I do this so you don't have to... adventures in building a SFF-like Antec Aria system (Shuttle SB81P sucks!)

[Stark]

Ok, the old original post is down at the bottom... here's the new system:

Antec ARIA MATX case $99 (looks like a sweet case, just a little bigger than the XPC cases)
Asus P5GD1-VM MATX MB $105
plus:
Sapphire Theatrix 550pro capture card oem $90.79

The original system:
BRBN PC SHUTTLE SB81P RETAIL (Qty=1,Price=$374.00) (the P designates Piece of crap in the Shuttle family)
VGA LEADTEK GF PX6600GT-128MB RT (Qty=1,Price=$208.50) (two of these blew up in the above system)
CPU P4/3 GHz 800M LGA775 530 RET (Qty=1,Price=$179.00) (in new system, now running with Intel retail fan)
DDR 512MB PC3200 BL6464Z402 CRU (Qty=2,Price=$218.00) (in new system, runs great)
HD 160GB|WD1600SD RAID Edition% (Qty=2,Price=$230.00)
KB MS|NATURAL KEYBRD ELITE PS2 REV% (Qty=1,Price=$18.00) (not using)
KB&MS LOGITECH DINOVO KEYB/MOUSE RT (Qty=1,Price=$149.00) (sweet, sweet, keyboard/mouse)
DVD+/-RW 16x+|NEC ND-3500A BK (Qty=1,Price=$62.99) (in new system, able to use with front bezel in Aria case)
S/W MS|WINDOWS MEDIA CENTER 2005 % (Qty=1,Price=$131.00) (installed 4 times already, only activated on first install, hopefully I won't have to call again when I activate if this system proves stable over the next week or so)
WRLSS-G NET ADAPTER|LINKSYS WUSB54G (Qty=1,Price=$49.99) (works great)
IR REMOTE CONTROL BATAM MC GENERIC% (Qty=1,Price=$29.00) (not bad)

the current video card is the ATI x700 PCIe 256MB (don't remember price)

and now for the pics...

(if the links below don't work, you can check them all out HERE)

handy strap to remove from box

front view

side by side comparison

a little shorter, a little fatter

3 little loud fans vs 1 big loud fan

remove the top, push the side toward the front to unlatch

open it up (I installed the mobo and capture card when the system arrived earlier in the day)

the drive bay swings up for removal

the guts

nekked... w/ sexy sapphire tv capture

directions for using card reader in Linux (slightly more advanced than shuttle for system building dummies)

nice little bonus slot fan... this wouldn't even fit in the shuttle (i tried one)

time to strip the shuttle... notice the HD layout

put these away for later

how am i going to put 3 HDs and a DVD-RW in this?

DVD-RW installed (bezel went back on later)

the HD bays are lined with vibration absorbing strips (nice)

rubber grommeted vibration absorbing drive screws and a clue where the other drives go

Drive 1 installed (later changed this drive with SATA which is current C: (system) drive

second drive installed (flat screws required)

hanging drive! (this was later switched with the IDE drive)

with 3 drives, the bay almost looks like some klingon warship

tower 'o' drives

emptied out shuttle (nice easy wiring)

moving everything over

nice stock intel fan installed (pretty easy install with cool snap on locking mechanism)

squeeeze it in there (no cables yet)

a hint at the wiring madness to come

plugging in front USB ports and SATA drives

left side wiring

rear wire cluster (left) are for front audio port

right side wire madness

two SATA drives, heatsink/fan, PS and a whole lotta wires

left side with drives installed

wasn't this a windows 98 plus theme... "inside your computer"?

IDE HD installed on left side (ATA133 raid plug on this side)

This system took a few hours to put together (mainly because of the wiring). It was sort of like a puzzle. I feel much more satisfied with the process than with the Shuttle... which is a very well designed system, but one that a trained monkey could put together. This is not a noob build!

If I was starting from scratch and didn't care about case size, I would probably go with the Asus P5GD2 Deluxe board with DDR2, but since I wanted a small system, I think I got just about the best sytem out there.

BTW, I noticed Newegg is now selling the SB81Piece of crap as an OEM barebones for $100 less than they used to. Can you say "clearing out stock"?

Now I'm gonna go play on the thing and try to give it a workout. 3DMark scores down below.

 

[Thor86]

Nice setup. Now cut out those fan grills and see your temps drop. BTW, what kinds of temps (idle/fl) are you getting with that Shuttle?

 

[threats]

thats awesome thanks for showing that.

 

[SKC]

great post!

 

[CaMSpoon]

WHAT where u get the DiNovo for 179! thats canadian pricing isnt it?
theres no way since the cordless version is that price not bluetooth.

