Shuttle XPC Prima P2 4800X System Review

Test Setup

I was a little disappointed in the system’s overclocking capabilities. I was not expecting a lot of head room on the QX9770 but I could not even get it to boot at 4 GHz without boosting the CPU’s voltage. To get it to the highest stable overclocked FSB speed of 407 MHz, I had to apply 1.3875 V to the CPU and this put the CPU right at the temperature limit, even with the fans at their highest settings.

The disappointment continued with the E8400. It could run easily at 3.6 GHz but trying to overclock it above that made it unstable without extra voltage added to the CPU. This is contrasted by the P35-based system, pushing the same E8400 with no voltage changes at all to 4 GHz by just boosting the FSB speed to 445 MHz. Finally, the E7200 was able to easily reach 3.6 GHz with a 9x multiplier at a 400 MHz FSB speed (which surprised me, but again, any FSB speed over 400 MHz made the system unstable, even with a lower multiplier). So the common thread here is that the FSB is limited to just over 400 MHz. You might be able to do better than this, but not without seriously tweaking the voltages.

Performance

The SX48P2 is an X48-based system with a QX9770 CPU and one of the fastest video cards on the market, so we would expect it to tear through the benchmarks. What we look for are weaknesses that would prevent this system from meeting our expectations.

Gaming Benchmarks

These include some game play from each level of the single-player games. Sometimes a few frames during a cut scene or when a game was loading were captured, which did not affect the overall results. However, this is why we have some exceedingly low and high numbers.

The two main games tested were Crysis and Call of Duty 4. These proved to be the more demanding games. The truth is that the Unreal 3 engine did not push this system enough to make more benchmarking worthwhile. Multiple levels of the game were played for all of the titles used for the tests and at least 30 minutes of game play were captured for each group of benchmarking results.

System configurations

Shuttle Prima SX48P2 Deluxe system

X38-based system

P35-based system