Shuttle SX38P2-Pro

[racolvin]

Just bought a new shuttle box and equipped it as follows:

Shuttle SX38P2-Pro (obviously :) )
Intel Q6600 2.4, OC'd to 2.99 for now (Arctic Silver 5 for the thermal grease)
8GB RAM
Lite-On DVD burner w/Lightscribe (SATA connected)
WD 160GB (SATAII) for the C:\ drive
WD 500GB (SATAII) for the D:\ drive
VisionTek Radeon 4850 card with a Zalman VF1000 cooler retrofitted to it
Vista Ultimate 64-bit

I must say that it all came together very nicely. The case was fine to work in but a bit tight as expected. Using SATA for everything makes it easier tho. It's very quiet at idle and it doesn't ratchet up much in volume at load (at least not yet).

Adding the VF1000 cooler to the 4850 was easy but it's an awfully tight fit in the Shuttle case. The case is supposedly set up to do CrossFire but getting two cards in that thing would be a real PITA so I can't say I recommend it. With the 4850/4870 cards though I don't know that CrossFire is really necessary unless you want to try Crysis at full settings :)

Anyway, just thought I'd post with a thumbs up for this little barebones box :)

[VooDooAddict]

I'm running a very similar setup. But with CrossfireX on 2x4850s I was bored on 4th of July after the party I was going to got canceled. Being near a Fry's I went a little nuts.

No point fibbing ... It gets hot. Best way to keep it cool is to crank all the fans to full in the Bios. Leaving the fans at medium is better for noise, but If I'm doing heavy gaming ... full fans is best.

Went from an 8800GTS 512MB to the crossfire setup. And honestly I'm a little disappointed in the performance gain. The biggest difference I see is with AntiAliasing. The 8800GTS was quite playable with 4x AA in most games, but I'd still turn off AA for Multi-player sessions of CoD4 and Supreme Commander. Now I leave it on all the time.

[racolvin]

I bet that baby does get hot :)

I play all my games in 1920x1200, so I've never bothered to turn AA on for anything, so I dunno about it's performance issues.

Once I got my Oblivion working on it, I've been quite happy. Speedfan rarely has to ratchet up the fan speeds to the point of them being a distraction, so I can't complain too much about that. I may still replace those stock fans with some Noctua units, just to see if I can get them to drop a few db in noise level. Other than the occasional noise level, I'm pleased with my purchase :) I may someday want to upgrade the CPU but I doubt it. By the time the useful life of the 6600 is done, it'll be time for a new box again :)