Shuttles - are they worth the money?

Durzel

Durzel

Durzel

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I've had an Shuttle SK41G for a good few years now and whilst it's still running fine the poor Athlon XP 2400 CPU is struggling to keep up with modern demands - for example I can download a whole ISO from Usenet and it'll finish downloading a good 30 mins before it's finished decoding the RAR files!

I've got a pretty big plasma at home now and I was debating whether or not to stump up the cash for a SG33G5M - but I'm having trouble reconciling spending £350 on what is essentially a case, motherboard and basic PSU. I probably wouldn't be in a position to wire it up to the TV straight away either, so it would have to just be "my download box" for the time being.

All told the basket I have put together (Q6600, 4GB, ancilliaries) comes to just over £700.

I guess I'm looking for reassurance - do people think this is a reasonable amount of money to be spending on an HTPC?
 
q6600 is totally overkill for HTPC use so you could drop the price down quite a bit by swapping that out for a cheaper dual core :) it would also help in terms of heat etc in the shuttle
 
True, but last time I checked the price was roughly equivalent for dual and quad core - at that level anyway.

I was more unusure about whether it was "worth" spending £350 on a barebones Shuttle.
 
100 for an HTPC case
60 for HTPC motherboard
60 for PSU

So your looking for at least 220, and thats for fairly basic components... Although it will have more flex than the shuttle...

Personally, i'd have a shuttle for an HTPC, as long as it does everything you need.. But yes, you do pay extra...
 
I'd pay the extra too.

Shuttle have reasonable customer service, there is a fairly dedicated community on the 'net too. Fair resale values. Decent build quality.
 
I've got a shuttle SG33G5M that I bought from OC over a year ago. Use it as a HTPC (linux, myth, + other stuff). First PC that I've bought that has gone up in value! - keep that in mind, the sg33g5m is fairly old now.
 
I have one of those as my main pc, has a q6600 inside and is used for encoding and games, has an 8800gs inside, not the best but does the job for most games even if you have to turn down the quality a bit. I mainly play counter strike and football manager so it's plenty for my purpose.
Those little power supplies are better than you'd imagine. The ice cooling system I find to be very good, idles at 40degrees with the fan at 30%ish overclocked the q6600 to 3ghz too, nice and quiet, if you choose a cooler cpu then you can make it quieter.
As mentioned before you can't beat for build quality and resale value too
 
Thanks all :)

Ended up buying one - spec as per the first post (Q6600 G0, 4GB RAM, etc). BIOS was showing CPU idling at 61 degrees C in the BIOS until I flashed it to the latest version, now it shows around 51 degrees - not sure if this is normal?

I've been thinking about getting an 8800GT for it but maybe that's a bit too extreme?
 
They are great ... until they break. Replacing the PSU will run you to almost £100, and you can't find replacement motherboards at all.

My SD37P2 motherboard died after about 18 months, so that was £350 down the drain. Gone the Sugo route now and am very happy.
 
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CaseyChaos said:
I have one of those as my main pc, has a q6600 inside and is used for encoding and games, has an 8800gs inside, not the best but does the job for most games even if you have to turn down the quality a bit. I mainly play counter strike and football manager so it's plenty for my purpose.
Those little power supplies are better than you'd imagine. The ice cooling system I find to be very good, idles at 40degrees with the fan at 30%ish overclocked the q6600 to 3ghz too, nice and quiet, if you choose a cooler cpu then you can make it quieter.
As mentioned before you can't beat for build quality and resale value too
Click to expand...
Mind telling me how you've overclocked your Q6600?

I bumped the FSB from 266 to 333 on mine, booted into Linux fine, ran mprime (Linux version of Prime95) with no issues. I could see from looking at /proc/cpuinfo that when idle the CPU frequency was ~1997Mhz going up to 2997Mhz when loaded.

All I changed was the CPU FSB from 266 to 333 - is that all I need to do?
 
I used to be a shuttle man, and really loved it as a second PC for the lounge, but then I wanted to upgrade to allow me to game downstairs, I wanted more HDDs to rip DVDs to, and I fancied a bit of OC'ing, and found that the limit on space and upgrading (particularly the PSU) was too much of a pain in the rear, so changed to a larger case which takes standard PSUs and MATX Mobos.

Currently I've got the antec fusion, and although HUGE, it looks pretty good under the TV
 
i love shuttles but they arnt really worth the money. we buy them because we are retarded and like gadgets. in america they are actually pretty well priced but over here there seems to be a rather high markup beond vat and shipping. find a retailer in america that sends goods marked "gift" ;)

oh and worth mentoning is that shuttle provide abismal support at times i remember when the biggest shuttle community was thriving online and over 6 months it died a death. the thing that really miffed a lot of users was silly little things like incompatabilities with new cpus sn95g5/sn27p for instance with no attempt or interest from shuttle in updating bios once the unit was discontinued unlike many other mobo brands that provide excelent support to people with older kit... personally i cant see me spending upto £400+ on a new high end shuttle.. although i really really want to at times... :S
 
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Same as Zarf, I went the SUGO route, small footprint and standard PSU's will fit in it, any MATX boards will fit, so it can be upgraded easily.
 
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