Battle of the Minis: Soltek vs. Shuttle

Benchmarks With Different Systems

We used different benchmarks to obtain a complete and balanced picture of the performance of all three PCs. The benchmark results provide a clear overview of ATX motherboards fitted with identical hardware and the same chipset as the Shuttle barebone system.

We measure OpenGL performance with two different Quake 3 tests; Direct3D performance in the DirectX package is measured with 3D Mark 2001 Pro (based on DirectX 8). The various MPEG encoding benchmarks form a comprehensive test scenario. We encode a 178 MB WAV file to "MPEG-1 Layer 3 format" using the mp3 Maker Platinum. The MPEG-2 test is a new one. Here we use the Main Concept encoder to convert a DV format file (1.2 GB) into MPEG-2 format (audio and video). Zipping of files is highly relevant to day-to-day computing, and we have started to do this with Winrar 3.1. We use the Sysmark 2002 benchmark to measure Office performance. And last but not least, we haven't left out the SiSoft Sandra 2003 and the well-known PC Mark 2002.