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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?
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?
