 64 then you might as well invest in a solid (if not incredible) graphics card.

Keep in mind that you can not use dual slot graphics cards such as high end nVidia cards since the AGP slot is the othermost slot on the SN85G4.

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