I want to build a FAST QUIET Shuttle box, please help?

[HostVisions]

Hi all,

Tired of my noisy desktop and looking to build one of these shuttle boxes. Can anyone help me out?

-Which one to get? I want to stick a 2.8 P4 in it!
-I'd really like to have a SATA drive, but a fast IDE would do, just needs to be quiet!
-How quiet are these things? I really want mine to be almost silent
-Any problems putting an ATI 9600Pro in one of these?

Thanks in advance!

 

[zzzz]

The Shuttle boxes are not that quiet. The power supply fan is noisy. Out of the box, you will find that Dell is much more quiet.
1) the model SB61G2 is good for the 2.8P4
2) Sata compatiblity
3) not silent
4) no problems with 9600 pro that I know of.

 

[HostVisions]

Thanks, placed my order with newegg this morning:

-SB61G2
-ATI 9500Pro (waiting for HL3/D3 and latest cards at that time to spend major cash)
-2 sticks of 512MB Cosair XMS PC3200 (400)
-WD SATA 10,000rpm drive (36gb, 8mb cache)
-Silver AOpen CDRW
-Silver 6-in-1 memory card reader for 3.5" bay
-Artic Silver paste
-overnight shipping!

I'll put it together Monday night and post the results here!

 

[zzzz]

hi, I should have mentioned that though there are no problems with 9600 pro, there are reported problems with 9500/9700 series.
look at this thread..

best for you to sell the ATI card and use the onboard video till you buy the latest video card.

 

[LennyZ]

yeah you need to use a sound card with the 9500/9700 series cards.
unless you have the new revision that fixes the incompatibility.

 

[IgoByte]

I also would not go with a 9500Pro, because of its higher power requirements and heat dissipation. The 9600Pro would be my choice right now, and you can usually overclock them quite a lot.

BTW, the SB61G2 is a good choice. I just built one for a friend about three weeks ago (P4 3.0/800, 1GB RAM, 250GB HDD, Combo Drive, 9600Pro) and I had no complaints and neither does he. It's also more silent than my SN41G2. All in all, the noise level is very much manageable.

 

[ultimatebob]

Just to let ya know, you don't need to buy thermal paste when you buy a Shuttle XPC. They include a package of it in the box.

 

[HostVisions]

Thanks all for your replies. I just got my newegg order this morning (gotta love them!) and will be building this evening.

zzzz/Lenny - yeah I heard about the issues, and picked up another audio card (SB A2) this weekend. I couldn't afford the 9800pro, and didn't want a 9600 in this box. Thanks!

IgoByte - I hear you, but all the review says the 9500p is OCable to 9700p speeds. That's why I went with it (that and every 9600p review I've read says get the 9500p if you can find one.) Keep in mind that I'll be buying a new card for HL2/D3 when they are out (9900p?)

ultimateB - Yep, I know, I just plan to kick this 2.8 up a notch or three so I thought I'd better spring the extra $5 on some good paste.

I'll post some impressions and benchmarks later.

 

[HostVisions]

BTW the install manual has to be among the best I've seen. Nice, lots of step-by-step pics!

 

[Psychosylph]

You're going to absolutely LOVE that machine...

I played with a similar setup (9700 and 2.4C) and it SMOKED!

 

[thraxes]

Installed my brothers new XPC yesterday,

XP2500+ and Radeon 9800... All I can say is wooooohhaaaaa!

 

[HostVisions]

Hi all,

Well, I put my new shuttle box together last night. Mixed impressions so far. Overall I'm happy and still have lots of tweaking to do.

-The system went together easily enough. Not much room in the case to mess around though! Shuttle did a nice job with the case design and extras they throw in the box. The heatsink
thing is crazy!

-Popped in a 2.8C, 1GB of Cosair memory, a WD 36GB 10,000RPM SATA drive w/8MB cache, Aopen CDRW (silver finish to match). I bought a 6-in-1 media card reader (3.5" size, silver to match) from newegg, and it had an internal 5-pin USB cable connector that didn't seem to match anything on the MB. A quick call to Shuttle support (NO WAIT in the middle of the afternoon!) got my answer and I hooked it up.

-Held my breath and fired it up (for some reason that's always the most nervous part of the install for me is that first poweron), and was greeted with the big fan powerup and quick powerdown. The screen came up, all looked good. Made some adjustments in the bios (had to enable the SATA controller to see the hard disk and disable the Floppy drive seek), then booted off to a XP Pro install from CDROM. The chipset heatsink fan was making a racket like it was hitting a cable or something, but a quick check showed nothing was in the way. the rest of the system was reasonably quiet. XP Pro installed very quickly without a hitch. Fastest install of XP I've been through. No problems with devices.

-After boot to the desktop, I powered down and installed the Audigy 2 card, which also went fine except the card was a tight fit.

-Another powerdown and I installed the ATI 9500P card, again, all went well. By this time I was so sick of the darn chipset fan that I just unplugged it. Nice big heatsink on the chip and I'll replace it later. It seem to be vibrating against the heatsink as it ran quiet without it hooked up to the heatsink.

Ran some initial benchmarks, the system scored very well, with disk scores being just higher that a RAID ATA/100 score, but below a 15,000rpm SCSI score. Right where I expected.

I haven't started to OC yet, but that's next!

What I like - it's small, it's fast, and it's cute. Can't wait to mod the case
What I don't like - darn chipset fan, it is a little louder than I expected
Kudos to shuttle for: nice design, great manual, fast motherboard with good OC features, nice packaging of cables and such.

Anyone know what I can do about this chipset heatsink/fan?