Testing Procedure And Peculiarities

We performed different benchmark tests in order to obtain a comprehensive view of how both PC systems perform. To round out the picture, we also ran benchmarks with ATX motherboards outfitted with identical hardware and based on the same chipset as the Shuttle barebones.

OpenGL performance was measured by two different Quake tests; Direct3D performance from the DirectX package was measured by the 3D Mark 2001 (based on DirectX 8). The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks provide a comprehensive testing environment - mp3 Makers Platinium was used to encode a 178 MB WAV file into MPEG-1 Layer 3 format. We only recently introduced the MPEG-2 Encoding test with the Main Concept Encoder, in which a file in DV format (1.2 GB) is converted to MPEG-2 format (audio and video).

We also ran the new Winrar 3.1 archiver to test how well the CPU performs when archiving files, a common application in the computing world. The Sysmark 2002 benchmark was used to determine office performance. And last but not least, we also ran SiSoft Sandra 2003 and the well-known PC Mark 2002.