Shuttles - are they worth the money?

[Durzel]

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?

 

[Durzel]

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.

 

[Durzel]

Thanks, that puts it into perspective really.

 

[Durzel]

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?

 

[Durzel]

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

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?