Shuttle SD37P2

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 and expanding to IOMeter and an endless loop of Far Cry loop if all is well. 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:

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (operating at 2.93GHz - 11x266); 2x 1GB Corsair XMS2-8500C5 (running at DDR2-800 in dual channel with 3.0-3-3-9 timings); BFGTech GeForce 7900 GTX OC video card (operating at 670/1640MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gbps hard disk drive; OCZ GameXStream 700W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 93.74WHQL.

Motherboards:

• Shuttle SD37P2 (BIOS: 10th November 2006);
  
• DFI Infinity 975X/G (Intel 975X);
  
• Asus P5NSLI (nForce 570 SLI)

We decided to run the Shuttle against the more budget Intel boards we've previously reviewed. Whilst the DFI Infinity 975X/G supports DDR2 800MHz and we tested it previously at 3-4-3-9. The Asus P5NSLI was tested at 4-3-4-11 at 533MHz, despite the fact it supported DDR2 667MHz. The SD37P2 was ran at 3-3-3-9 with 667MHz memory at 2.1V, equating to tighter timings, but slap bang in the middle of standard supported MHz ratings.