Sff or a full tower?

young lad

young lad

young lad

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Hey,

As the title says sff or full tower which do you prefer?

And a few questions;

Do all the normal parts fit in there or do you have to go to a special site to get the parts (sff)

How much is it for a good gaming sff as i am about to spend £800ish on a full tower, So which do you recomend and why?

And could some 1 please spec me a sff for around £800 starting with a barebones sytem so mobo already in right.

Cheers for help guys.
 
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id say go with SFF. for one they just look damn cooler :) and when modded, look even better. in the middle of yet another mod with mine, going for a nice black finish this time.

pretty much all components fit in, with the exception of some of the bigger cpu and VGA coolers, though having said that, dual slot vga coolers fit in the P-type shuttles and the solteqs i think.

their just as capable as ATX comps at gaming and everything else. thats pretty much what they are, just ATX been shrunk. you dont loose out on any performance etc
 
Ah i may go with the full tower as its easyer for me to play about with and not have to worry about temps if i try my hand at overclocking.

But cheers for the response
 
thats what i thought id miss, the tinkering etc inside it but TBH, how often do any of us tinker inside our comps unless somethings died or your upgrading etc??? plus its horribly easy to take apart and put back together, as easy as a tower.

also, temps are not a problem. for some reason everyone gets the same idea that SFF = high temps. that aint true at all. my current rig, 3400+ clawhammer idles at 34 degrees. the I.C.E cooler you get with shuttles is a very good heatpipe cooler.

only thing it might be lacking is extreme overclocking, probably wont ever reach 300FSB but should be able to do anythin up to about 250FSB relativly easily

i still say go for the SFF :)
 
So if i was to go for a sff could i add a 120cm fan to the top or the bottom and just add air from the outside and cut a hole in it or could i just cut holes and add some fan guards so got air flow nice and easy?
 
i dont know about the P-type suttles, but the G-type shuttles will fit a 120mm fan inside nicely providing you dont have a pci-card in. if you do, you could always add a 80 to 120mm adapter on the back, and to improove the cooling even more cut the grill out the back to allow for more airflow.

also an 80mm fan should fit inbetween the graphics card (ati mainly cos 6800's+ etc are too long) and front of the chassis to suck air in if you wanted. i used to have this set up in my shuttle. but for simplicity's sake ive just got the stock fan in there only at the min.

if you go on shuttles webby theres loads of info about hte design of the shuttle. the main one being the little holes all the way along the bottom of the outer case. the ICE fan sucks air in through these, which then blows over all the components on the mobo as its at the same height as them, then up and out the ICE at the back of the shuttle.

do a bit of googling and oyu'll see hundreds of pics of mods people have done with them
 
you could easily add a blow hole, plenty of people have these, but i think its uneeded, as all the hot stagnent air gets sucked out the back of the shuttle by the ICE fan
 
would it house everything a normal pc would by normal i mean a midi tower? including say a ati x1800xt ? or would you need to lower the specs?

Could you please spec me a shuttle for £770 and i c which i prefer the specs of as i have a midi tower already speced?

Cheers
 
i have a shuttle SN85G4V3 nForce 3 250 jobby

3400+ Clawhammer
2gb Gskill ZX
74gb Raptor
160gb Maxtor
X800pro VIVO (at XT PE)
X-Mystique Soundcard
LG DVD-RW

pretty much everythin id have in a midi tower and without having to lower any spec.

the X1800XT should work nicely

what do you need? have you got any components you want to reuse??
 
With an SFF you can do anything you can do with a midi-tower, but it is more expensive and there are compromises eg. usually max. 2 optical drives.

There are even SLi shuttles, if you're really into games.
 
@ Original post..

My SFF has;

AMD X2 4800
BFG 7800GTX 512MB OC
2GB RAM
320GB WD hard drive
NEC 4550 DVDrw

and it all runs lovely at 40C :).. so YES, I'd pick it any day over a tower.
 
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