Processor cooling: going passive-aggressive
Shuttle's attention to detail with the SV24 extends to the CPU cooler. Shuttle includes a very nice low-profile Socket 370 cooler with a low-profile fan. And, for the first time I've seen in a long while, this one ships out stock without a pad of cooling goo that I would otherwise have to scrape off with a razor blade and nail polish remover. Instead, Shuttle includes a little packet of white thermal grease. I couldn't believe my eyes, but it's true. Look:

The SV24 comes with a low-profile cooler and—surprise!—real thermal compound

This cooling setup was sufficient to keep a 900MHz Celeron running fine with the SV24's aluminum shell intact. However, the low-profile fan generates more noise than I would like. Fortunately, I had a solution for that problem: VIA's C3 "Ezra" processor (full review pending). This 800MHz CPU seems tailor-made for boxes like the SV24. It's a relatively small chip, and it's manufactured on a 0.13-micron process, so it draws very little power and runs exceptionally cool. I was just able to squeeze in the C3's entirely passive heatsink—no fan required—and run the SV24 in stealth mode.

With VIA's low-power C3 processor onboard, passive cooling is sufficient

Now, the C3 ain't gonna win any performance awards, even compared to the 900MHz Celeron I put into the SV24 at first. I've done enough testing with the C3 to establish that fact. However, the 800MHz C3 powers the SV24 just fine for desktop applications. The processor's floating-point unit is pretty weak, but with 3DNow!, the C3 can even play back MPEG4 videos without any trouble—not a bad choice if you want to cut out fan noise.

Performance?
Those of you expecting to me deliver a traditional TR-style array of benchmarks graphs here are going to be disappointed. If you want to see how a similarly configured system performs, I suggest you check out my recent value processors round-up, which is intended to answer just that question. The SV24 isn't about all-out performance, and frankly, I can't think of a similarly tiny system with which to make a fair comparison.

SV24 performance is obviously going to vary quite a bit depending on the components that populate it. Sadly, the FV24 doesn't support Intel's new Tualatin processors, including the Pentium III 1.2GHz and Celeron 1.2GHz chips. The Tualatins require a newer chipset revision.

Shuttle's manual claims the SV24 supports bus speeds of up to 150MHz, configurable from a BIOS menu. My system came with a BIOS dated 8/21/2001, and it didn't support any such thing. I flashed to the latest BIOS available on Shuttle's site, the STVA revision posted on 10/4/2001, and it was the same 8/21/2001 BIOS rev. I couldn't change the bus speed via the BIOS before or after flashing it.

As I've already noted, the biggest performance killer with the SV24 is the integrated S3 Savage4 graphics. The graphics core shares memory with the rest of the system, and you can choose the size of the RAM partition allocated to the graphics chip in a BIOS menu. The choices are 8, 16, or 32MB. I chose to give the graphics chip 32MB in my test box, since I had a couple of 256MB DIMMs installed. With 32MB allocated to graphics, the system reported 480MB of main memory available in Windows. Even with 32MB of graphics memory, though, the Savage4 is dog slow. You'll have to slap in a PCI graphics card in order to get good 3D performance out of the SV24. You'd be doing yourself a favor to get away from the Savage4 drivers, anyhow.

All of that said, I can sum up the SV24's performance for you in a few lines. For general use in web surfing, e-mail, office productivity apps, and for most types of multimedia playback, the SV24 will work just fine. With a 1GHz Pentium III, this box ought to perform respectably for multimedia content creation and even some workstation-class apps, but don't expect breakneck speed. For gaming, the SV24 without an add-in PCI graphics card is not good. It will run Quake III, but it's gotta run ugly to run faster than a slide show. Serious Sam crashes on start-up.