Building a quiet Shuttle any advice?

JezHancock · 24 Aug 2006 at 23:20

Hi this is my first post so bare with me.

I would like to build a reasonably quiet Shuttle or similar SFF for my living room.
I have a budget of a max. £1000 for the computer itself. The peripherals and screen will be bought separately from this budget.

I was proposing to go for these componants:- Shuttle XPC SN25P, AMD Althlon 64 X2 4400+, Corsair 1GB DDR XMS3200C2PT TwinX Cas2, HIS Ati Radeon X1900XT ICEQ, Samsung Spinpoint P SP2504C 250GB, Pioneer DVR-111BK 16x16 DVD+-RW, Askasa SATA-2 45cm Silver data cable, Askasa "Y" power splitter, Askasa PCI express 6 pin to 4 pin power cable adapter and a copy of Windows XP Home Edition. All of which I priced up today from Ocuk to £910.16.

I would be paring this with either a Belinea 20.1" or Dell UltraSharp 2007WFP 20" widescreen LCD monitor hence the need for a fairly powerful Graphics card.

Any suggestions, advice and possible alternatives would be greatfully received.

nolimit · 24 Aug 2006 at 23:53

The quietest shuttle i had was the SN95G but obivously you want PCI-e. The P models are little bit more louder then SN95G. but not that loud.

1st of all the HIS X1900XT won't fit, I've been reading all day today about the P models and it seem like you will need to change the VGA cooler to zalman 1 slot coolers for nice and quiet. Not sure how it would compare against the HIS cooler in terms of noise and disposing heat.

Compared to my X-Qpack barebone, my recently purchased SD31P (which is similar to SN25P) is little bit louder while using its onboard vga.

Then again you can always change the fans to silent x or noiseblocker to keep the noise level down.

Massive Attack · 25 Aug 2006 at 00:59

TBH m8 you are better off building a MATX system in either an x-qpack which i highly reccomend or a silverstone sugo,they are only slightly bigger than shuttles and have better cooling and expandability

gEd · 31 Aug 2006 at 23:39

Massive Attack said:
TBH m8 you are better off building a MATX system in either an x-qpack which i highly reccomend or a silverstone sugo,they are only slightly bigger than shuttles and have better cooling and expandability

I have to say Jez, both of these cases look pretty good. Sorry, I wasn;t aware of them when we spoke about your planned pc build.

There aren't too many A64 m-atx mobo's to choose from. Abit and Asus both have one although (like virtually all m-atx mobo's), they come with onboard graphics, which is a bit of a waste when you don;t need it but this is not the end of the world.

If you for AM2 route, there are also boards from Gigabyte and MSI and if you can be temped down the conroe route (E6300?), there is the ASUS P5B -VM.

I have no idea whether these boards are any good or not (especially compared the the shuttle equivalents).

JezHancock · 13 Jan 2007 at 15:25

Ok I've been tempted down the route of building a Apevia (Aspire) X-Qpack.
This will mean I can go for a Conroe CPU using a Asus P5B-VM micro-ATX Mother Board.
I'd like to know if a HIS Ati Radeon X1950 Pro ICE-Q 512MB will fit inside? I realise that I would lose the use of one PCI slot.
I would likely use a Sharkoon 120mm silent Eagle 1000 to replace the case fan. This would hopefully cut down noise as the LED 120mm case fan supplied with the X-qpack is a little noisy.
I would also like to know if there is a low profile HSF that is cooler and quieter than the Intel reference design? I understand that there is not enough headroom for the likes of the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7.
Any thoughts & advice?
thanks

Kezmo · 13 Jan 2007 at 16:37

Something i spec'd the other day in another thread, might be worth looking at, killer system for just over £900

Intel Core 2 DUO E6400 "LGA775 Allendale" 2.13GHz (1066FSB) - Retail £129.99
(£152.74)
Asrock Conroe945G-DVI (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £43.99
(£51.69)
G.Skill 2GB DDR2 NR PC2-6400 (2x1GB) CAS5 Dual Channel Kit (F2-6400 £144.99
(£170.36)
BFG GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £247.99
(£291.39)
Liteon DVD-8900 16x DVD±RW/RAM (Black) - OEM £15.99
(£18.79)
Western Digital Caviar SE16 320GB 3200KS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM £51.99
(£61.09)
Enermax Liberty 500W ELT500AWT ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU £59.99
(£70.49)
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic 32-Bit Edition DVD - OEM - 1Pk (66G-00576) £54.99
(£64.61)
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound (3.5g) £5.99
(£7.04)
Thermaltake Blue Orb II Socket 939/754/775) CPU Cooler (CL-P0257) £15.95
(£18.74)

Total : £918.63

No case there, id throw it all in a sugo

Minstadave · 13 Jan 2007 at 17:03

nolimit said:
1st of all the HIS X1900XT won't fit, I've been reading all day today about the P models and it seem like you will need to change the VGA cooler to zalman 1 slot coolers for nice and quiet. Not sure how it would compare against the HIS cooler in terms of noise and disposing heat.

I've got the SN25P and the best way to decent GFX without too much noise is the 7900GTO/GTX (I have the GTO in mine) or an 8800GTS (which I found out fits today).

Thx X1800XT/X1900XT is just too noisey with the stock cooler, and most aftermarket coolers don't fit. I'm not sure about the X1950s though.

Goksly · 14 Jan 2007 at 14:13

Go a X1800XT in my SN25P and its nice and quiet. I think thats mainly down to the fact it doesnt spin up during game play - even though I'm running 1280 with heaps of AA/AF.

Supercow · 14 Jan 2007 at 15:08

Got a X1950 in my SD37P2, also very quiet

Minstadave · 14 Jan 2007 at 15:10

Goksly said:
Go a X1800XT in my SN25P and its nice and quiet. I think thats mainly down to the fact it doesnt spin up during game play - even though I'm running 1280 with heaps of AA/AF.

Really? Mine made a real racket, drove me mad until I upgraded.

meansizzler · 18 Jan 2007 at 02:01

For a MATX Conroe Mobo go for the Asus P5LD-VM DH Revision 2.0, had the non conroe version and the board ran stable, Intel CPU+ Intel Chipset = Stable Platform..., AMD CPU + Nvidia Nforce 430 Chipset = Unstable platform, so that really limits you to MATX AMD boards...