Shuttle - Good for Gaming????

MR DAZ

Just ordered the following SHUTTLE

Plan to stick my 9800xt and a gig of ram to start with and P4.2.8ghz

Should I have any problems with any of the new games?ie Doom 3 etc

Also has anyone else bought this model....any reviews would be nice.

I've read a few on the web....but its hard to beat the local opion

Also Any chance some ye could post some pics of your shuttle systems.....and any accessories that you got for them.

Cheers

koneko

I had the predecessor and never had a single problem with it, they're great little machines.

Don't have pics anymore, I sold it on to someone else, but I built a little LCD into the front of it and painted the whole thing.

davidclayton

sudhian is great at reviews, and have a good forum also.
check the link:
http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=466

i have a shuttle sb75g2, and it's great.
2.8 northwood
512mb 3200 ocz ram
160gb samsung sata
80gb WD
9600xt
nec 2500 dvd burner

changed ice and psu fans
there's a nice psu fan mod on sudhian somewhere,
where they change the 2 x 40mms for 1 80mm fan.
have a look.

Nichololas

The onboard graphics won't be great for gaming, so you could have saved a few quid by getting one without onboard graphics, since most gamers would replace theirs anyway. Most people on Sudhian Forums say that the SN45G is the best option for gamers at the moment (unless you want cutting edge high spec, havent been paying attention to them lately). See sig for my specs on it.

MR DAZ

Thanks lads for your replies...

Now I used my shuttle at the week end in its first lan appearance.....

Games played....call of duty, joint ops,battlefield , far cry.........

Far cry was the only game which gave me problems....the system would lock up after ten minutes of playing.....so I then turned the detail down from very high to medium on all the options.

Far cry would then play fine for 20-30 minutes before the system would lock up completly


Now to me it sounds like a heat problem on the graphics card.....as the card if right up against the side of the case....

Spec: ST61G4, p42.8ghz northwood,250gig WD hd, 1gigpc3200 samsung memory,MSI Dual burner 8x, 256mb 9800Xt....

Like I said all the other games played perfectly with no probs!!!!


Any thoughts? (I dont want to drill a big mad hole in the side of the case)

davidclayton

post your problem here:
http://forums.sfftech.com/categories.cfm?catid=43

koneko

Did you check your temps? Does the side feel very hot? Have you installed any updates, or done any stability tests like running prime95 or 3dmark in a loop.

Did you play the other games for long? did you have any stability probs there?

It's best to rule any "normal" problems first, in case it isn't a heat issue.

MR DAZ

Right.....

I played call of duty for about 2 hours no problms....joint ops for 40 mins no problems...

Now i tried to play far cry before and after these gaming periods with same results..

Also I had ran 3d benchmark at home the night before scoring 6280...but when I tried to run it after one of the gaming sessions...the system locked up...and i had to reboot..

At the start of the lan I had the omega drivers installed.....I then got an error relating to video driver.....so I uninstalled the omega drivers and reinstalled the latest cat drivers.

Also I should mention that the bracket on my graphics card was origanlly a dual bracket taking up two slots.....but to fit the card into my shuttle...i had to cut the bracket in half , so that it would fit it

davidclayton

do you mean it had one of those vga silencer type coolers on it?
if yes, the air vents at the rear of the case will be blocked,
therefore the hot air is building up and casing problems.

[just guessing here]

MR DAZ

No ...I mean of those dual shields. ie where the screw for the card goes when your screwing it in to the system

davidclayton

is the cooler on the 9800xt taller than 1 slot?
if the fan is jammed up against the side of the case the fan will be strained.
i have a mesh cover on my sb75g2, maybe that could be a solution
[if heat IS the problem]
have you tried playing FAR CRY without the cover on?

koneko

If it's just Far Cry it's happening to I wouldn't be 100% it's heat related. Like david said, run it with the cover off and see what happens. Should help determine if that's the prob. I'd also say run something graphics intensive in a loop, like some game demos/benches or 3DMark03.

quarryman

ah another excuse to show my shuttle. regarding your graphics problem i've has the same issue with my 9600pro for a while. I still haven't figured out if its hardware or software. I get random lockups during games. Its been running quite smoothly for a while now though so i *may* (fingers crossed) have cracked it. I'll get back to you in a while with a link to the solution that worked for me. It was on a forum somewhere.......

davidclayton

why did you buy a gay shuttle paul?

davidclayton

oh, i know...
so you could look at your mingin face in the reflective front.


[don't ban me, we're mates]
hehe

davidclayton

if it turns out that it runs fine with the cover off,
me thinks you can buy the mesh sides separately...

link:
http://www.us.shuttle.com/product_AccessGuide2.asp

$50 though!!!!

