Product: Shuttle SV24 Manufacturer: Shuttle Price: $250 Author: Brian Lee Page: 4

When you first open up the SV24, the first thing you notice is how close everything is packed together.  Practically every useful inch of the case is taken up.

Here you see the front of the case where the 5.25 and 3.5 inch bays lie.  Right below the 3.5 inch bay is the power supply.  If you are not planning on using the 3.5 inch bay for a floppy drive, you could possibly fit a hard disk in there instead.  However, if you take a look at the picture more carefully, you'll see that the screws that hold the 3.5 inch blank cover are in the way.  Depending on how ingenious you are, you might be able to squeeze a HD in there.

The power supply in this unit is very interesting.  It is located at the front of the case instead of the more typical rear location.  The power supply is rated at 145 watts and although it sounds like not much in comparison to today's 300-400 watt units, it should be more than enough for most applications.  The SV24 is rated to handle up to a p3 1 GHz, so even with a decked out system, 145 watts should be able to power the box.  Part of the reason the wattage is so low is because there simply isn't all that much room for you to add more and more peripherals, unlike regular computers.

The front aluminum bezel has several holes drilled through it which allows air to cool down the power supply.  The power supply has it's own small fan and it is rather noisy.  It's not so much the air turbulence sound, but instead, the fan emits a high pitched squeal and can be heard even with the case cover on.  I found this to be extremely annoying and I tried to fix this problem by using the 7 volt trick.  I'll show you this later in the article.

This is the rear of the case and the single exhaust fan.  The fan grill is a nice addition since this fan is fairly strong and capable of inflicting some damage to your digits if you're not careful.  As such, the fan is fairly loud, both because of the motor whine and the air turbulence.  This fan uses a 3 prong header with RPM monitoring and plugs into the the motherboard near the cpu socket.

Below the fan is the slide out tray for the hard disk.

The FV24 motherboard is based upon the VIA PL133 Chipset.  The North Bridge is the VIA VT8604 and features an integrated S3 Savage 4 2D/3D Graphic Engine.  The S3 Savage 4 never became a real contender in the video card market due to it's lackluster performance and this does not change here.  The video memory is shared main memory which can be specified by the user.  Even at the maximum memory size of 32 megabytes, the Savage 4 performs poorly in 3D games and benchmarks.  Integrated graphics have never been stellar performers and this is no exception.  However, the 2D performance is very decent and suitable for most business applications.  The drivers that came one the CD were very stable and did not show any problems even under high stress from programs like 3DMarks2001.

Speaking of video, the picture quality from the TV out was pretty decent and looked good on my 36 inch Sony Wega television.  However, as I mentioned before, the 3D quality of the Savage video chipset is fairly poor.  If you plan on doing some serious gaming, a new video card in the PCI slot is in order.

The South Bridge is the VIA VT82C686B which gives rise to two ATA/100 channels.

The network interface is provided by a Realtek RTL 8139 10/100 LAN Controller.  The Realtek 8139 isn't known for it's speed, but it is a very capable and inexpensive network controller chip which is probably why it's on this motherboard.  Another good thing about the Realtek 8139 is that most major operating systems already have default drivers for this chipset and automatically recognizes it, which means there are less drivers for you to mess around with.  It's really good to see a network interface on more and more computers considering the growing popularity of home networks and connections to DSL or Cable modems.  It would have been REALLY nice if they would have provided TWO network connectors.  This would not have cost much more and would allow this box to be used as a server/router/NAT box without having to take up the free PCI slot.  This is just me being greedy.

After using the SV24 for a few weeks, I really grew to appreciate the onboard network card.  Even though the Realtek 8139 network chipset performed poorly in our PCI Network Card Roundup, it worked very well here although I didn't run any benchmarks on the network to see if Realtek 8139 was running faster than what I measured in the network roundup article.

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