Shuttle SD11G5

General Performance

Whilst the 6800 GT PCI-Express CPU usage on the SD11G5 is about a single percent higher than the Aopen board, its IGP CPU usage is a single percent lower. Overall the video playback is a few percentages more, on average, for the use of a PCI-Express card in the system. It is worth noting that the 6800 GT doesn't have perfect WMV9 acceleration, so you may find that other PCI-Express video cards will deliver much better performance.

Shuttle drops a dozen or so seconds to the AOpen i915GMm-HFS board we previously looked at in our MP3 encoding test, despite its slightly higher memory bandwidth. Even though the Shuttle SD11G5 only drops a second between IGP and 6800 GT PCI-Express use, the AOpen board is much faster when using 6800 GT PCI-Express, but marginally slower when using the onboard video. It looks like Shuttles use of onboard video has worked out more efficient.

Xvid encoding is marginally faster, by 30 seconds over half an hour of working. This is probably due to the SD11G5s slightly better memory performance than the Aopen i915GMm-HFS board.

Obviously Pentium Ms are not designed for multitasking, unlike their desktop equivalents the Pentium 4/Ds. We will have to wait until next year for dual core Pentium Ms, and the test here shows the Pentium M CPU dies a relatively painful death when told to do two things at once, compared to a desktop chip. It takes a full two minutes more to do the same thing; however the Shuttle is far more efficient than the AOpen Pentium M board in this test.