Small Form Factor It Blew Up

My previous rig (and the first one I ever built) went tango uniform earlier this month from unknown causes. I am planning to rebuild with a Shuttle SP35P2 pro, an Intel Q6600, an NVidia 8800 GTS, and 2 Gb of RAM.

What I am looking for is people's experience with Shuttle based systems, and how well they work with high powered video cards.

 

http://www.trustedreviews.com/pcs/review/2007/05/30/Shuttle-SD39P2-Barebone/p1

Saw that when it came in and it was well nice. Benny now uses it as a full time machine at home for his Oblivion antics afaik - he's had an 8800 in it and a Q66 and two Raptors just fine.

 

I'd quite like a shuttle but never got round to it. You should make sure you keep all your cables tidy though as you could build up a lot of heat in such a small space so good airflow is a must.

 

Is the supplied 400w power supply enough for that? I didn't think you could swap them out, and a GTX uses a lot of power.
Edit: I am wrong, it does seem to be able to cope according to TR!

 

Cool but if you put a Geforce 8800... well you lose you only PCI... so no sound card or TV-Tuner...

 

unless you put on a DD or EK full-cover waterblock; but getting H2O into a SFF case would be a challenge.

 

Thats not too upsetting to me. If, for some reason, the integrated sound doesn't suffice, I can always spring for a external solution.

 

I ran an SN45G back in the day as my main pc (now server) and it could cope with the most high end graphics cards of the time (5900) with no problems and only had a 200W PSU. I don't think pc power demands have quite doubled since then so i think the 400w unit should be enough. Shuttles are very nice just don't expect to overclock. On the SN45g if the memory voltage was increased the motherboard failed on the next reboot.. not good and shows that they were never designed for overclocking. In later versions they took out the option ot alter memory voltage to stop this problem.

 

400W should enough... but I would go with 500W or 620W, as you always want more then what you need, as:
1 - The PSU will be quitter as it heat up less.
2- And every year your PSU components age, so it will drop in 2-3 years quiet a bit... so your 400W can be 380W or 350W... and your computer might not function properly or not at all.

This site is the best, it's a PSU calculator, so you know how much power you really need, and it's very flexible:
http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

 

It's not the watts, it's the amps. Plus, shuttle's stock psu's are quite good because they're rated at 50c (no derating curve), actually provide the specified power, and are somewhat efficient.

-The psu is actually not as efficient before 50, and after 50% load. I generally keep my stuff around 50% loaded.
-The components will age, yes, but most people still don't need 300w.. My rig, an e4300@3.6 with a 7800gt and 5 hdd's, takes under 150w. PSU components age, but not that much.
-The eXtreme psu calculator is eXtremely inaccurate. It spec'd my rig as drawing over 800w. It takes under 150. And don't even try putting sli components with even more drives in there, because you'll be well over a thousand..

 

component aging I can only think of the capacitors and shuttle puts capacitors of the correct temp ratings and voltage ratings in there power supplys so they should keep working for decades. My shuttle had a super micro 1u psu which is about as high qulity as you can get (server power supply).

 

You know your components have power energy saving system.... If you load your computer at max (sound card, network, video card, etc...) I really don't think it takes 150W, else our laptop will have at least 4-5 hours of battery (instead of 2-3 for a 12inch tablet PC) life with a simple 4 cell battery, as the power efficiency is far more superior, and the computer much less powerful for the same specs.

From my tests, it calculated everything perfectly at 20W close. (it was under). I have a bunch of PSU's here... Before my Corsair 620W, I has an Antec 480W, well it broke after a year and a half. I did not have my Geforce 8800 GTS 640MB yet (it was coming trough mail, I had a Geforce 6600GT 128MB at the moment). Anyway, the next day I received my Geforce 8800 GTS, eager to test it, I used my older ATX 2.0 Antec 380W PSU. Guess what? Well the second you start windows (sometimes, you hear the HDD shut-down and come back up (so system freezes). If you manage to pass that, the second you start anything big or start any game, the system shut-down. PSU did heat up a lot, and it's fan did turn at max speed. You can clearly see that the PSU was struggling to give me power. That PSU was just 3 month older from my Antec 480W and was barely used. And they offer both the same Amps, and both from the TruePower series. So I removed my Geforce 8800, put back my 6600, de-overclock my CPU, so I can use my computer properly (it did work fine at that moment), did some heavy research, and got the Corsair HX 620, specially that is was 10$ more then the HX520W, and up I go and buy it.

I did some calculations and it ended up that, the computer barely use power, but under load it's not the case. And the Geforce 8800 has no gift of power efficiency compared to the 7900 and older.

 

Mine does take <150. From the wall. Laptops are a diferent story, they also have a screen, speakers, and are generally not really as efficient.

The problem you had with the 380, was not that it didn't have enough power; it was the rail distribution, and amperage. Let's take an even more drastic example: Say, 500w psu with single 24a 12v rail, 500w psu with 1 12a and 1 14a 12v rails for a max combined of 24. Both have the same amount of power, but because of rail distribution, your cpu gets 12a (Which it doesn't need), and 14a for the rest of the system. Let's say you put an 8800 gtx, and a Q6600. That will easily overload 14a (168w), whereas the single 24a psu won't have any problems.

Besides, the power calculator has no amperage figures, and derives the power consumption from TDP.

I've tried the paid with-amps one; it's the same, but with amperage. Just as inaccurate.

 

ah I see! Well we learn something everyday!

So basically all the super hight 1500W > is just pure useless and waist of money for a general gaming computer

 

yep. most people would only need the corsair 620hx.

 

Yes. You don't really NEED more than 750ish watts, but headroom is a great thing to have. That's why I don't suggest anything smaller for 8800GTX SLI.

 

The E6850, X1950XTX, 2GB DDR3, Asus X38, 1 HDD, 1CD drive and two fans I have sitting here right now is taking up 126W idle and loads at about 200ish.

The 700W OCZ I use is a complete overkill.