I'm planning on building a new comp in thenext couple of months. I want to go for SFF after seeing a friend's Shuttle setup. Here's my problem though. I definitely know I want to go with a 939 Socket Athlon 64 CPU setup, so that leaves 2 current Shuttle setups, the SN25P and the SN95G5. The 25P is Shuttle's nForce4 chipset, supporting PCIe, while the SN95G5 is nForce3, supporting AGP and PCI. Now, going with the least expensive setup is definitely a priority. So, the SN25P is ~$350-$400 while the SN95G5 is ~$250-$300 dollars. The X800XL seems to be the most cost effective Vid Card on the market, and the PCIe version costs ~$350. The SN95G5, assuming that the AGP Version of the X800XL will be a bit more expensive than the PCIe version (due to AGP to PCIe bridge chip and larger PCB) I'm going to guess is a~$375. So, in the end SN25P w/ X800XL PCIe ~$700-$750 SN95G5 w/ X800XL AGP ~$625-$675 Basically a $75 price difference. Not having seen reports on AGP vs PCIe X800 XLs, I'm guessing that the PCIe will be the way to go, because of future upgradability. Am I wrong with my logic? (And srry for the long damn post)
I still like my good ol' agp, but that's because I see no need to upgrade to a technology for no real benefit. This has been discussed in other threads. Still, I have to swallow that we are for some reason forcing PCIe, and why not feed the machine? Don't forget to incorporate the cost of your chip choice into your budget, by the way, I don't see it on there.
PCI-E is the way to go. AGP is soon to be history. PCI-e is a hole lot better and then you can upgrade in the future without buying a new mobo.
We are going PCIe for one reason and it is a very simple reason. PCIe 16x has 10 times the bandwith of AGP 8x. In short, video card chipset designers like ATi or nVidia have more room to develop, thus in theory, allowing for graphics and GPU performance to increase much more rapidly than it would if AGP 8x was the only way.
AGP 8x is 2.0GB/s uni-directional, PCI-Express x16 is 4.0GB/s bi-directional - it's actually 4x the speed. Regardless of whether we are using the full bandwidth of the AGP bus or not, if you are buying a new system now, I would strongly recommend looking towards PCI-Express, because all new high-end video cards will be native PCI-Express parts - the development of a second card, using either the HSI bridge chip (NVIDIA) or RIALTO (ATI) takes a little longer than creating the part for the native solution.
Where did you find an AGP X800XL for sale? Other than the X800XL AiW, I've only seen them out of stock, back ordered or claims they have not been released yet.
I'd go with the PCI-express. On top of the fact that it allows for better future upgradability, the SN25P has a MUCH better onboard audio controller than the SN95G5 does. Whether that matters to you or not I don't know. The only problem with the SN25P is it doesnt have any regular PCI slots, it only has a PCI express 1x slot, and there's not much that use those yet, except like... gigabit lan, which it has built in already...
Well, there's always a big *** raid controller. In fact, I think we talked about the uselessness of that in a shuttle in another thread recently... "Hey dudes, I have my shuttle!" "What's in it!?" "I got a 4 HD scsi raid array, man!" "WHA? Turn it on!" "No way, man, I did that last night and the mobo melted and the psu caught on fire..."
Hmm... Do you think it would be okay with two drives with RAID striping? I plan on getting the X850 XT Platinum, which is the double-wide card, so the heat from that would mostly get blown out of the case... And also, for power would it be okay? Two SATA hard drives, the graphics card, a dvd-burner, and a floppy drive (just for kicks)
The SN25P has a 350watt PSU, so if it's of great quality with a high efficiency rate (above 75%) it could power those components, however I wouldn’t recommend it. Here are some system power draws with various high-end video cards. http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=x850xtpt&page=12 Here are the specs for the rest of the syerem used in the benching. http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=x850xtpt&page=4
agreed...even with all that psu efficiency, you might have a hard time running a raid stripe in there. At least with that graphics card. But you know who would be great to ask this of? zapwizard, who is in the process of making a shuttlepc with a radeon x850blahblahblah high end thingie.
Speaking of zapwizard and shuttle PSUs... This was copied from his recent Redwood 3.0 Projest log. As you can see he's using a 240watt PSU to power his system and knows it will work, with that knowledge I think it's safe to say you could run your system off the 350watt PSU.
