Shuttle XPC slim DH370 mini-PC Review: A Compact Digital Signage Powerhouse
by Ganesh T S on May 6, 2019 8:00 AM ESTDriving Three 4K Displays - There is No Free Lunch
The unique feature of the Shuttle XPC slim DH370 is the ability of the system to drive three simultaneous 4Kp60 displays from the integrated GPU. This is particularly useful for digital signage purposes. However, if one were to purchase the DH370, expecting it to playback three different 4Kp60 video streams on three different 4K monitors, the person is in for some disappointment. In fact, I actually tried playing back three different 4K streams on the three monitors, and ended up with stuttering videos in all three.
In order to study this aspect further, I fired up DXVAChecker's benchmark section and benchmarked each video in our decode / rendering test set for playback at 3840x2160. The first iteration was done with one monitor connected, the second with two, and the final one with three 4Kp60 displays being driven by the iGPU.
Benchmarking the VP9 Profile 2 HDR Stream with DXVA Checker
The best-case playback frame rate obtained for each video in the three different display configurations is presented in the table below.
| Shuttle XPC slim DH370 DXVA Checker Playback (3840x2160) Benchmark Best-case FPS |
|||
| Single Monitor | Dual Monitor | Triple Monitor | |
| 480i60 MPEG2 | 118.2 | 91.9 | 83.3 |
| 576i50 H.264 | 124.1 | 103.4 | 98.4 |
| 720p60 H.264 | 101.5 | 100.4 | 78 |
| 1080i60 MPEG2 | 114.2 | 102.7 | 91.4 |
| 1080i60 H.264 | 104.7 | 92.6 | 82 |
| 1080i60 VC1 | 115.6 | 109.5 | 98.1 |
| 1080p60 H.264 | 108.1 | 86.7 | 82.6 |
| 1080p24 H.264 | 107.8 | 97.3 | 78.8 |
| 4Kp30 H.264 | 91.1 | 82.8 | 75.5 |
| 4Kp60 HEVC | 84.8 | 67.1 | 61.1 |
| 4Kp60 HEVC Main10 | 66.6 | 68.3 | 55.6 |
| 4Kp25 HEVC HDR | 55.5 | 52.9 | 49 |
| 4Kp60 VP9 Profile 2 HDR | 55.3 | 51.2 | 47.2 |
The above numbers indicate that playback with a single monitor is fine for all the codecs (ignoring the VP9.2 video, as DXVAChecker was not able to use the ff-vp9-d3d11va decoder for the benchmarking). However, once more monitors are added to the fray, the ability of the iGPU to decode and play back the video at the required frame rate comes into question.
To be clear, the iGPU does not seem to have the ability to decode three simultaneous 60fps streams for any of the tested codecs irrespective of the resolution - the best case appears to be 124 fps for the 576i H.264 stream in the single monitor mode. That said, decoding three simultaneous 24 fps streams for certain codecs or some legal combination based on the numbers in the above table seems to be possible.
Driving multiple displays from a discrete GPU is relatively simple. The GPU has its own RAM where the frame buffers can reside. The GTX 1650, with its 128-bit memory bus, has a 128GBps memory bandwidth number. Contrast that with the Coffee Lake desktop processors, which, in dual-channel mode, have less than 40GBps available for both the CPU and the GPU together. It is likely that driving three 4Kp60 displays can take up a significant chunk of the available bandwidth, resulting in the performance loss that we see above.
The takeaway is that the Shuttle XPC slim DH370 can drive three 4Kp60 displays simultaneously. However, users must be prepared for some performance loss in this process.
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Guspaz - Wednesday, May 8, 2019 - link
It has to do with the subject of my post. Shuttle sells this as a barebones claiming support for products meeting certain standards. And I’m warning that in the past they have made that claim in a way that is misleading at best and false at worst.Skeptical123 - Wednesday, May 8, 2019 - link
I personal agree with the content of the article in that it's a good box for the use case and price. Except for this one snippet that too many tech reviews have, its good but could be better if it had these expensive rarely used but cool to have features. The reality is this is a custom product for a limited market and regardless of that there is still a lot of competitions in the small form factor pc space around the mid $300 mark. Meaning the company needed to meet a certain price target which I think we can all agree they did at $330. The additional chip required for thunderbolt 3 from intel along costs up to $10s alone. Regardless any additional thunderbolt enclosure would add to the size of the unit which kinda defeats the whole point. And the reality is the people buying these systems know what they're looking for and if they find this product they can defiantly find a similar product that has what they want, say a 10gig Nic integrated in a similar size for a little more $. The company could have chosen to make that product, they did not. That is not a bad thing nor a bad decision.Skeptical123 - Wednesday, May 8, 2019 - link
the quote from the article "Shuttle does have scope for improving the DH370 further - for starters, we would have liked a couple of the USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A ports to be Type-C. A Thunderbolt 3 port would have also been nice to have, given that spare PCIe lanes from the PCH as well as the CPU are available."jiangann - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
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"It is likely that driving three 4Kp60 displays can take up a significant chunk of the available bandwidth, resulting in the performance loss that we see above"Not that significant - 3840*2160 pixels * 4 bytes per pixel * 3 displays * 60fps is 6GByte/sec and the machine supposedly has 40GByte/sec available.
censtry - Thursday, October 15, 2020 - link
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