Intel Shelton "ITX" - A Via Eden/EPIA alternative

Intel Shelton "ITX" - A Via alternative

In August of last year there were reports on tech sites about an Intel platform for embedded and low-cost/low-power systems named Shelton and based on a cacheless 1GHz Celeron chip. Initially it was thought to be PIII based, but turned out to be based on the Banias Pentium-M core. That was pretty much all, it got a little notice but nothing much seemed to happen.

Flash-forward to a month or so ago when I(and others) came across a few Ebay sellers with an Intel "ITX" motherboard. This was Shelton, the setup mentioned above. Now, I like weird stuff like engineering samples, limited production stuff, etc, so this was a no brainer purchase. Clicked the Buy-It-Now, waited a few days, and it arrived on my doorstep.

Here's what arrived...

The board, came with the I/O plate and a few stickers for the case with different warnings, pinouts, and a layout of the board-



With a Zippo to show size of CPU heatsink-

Back of board-

Stickers-




i845GV chipset, one PCI, one IDE channel, one DIMM slot, 4 USB, onboard video, sound, and ethernet, no serial or parallel. All your basics, but nothing more. Two big-ass heatsinks on the CPU and NB.

Setup was simple, tossed on a 160GB WD drive, a 256MB of El Cheapo Mushkin, and an old 300 watt PSU. Loaded XP, and started playing around with it.

Here are some CPU-Z screenshots-





And some from Sandra, tried to show comparisons to like-speed CPUs.





And a couple comparison links for PCMark04 and 3DMark2001-
3DMark2001
PCMark04

That's what I've run so far, as well as Seti@Home. The point of Seti@Home was to guage what the effect of having no cache has on a cache-heavy application. Surprisingly, the Shelton does fairly well. Compared to a Pentium-M Dothan 2MB cache@2GHz(OC'd 1.5Ghz@533MHz{quad-pumped 133MHz} effective bus), the cacheless 1GHz(10x400MHz bus{quad pumped 100MHz}) Shelton is about 15-18% slower. Significant, but I expected much worse, especially compared to the cache-giant Dothan core.

Overall, it's a hell of a little board for the price of around $100 with shipping. Easily a much better performer than a Via mini-ITX, but without the same kind of "goodies" on the motherboard. Also runs just as cool, if not cooler. Currently have this in a slim Flex-ATX desktop case made by AOPen. After running 24 hours of Seti@Home, the CPU heatsink was warm to the touch, and that is with ONLY the PSU fan moving any air in the whole system. The northbridge actually runs hotter than the CPU, at least by the heat coming off the heatsinks.

So, comments, questions? Request for different benchmarks?

 

Search for "Intel ITX" on ebay, there are two sellers who regularily have these up for sale. Last I looked, the price was below $100 with shipping. Tempted to get one more, but I don't have a use for this one, yet.

 

Shelton should easily outperform the same speed PIII, and would smack around the same speed Celeron pretty easily. Well, unless the PIII and Celeron are Tualatin-cores, might be closer then. I have the parts here, I might try a comparison when I get some time.

 

I've actually got two P-M desktop systems. One is a 1.5GHz@2HGz on the AOpen i855 board, the other a 1.6GHz@2.13GHz on the DFI board. Great chips, great systems, and built on the cheap. The 1.5GHz box cost under $300 thanks to Newegg refurbs and dumb ebay sellers.

Can't change the CPU on the Shelton, at least not easily. It's soldered directly to the board, would require some excellent skills. The heatsink is actually soldered to the board using 4 stiff little pins, getting that off would pretty much mean a damaged board.

 

Well, anybody want to send me one?

Seriously, anybody who has one and would like to benchmark, I'd love the comparison as well. Going off of the PCMark04 ORB comparisons, the Shelton setup is anywhere from 2.5 to 3 times faster than a Via. Surprisingly, the few Transmeta chips listed on the ORB seem to match up pretty well with Shelton.

 

Actually, I think PCMark on either board with only memory added should make a good basis for comparison. There'd be nothing but the hard drive to really affect the numbers, and unless someone used an older drive, it wouldn't do much.

I'll do a SuperPi run later tonight and post results.

 

I'm working on the overclocking. The clockgen PLL on the board is well capable of it, and the chipset can at least go to 533Mhz(133 quad pump). And if I could get the FSB up, I could also get the memory running faster since the chipset supports DDR333 at 533MHz bus speeds. It's sort of on the back burner for right now, playing with some low power Geode SBCs right now.

 

eBay, quite a few show up there.

 

When I bought it, I had hoped I'd be able to drop it into one of the mini-ITX cases, but it's too big for most of them. The PCI slot is in the #2 position, while the standard mini-ITX boards have their one PCI slot in the #1 spot, so it's about 2cm wider. Ended up buying a low-profile mATX case, which is one of the only "bad" things about this setup. I would have also preferred a few more bells and whistles(one more IDE channel, SATA, firewire, etc), but that would also drive the price up quite a bit.

 

I haven't, but it should work. According to the chipset specs the 845GV supports 2GB using 2 DIMMs, so 1GB should be good.

 

Worked for me with an older S3 card

 

If you can find a compatible ClockGen it should overclock, BUT be aware that the PCI bus will also be heavily overclocked. That means possible issues with onboard sound and video. Not to mention overclocked memory(176MHz@133MHz bus), but that's not as big a concern as long as you run DDR333 or better.