MR DAZ

Thanks Quarryman ...if you could post that link it would be great

quarryman

found it!

http://hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/8596/?o=0

this is taken from a thread regarding 9600s freezing. i found it ages ago and tried a lot of the suggestions. the thing was its a 92 page thread! but tucked in amongst the crap was the solution for me:

You won't believe it BUT:

I FOUND A SOLUTION FOR OUR PROGBLEM !!!

Here are the steps (it works with VIA KT333 based mainboard and ATI Catalyst 3.7) ...

1.) Disable "AGP FastWrite" in the BIOS
2.) Browse to your folder, where you installed the ATI Control Panel
3.) Execute file: SmartGard (this is a link)
4.) Do following settings (no matter what the auto-detection says!):
PCI Write: ON
PCI Read: ON
AGP Write: OFF
AGP Read: ON
5.) Apply
6.) automatic restart and after that WAIT some seconds because during windows logon, the driver tests your system
7.) SmartGard starts automatically and you have to confirm the new settings with "OK"
8.) Have Fun!

Now, my C&C Generals and Neverwinter Nights work excellent without the reduction of hardware acceleration.
The problem was, that the ATI driver can't detect the AGP settings corectly. Therefore these settings have to be done manually.

I hope this can help some people! Nice to work with you ...

let me know how you get on.

MR DAZ

Will Do.....thanks Quarryman!

MR DAZ

Sorry for the Delay

I didnt get near my system for the last week!!!!!

Anyway Just an update for yee....

I tried your suggestion.....it didnt work for me....but thanks anyway.

I took the case off last night!
Basicly I played farcry last night with all the settings "Very High", I played for about an hour and a half... No problems!!!

I left the system running over night running the Demo Loop in far cry ....back this morning ....System working fine - no lock ups etc..


SO I guess the problem was Heat related......

Thanks For all the help lads.

BloodBath

Time to get yourself an ati cooler and a tube of artic silver 5 + some ramsinks.


BloodBath

MR DAZ

What type of ati cooler?? surely these wouldnt fit into the shuttle case....would they??

And where would you suggest buying from?


I was going to order one of the replacement case covers with the mesh windows....only 40 yoyo's

BloodBath

That's the 9800xt one and the site to order from. That + ramsinks + artic silver 5 + delivery will = about 50 euro.

http://www.jes-computer.de/product_info.php?pID=17564

Now the only problem with these is that I think they use the pci slot under the card to blow the hot air out the back and on a shuttle that might not be free.


BloodBath

davidclayton

i have the mesh sides, and a vantec iceberq on my 9600xt,
[which includes ramsinks]
but i dunno if they are good enough for a 9800xt.
worth a check!

davidclayton

review:
http://www.envynews.com/index.php?ID=559

MR DAZ

I was thinking that if i ordered the mesh covers that....it would prob be ok...

as you said bloodbath....i dont have a spare slot below the agp slot....so there fore the card right up against the side of the case...

David....do you find that they let in alot of air?

And did you get yours as standard or did you order them as an after thought?? ie where you getting problems relating to heat?

quarryman

some people actually reckon a mesh cover increases temps.

check out this thread.

its based on the fact that there will be less airflow since the side's aren't covered.

this might not relate to you since its a gfx issue and having airflow right beside the 9800 heatsink might be of benefit.

davidclayton

i don't have heat problems,
i changed the fan and sink on my 9600xt coz it was too noisy for my liking.
i now have the iceberq running @ 3% on speedfan.

where are you based?
i could give you a lend of the mesh case top for a night or two.

also i posted here for you:
http://forums.sudhian.com/messageview.cfm?catid=46&threadid=64678
subscribe to the thread.

quarryman

here's a quote from that thread above

the only thing mesh sides offer in the way of cooling is a cooler AGP GFX card.

might be of use so.

MR DAZ

Thanks for the help david....and the offer of the case cover...

but I'm in limerick/cork....so it would'nt be easy to get it...

Actually the post about the mesh covers seems 50-50 as regards opinion, while some are saying that it increases there temps slightly.....it seems to fix some of the problems they were having on thier gfx cards when playing games like doom3 etc...

So this seems like a solution.....I dont want to cut a hole in the case

davidclayton

there's actually a small chance i might be in cork on saturday.
but i'll only be there for an hour or so,
so, unless you can get to dublin a few days later,
we'll just leave it.

MR DAZ

Yeah....thanks anyway David.

MR DAZ

System crashed again ...with the covers off
So back to the drawing boards, I've tried about everything that i can find in the sudhian forums but to no avail.....

One last thing I might try this evening, i found this thread...

