TechLounge

Wow as soon as we opened the box we were met by the superior Shuttle standards that we have become use to over the past 2/3 years. Ok we’ve gone for the best we can get here:

NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6800 GT PCI-E 256MB DDR3
Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 570J w/ HT Technology 3.8GHz 800MHz FSB 1MB
1GB Dual Channel Low-Latency DDR PC-3200 at 400MHz - 2 x 512MB
400GB Serial ATA 7,200 RPM w/8MB Cache
16x Dual Layer DVD±R/W Drive w/Light Scribe Technology

The build quality that these XPC’s come with from the factory is amazing. The case quality is on par with Coolermaster and Li Lian. All the cables come plugged in on the board and routed in the case ready for you to plug your drives in. (Obviously ours was ready built). Straight away we ran Mem-test 86 over a weekend to check for memory errors and no surprise there we didn’t have any. We then installed Windows XP Pro. The longest process was the formatting of the 400GB HDD, but we did 3 partitions all on a normal format, C: 130GB, D:170GB and finally E:170GB. When this was done the windows installation zipped through in about 30 minutes.

Once we had put the XPC service pack and all the latest drivers on it was done. We were away before we knew it and playing Far Cry on full settings. You would say as we have just forked out a big wad of cash for the xpc you’d expect it to perform well but not as well as this, it didn’t miss a beat.

Now for the true test PCmark05, we thought it would hold its own on sum tests but might be a bit middle of the road on harder testing. We stepped into 9500’s with AA (anti aliasing) off and running 1024×768 but that’s good. With AA on full we were getting 8500’s. But as we know the PCmark range is always stressful even on the best Sli rigs running the latest 64- bit chips. But this is one single 6800GT not your 7800GTX. So its not the worlds latest cutting edge technology but its certainly not ready to abandon yet.

Light Scribe Technology in the DVD drive is amazing but we feel it could just be a phase like the multi CD-rom drive that was normal drive but you stored 5 CD’s in it at once.
It looks amazing on our bench here at Techlounge, but would your normal work mate notice or a friend that comes round to your house to use the net?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 3:35 pm and is filed under Desktops, Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.