Shuttle SN68PTG5 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 SN68PTG5 - BIOS Version: Release
  
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
  
• 2GB DDR2 Memory at 750MHz, 5-5-5-16-21-2T Timing
  
• Nvidia GeForce 7050PV IGP
  
• Seagate 7200.9 200GB SATA Hard Drive
  
• Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
  
• Nvidia Forceware 169.25 WHQL
  
  Other Systems
  
• MSI K9A2 CF – AMD 790X
  
• Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6 – AMD 790FX
  
• Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe – Nvidia nForce 590 SLI

We were unable to use our normal Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT or even an AMD Radeon HD 3850 with the system because it simply doesn't have enough power to accompany an AMD Athlon X2 6000+ with a measly 250W PSU. Our tests were done using the IGP which was automatically assigned 128MB of main memory.

The main memory was left at SDP settings, rather than the performance settings we usually apply - this is because the BIOS simply didn't like anything we tried – even more liberal timings like 4-4-4-12 didn’t want to work, never mind our usual 3-3-3-9 timings. As such, the system comes out quite a bit slower because of the significantly reduced memory timings at 5-5-5-16.