"Hello,

I realise that I cannot be of much help, since I don't have any experience with your particular model of PC. However, I had the exact same problems with my (new) ABIT 9600XT VIO card and my (new) Shuttle SN85G4L (boo..hiss!). I scoured many forums looking for possible solutions... Here is what 'could have been causing my problem' and what I tried to resolve it in rough order:

Drivers - I reformated/reinstalled a half dozen times. No-Go.

Heat - I removed the case and pointed a 16 inch desk fan at the powersupply side of the PC, blowing air over the CPU. No-Go.

Memory - Memtest86 for a day. Tried using one stick of RAM at a time. Tried alternating DDR slots. No-Go.

Power Shortage - I bought a 480 watt Thermaltake PSU. No-Go.

Faulty Motherboard - I bought an ASUS K8V SE motherboard. Wasn't gonna RMA the Shuttle if I wasn't certain. God, this transfer of hardware was a damn pain! No-Go.

At this point I was beyond peed-off. I was going to buy a sledgehammer and smash the crap to bits... Then I noticed something in the ASUS manual. It went something like "This motherboard only supports 1.5volt AGP cards. Do not use 3.3 volt cards with this machine." I was like "WTF? I didn't know that they made AGP cards requiring different voltages." I checked the Shuttle manual and saw no mention of AGP voltages. Since I've already dumped months of work/paychecks into this machine, would buying another new video card be too much of a bother? For reference, the manual indicated that 1.5volt AGP cards were the ones with 3 banks of contacts, 3.3volt cards only had two banks of contacts.

I bought a crumby Gainward FX5700 card and behold! I had a working computer that didn't crash while playing Far Cry, etc. I haven't tried putting anything back into the Shuttle, since it was such a pain getting the SATA drive to work with the ASUS board, but I suspect that everything would work fine in there as well.

My advice: Don't overlook the obvious. Check to make certain that your machine supports your video card 100%. If you only crash in games (like I did), you may have the same sort of problem... "


Could this be my problem???

My card has two banks of contacts, What do you guys think???
This is driving me nuts......Also I played at the weekend just using the onboards graphics no problems at all(battlefield vietnam)

davidclayton

well it looks like he might be right.
i'd email off to shuttle asking about 1.5/3.3V gfx compatability.
to be honest this is now a bit out of my knowledge,
so my only suggestion is to email shuttle and try to get a lend of a different gfx card to test.

dave

unkel

davidclayton wrote:

well it looks like he might be right

He's not. Your mobo might only support 1.5v cards, but that only means you can't use the older 3.3v cards. You can still use the new 0.8v cards

There are 3 versions of AGP:

AGP 1 Ancient 3.3v cards - from the nineties mainly
AGP 2 1.5v
AGP 3 Since last year 0.8v (9800xt is AGP 3 0.8v card)

It is very unlikely but possible that the mobo and the graphics card just conflict. I have had that once with the notoriously difficult nforce1 mobo. There was nothing that could be done about it, but change the graphics card

Most likely the problem is heat related - you'll have to buy yourself some cooling

davidclayton

if you could get your hands on another stock cooled 9800xt to compare,
and check for conflicts, you'd have a better picture.
[easier said than done though]

MR DAZ

Thanks for the help lads...

I'm going to contact shuttle and ask thier opinon etc....but if I get no Joy, I'll prob RMA back to komplett.ie, because there isnt much more I can do really

What I've done so far:

Swapped memory,processors,graphics card,

I put a gforce 3Ti500 in last night and the same thing happened.....

I ran memtest 86 overnight no errors

I've updated board drivers, flashed upto the latest bios,

I tried every tip I could find on various forums froms

Left the case off and tried to play without the case on

I had sp2 installed, I removed it....reinstalled windows and then installed sp1....no change

The only time the system doesnt crash is when its run off he onboard graphics....which is horrible for games


Is there much more I can try......

davidclayton

kick it?

MR DAZ

WOOOHOOO......its fixed ...well kinda

Thanks lads for all the help.

Solution:

Set the agp speed back to 4x from 8x in the driver settings and it works fine

But at least its not crashing during games anymore.


Cheers for the help

Dazza

MR DAZ

I should have added that there was a few things causing the system to hang.

a) Like mentioned in the above post the agp setting @ 8x

and

b) When the cover is on it bombs out during games


it was hard to figure it out as I original thought is was a heat problem..and so did yee

but kept hanging with the case off as well....and it was the same type of crash.

So I was more than stumped.


So i have ordered the the cover with the mesh sides , which I'd say should fix my problem with the heat


But all in all its working fine playing games with the cover off.

Soz for boring ya all this last few weeks

davidclayton

(i'll bet you kicked it)

MR DAZ

More than Once!