Specifications

Specifications

As previously mentioned, the Bravado 2310 begins life as a Shuttle SN41G2 XPC. For the uninitiated, the XPC is Shuttle’s small form-factor “cube” chassis that comes equipped with a motherboard and power supply to fit the small box. Further, it also features Shuttle’s proprietary I.C.E. cooling technology, utilizing heat pipes to transfer heat from the processor to an array of aluminum fins. An 80mm fan blows past the array, through an exhaust hole on the back of the system. Needless to say, the setup doesn’t emanate much noise. At the heart of the SN41G2 lies the FN41 nForce2 motherboard. Shuttle is utilizing the IGP and MCP-T components of the chipset, giving the system dual-output GeForce4 MX-class graphics, IEEE 1394, USB 2.0, optical output, 10/100 Ethernet, TV-out and six-channel analog audio output. It’s a mouthful, I know, but it goes to show how much functionality has been integrated into an aluminum box measuring 300mm long, 200mm wide, and 185mm high.

Space efficiency is clearly imperative in the SN41G2. There isn’t room for a conventional power supply, so Shuttle uses a 200W unit from Enhance Electronics. Amazingly, it is robust enough to power an Athlon XP 3000+, AMD’s current processing flagship. The chip, based on the newly released “Barton” core, hosts 512KB of Level 2 cache memory, operates at 2.17GHz and runs on a 333MHz front side bus. For the most part, the 3000+ is capable enough to compete with Intel’s 3.06GHz Pentium 4. If you don’t require quite that much performance, the Bravado 2310 can be configured with the 2800, 2700 or 2600+ processors for significantly lower prices.

Of course, one of nForce2’s primary features is its dual-channel DDR memory support. Capable of supplying up to 6.4GB per second of bandwidth at 400MHz, the effectively 128-bit bus is best utilized by the integrated GeForce4 MX graphics. If an external AGP 8x card populates the board’s slot, system memory delivers even better performance clocked at 333MHz (synchronous to the processor) with aggressive timings. ABS includes two, 256MB modules of Corsair XMS3200 DDR RAM, which is of the utmost quality, though we feel Corsair’s low-latency modules would have been even better. Nevertheless, ABS ships the Bravado system preconfigured to run very aggressive timings and the appropriate 333MHz memory bus.

Tiny system

ATI graphics inside

The Bravado 2310 would make for an excellent home PC equipped solely with the parts we’ve already talked about. Simply, the system has power to spare. ABS wants to appeal to the gaming community, though. And so, the onboard video capabilities are disabled in favor of a RADEON 9700 Pro card with 128MB of DDR memory that populates the SN41G2’s AGP 8x slot. The result is greatly enhanced gaming performance and the ability to connect a digital flat-panel monitor to the 9700’s DVI port. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that the nForce2’s dual outputs can work in conjunction with the RADEON 9700 Pro, but it should be of little consequence, as the 9700 also supports two display outputs.