OMG those are american pricing... wow thats one expensive computer.

 

[IlllI]

why two keyboards though?

 

[Damn Dirty Ape]

How about a full frontal view?

 

[Stark]

Originally posted by: Thor86
Nice setup. Now cut out those fan grills and see your temps drop. BTW, what kinds of temps (idle/fl) are you getting with that Shuttle?

i've been too busy/lazy to check temps.

The dinovo keyboard and mouse are sweet. i'm running video and audio through the wall of the office to the living room tv/ht for the mce functions and they work great sitting on the couch with the reciever in the next room.

two keyboards are because my wife likes ergo keyboards. The OEM one I got didn't come with a USB plug, so I had to swap it with the "elite" version.

I took some pics of it sitting on my desk but haven't had a chance to upload yet. I'll try to remember tonight.

So far it's been a great system. Watching divx encoded .avis of TV shows looks really good on a 36" Toshiba CRT TV through the S-video output on the nvidia card (equal to watching the shows on DVD).

The only issue i've seen so far is a lockup/reboot in 3dmark 05 (something during the ogre fight killed it). I've been too busy watching TV on it and reorganizing my music collection to play any games. I'm also still waiting for the tuner card from mwave (everyone seems to be backordered). I also had to order a 4-port USB2.0 hub for all the peripherals.

So much nicer than the massive box it replaced!

 

[Stark]

new pics:
At home in action
Rockin' out with SRV

temps are around 50C when poking around the BIOS. Heat is definately a concern for the system. The lockup problem running 3DMark was heat, because when I went into the bios and cranked the fans up to 100% it blew through the benchmark with no problems. It's pretty loud with the fans blowing that hard, so I'm playing around with the CPU Temp Tag setting to get the smart-fan setting to start spinning up faster at a lower temp to compensate when things really start heating up.

The results were pretty good...

Benchmark Settings
Program Version 3DMark03 Revision 5 Build 0
Resolution 1024x768@32 bit
Texture Filtering Optimal
Pixel Processing / Antialiasing None
Post Processing false
Vertex Shaders Optimal

Main Test Results
3DMark Score 7831 3DMarks
CPU Score 811 CPUMarks

I like it!

 

[Damn Dirty Ape]

thanks for the pics and further info.


Is that by chance that new steel frame/case model that shuttle was speaking of in their recent interview on www.silentpcreview.com?

 

[jevans64]

PVR? Yep. It does not look like my Hauppauge PVR 350 will fit in there without doing something to the power supply wires. I'd be afraid to have the converter block next to those wires.

 

[Stark]

it's not this shuttle case. that one might be ok if all you wanted was a quiet mce box (it only has one expansion pci slot, no agp or pci-e), but mine needed to be able to play HL2 and other new games well.

 

[Stark]

update!!

the computer is great, but I got sick of waiting for the PVR-500 capture card and got the PVR150MCE instead. (FYI, PCalchemy.com has awesome turnaround on orders) Well, as I feared when I put the system together, there is not much room in this case for a PCI-E card (with fan) plus a tuner card right next to the power supply and cables.

pic

I tried anyways, and was able to get through the tuner setup portion of MCE before disaster struck. I switched to fulls-screen TV viewing and all was good for about 30 seconds, then the screen when green and the system locked hard.

I rebooted the system and got this:

look at all the pretty pixels

plain grey background... not bad for handheld shot in the dark

in HL2 demo

not good.

i pulled the PCI tuner card and nothing changed. I puleed the 6600GT card and used the Intel onboard video and all was well.

then I put the PCI tuner card back in to see if it still worked. Initially when I launced MY TV in MCE I got only a green screen. I removed the card in device manager, had windows re-detect it and it worked for about 10 seconds and the picture froze up (the pc was fine when I exited MCE, just the TV signal was frozen).

So I'm thinking maybe powersupply next to tv tuner card right next to video card might not be the best solution. An external USB2.0 device is probably a wiser choice. Unfortunately, I don't think MCE supports any of ones availabe. That's not that big a deal as TV viewing is not the primary purpose of the machine, but it's still a bit of a letdown.

The onboard Intel graphics are fine for general use, but there is no DVI connection and new games are out of the question. I ran PCMark on it for kicks and it scored about the same as a GF 4200 I had awhile back.

Now I have a replacement 6600GT on its way from newegg (for some reason it's coming from NJ when the original shipped from CA), and UPS picked up the tuner card for return today. If all goes well, I may be able to try the HL2 demo on Thursday night.

