In our original article on the Shuttle SB81P we had some concerns about the cooling efficiency of the system and some of the issues that may be described as secondary effects on chipset and memory. One issue that arose after posting of the article was that the S909 BIOS revision sets a default temperature of 51 centigrades as opposed to the 70 centigrades we stated in our review. The discrepancy stems from the fact that after flashing to the newer BIOS we did NOT clear the CMOS and, therefore, the onset of the Smart Fan was apparently stuck at 70 centigrades and caused the major throttling we found.

Upon request from Shuttle and because it is the right thing to do, we retested the SB81P with the S909 BIOS revision along with a BIOS revision that, at least according to the file name is geared towards the SB83S SFF (flie name FB83S00V.BIN), which flashed without problems to the SB81P, to see how the system performed with either BIOS under default settings. As we were informed by Shuttle, one additional difference between the older version and the S909 BIOS is the faster ramping of the fan speed as soon as the temperature increases above onset threshold. Compared to the original BIOS the fan speed ramps up faster by a factor of 4 x in order to cope with the increased thermal dissipation.