Product: Shuttle SV24 Manufacturer: Shuttle Price: $250 Author: Brian Lee Page: 5

Since our website is primarily focused on running a webserver from home, I decided that the best CPU to test the SV24 would be the VIA C3 @ 933 MHz.  The VIA C3 looks amazingly similar to the original Cyrix CPU's and this is partially due to the fact that they are related.  However, unlike the old Cyrix CPU's, this new C3 CPU runs very cool at speeds up the 933 MHz with only a passive heatsink.  This is not to say that the Intel Celeron or PIII are not good inside the SV24, but those chips run much hotter and are more expensive.  The low power consumption and relatively good performance of the C3 make it a good choice in home webservers and other applications where speed is not the primary objective, but reliability, quietness, and low temps are.

The SV24 comes with a low profile heatsink and fan by Arkua and it is about half the height of a normal HSF that we are accustomed to seeing.  The reason for such a small HSF is because the hard drive bay is right above the CPU socket as you can see in the pictures below.  The heatsink is supposed to be able to handle up to a 1 GHz P3, but since I do not have one on hand, I cannot verify that this is the case.  However, the fan is capable of moving quite a bit of air.  This leads to the problem of noise.  The fan on this heatsink is rather noisy.  It emits a high pitched whine, much like the power supply fan.  These two fans, combined with the noisy exhaust fan add up to one noisy little computer.

The SV24 is supposed to be very quite and designed for applications where noise is a major issue.  However, in the stock form, the noise coming from the 3 fans are definitely noticeable.  It is louder than most non overclocked computers such as the Dell's in my office.  This is because the larger computers have bigger fans which can move the same amount of air at lower rpm's and thus generate less noise.

Fortunately, the VIA C3 933 we used in the SV24 comes with a passive heatsink from Cooler Master. (model number: DP5-H6056-Q1).  The VIA C3 runs extremely cool and only requires this modestly sized passive heatsink without a fan.  This means one less fan in the case which is nice.

The passive heatsink comes with a thermal pad which I promptly scrapped off an replaced with some Radio Shack white silicon paste.  Throughout my testing with the C3 CPU, the heatsink would get fairly warm, but not nearly as warm as the AMD Athlon with heatsink AND fan.  The SV24 never crashed while using this CPU, so I guess the passive heatsink is doing its job just fine.

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