![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , June 14, 2005
- Author:
- Morry Teitelman
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Shuttle ST20G5
The ST20G5 is Shuttle’s latest Athlon64-based bare bones system that uses the ATI Radeon Xpress chipset. How well does this system stack up to the rest of the Athlon64 crowd in terms of stability and performance?
BIOS
Shuttle chose to design the ST20G5’s BIOS around a Phoenix AwardBIOS template. The BIOS version we used in testing was version ft20s00w.
The Advanced BIOS Features menu contains various system initialization settings, including those related to boot device access order. With a USB 2.0 hard drive type device attached and properly detected at system startup, the device shows as a valid hard drive under the Hard Disk Boot Priority submenu. The priority of specific items in this menu can be changed using either the + and – keys or the PageUp and PageDown keys.
The Integrated Peripherals menu contains a number of submenus for configuring the system-integrated devices. The South Configuration submenu contains numerous options and submenus for configuring the Southbridge integrated devices. The state of the USB 2.0 ports, as well as the SATA ports and integrated RAID controller, are settable via options within the top-level submenu.
The South Bridge Feature submenu contains configuration options for tweaking the performance of the Southbridge chipset itself including the P2P pre-fetch queue depth and maximum pre-fetch DW setting. Performance mode can also be enabled for the PCI-Express bus to optimize its working state. The On-Chip IDE Setting submenu contains options for configuring the board IDE-based ports.
The PnP/PCI Configuration menu allows for user configuration of system IRQ and interrupt settings. System interrupts can be customized for system selection, or manually set to values ranging from 3 to 15. With the Resources Controlled By option set to Manual, the IRQ Resources submenu becomes accessible. The individual IRQ pool assignments are configured using this submenu.
The PC Health Status menu contains real-time statistics on all BIOS monitored system voltages, temperatures, and fan speeds. The Advanced CPU Fan Setting option controls the I.C.E. cooling unit fan speed, with options for automated system control, or manual control. The Smart Fan setting allows for temperature controlled automatic setting of the fan speed, with the fan running full speed when the CPU temperature exceeds 80C. The Noise Control options allow for static fan speed setting. The Temp Control options set a target CPU temperature that the system attempts to match by dynamically adjusting the fan speed.