 

[Stark]

the new card arrived today and lasted about 20 minutes before blowing up.

so either Leadtek PCIe cards suck or my shuttle barebones has a problem. <sigh>

 

[karna]

Dang. I was reading this happy story and decided to scroll to the bottom, and suddenly stuff is blowing up?? What the.. so I read back a bit and see what the problem was.. Strange, maybe the slot is hosed.

Good luck.

 

[Stark]

i haven't given up hope yet!

i called newegg and got an RMA for the second card and have an ATI X700Pro 256MB on the way.
I even opted for the extended warranty and an antec cyclone case fan to go in the PCI slot (just in case).
Update: the cyclone slot fan is huge and didn't fit in the slot. I already sent it back.

the onboard video plays rise of nations just fine, but there's no s-video out for the TV

here are some pics of the jacked card vs onboard
6600GT
onboard intel

 

[Stark]

I should be recieving the x700 card today (it's on the fedex truck).

I think I may have figured out what killed the cards... in a FAQ on the shuttle site, there's this:

Q7 How can I deliver better voltage to high-end PCI-E graphics cards?
A7
Shuttle has engineered an innovative method for delivering more power to PCI-E cards. Using the FDD power cable that comes with the product, connect this cable to the ATX3(red) connector on the motherboard. This provides more voltage to the PCI-E slot and in turn will improve the performance of your graphics card.

http://www.shuttle.com/share/f...ttle%20XPC%20SB81P.htm
for some reason I missed this when i checked out the same page before. I was expecting the extra ATX3 plug to supply power directly TO the card (like some of the old Voodoo cards that required a power supply connector plugged into them). I didn't think that I'd be plugging a power supply connector into the motherboard to supply more power to the slot itself.

This little factoid isn't even in the manual that comes with the system. I guess that may explain why the cards only blew up while running ultra-intensive processes like full screen tv or 3DMark. It didn't need the extra juice for running a web browser, but it did for 100FPS benchmarks.

The CPU seems to be fine... i ran a burn-in program all night and no problems were encountered. For some reason Rise of Nations crashed on me several times yesterday (BSOD reboot the computer crashes), but I'm not sure if this is HW or if there's some conflicting SW causing a crash.

I coulda bought a new flat screen imac or 4 imac minis... but that would have been too easy!

 

[Stark]

well, the x700 is in, everything is hooked up and running and it works like a champ!!

when running benchmarks, the x700 fan ramps up to keep the card cool. the Leadtek card never did.

BM numbers with AV and all sorts of crap running in system tray:

3DMark05: 2963
3DMark03: 7070

The best I got with the 6600GT in 03 was 7831 and that was right after installing windows with nothing else on the system. I'll take the loss in speed for increased stability.

just for comparison
Onboard Intel: 1369 (3DMark03)

 

[Pciber]

My system in the sig... no problems whatsoever building it, or power issues. I'm considering removing the wifi card and putting in a tv tuner, just for shits and giggles.

 

[Stark]

ok, this system is *officially* a PITA POS and is going back.

here's the bios screen
that doesn't happen every time, but too often to be tolerated.

Degraded RAID
this started happening yesterday... one of the drive falls out of the raid array and has to be rebuilt... had to do it twice.
rebuilding

If I had been running Raid0, I'd be doing a Robert Blake and hire a hitman to kill everyone at Shuttle right now

finally, here's the log of
BSOD system crashes
that have happened over the past few weeks.

Screw it. I got an RMA from Newegg. I'll get another one and try again. This one is broke[sic]!

 

[Stark]

for anyone considering an SB81p or 6600GT, you may want to check out this thread over at sfftech.

 

[Digikid2]

Stark. The reason why you are have to rebuild your RAID array is that you INSIST on using shitty, crappy MAXTOR DRIVES. Maxtor is the worst hard drive out there. Get a REAL hard drive like Seagate or Samsung instead.

 

[Stark]

Originally posted by: Digikid2
Stark. The reason why you are have to rebuild your RAID array is that you INSIST on using shitty, crappy MAXTOR DRIVES. Maxtor is the worst hard drive out there. Get a REAL hard drive like Seagate or Samsung instead.

ya, ya... funny guy

the raid array is actually 2 of these:
HD 160GB|WD1600SD RAID Edition% (Qty=2,Price=$230.00)
I figured two WD's specifically designed for RAID applications would be a good choice.

I don't keep anything vital on the Maxtor, just BT download junk.

 

[Antoneo]

Good luck fellow shuttler.

 

[Stark]

ok, i'm currently typing on the new replacement system. I must admit, building up the system is pretty quick and painless. Some smart people designed this thing.

so far, so good. The ATX3 plug is NOT connected on the mobo (as the X700 card supposedly shouldn't need it).

Knock on wood, we'll see how it goes!

BTW, I found another thread with people having similar problems with this barebones.
check it out