some questions on a Shuttle XPC E660 system...

zero_mac

hi,
i'm trading up my current shuttle (ST61G4, P4 3Ghz, 1Gb ram etc) for a newer model. i use it as a software dev PC, Visual studio 2005, office 2007, SQL 2005, Vista ultimate etc, and i'm finding that the latest round of MS software is slowing me down a little, waiting 10 seconds for compiling big projects etc.

here is my proposed spec so far, i have a few questions on it, if anyone has better ideas please shout. i don't really have a tight budget but don't want to buy stuff needlessly. i got nearly 3 years out of my current shuttle by buying above average but not bleeding edge.

• Shuttle SD37P2
• E660 core duo. seems to be the best price/performance choice at the moment at 262 ex vat from Dabs.
• 2x512 667 dimms, crucial ballistix. i don't think i need 2gigs yet, maybe in a year or so.
• Raptor 74Gb 10000RPM for my main OS + Programs + Files drive. this will hopefully kick ass for Visual Studio and compiling projects etc, it is only SATA-I but toms-hardware shows that it beats the pants off most SATA-II drives in most categories.
• WD 500Gb SATA 2 for secondary/backup/media drive. i'm not too interested in RAID because i do daily backups all over the place and put a lot of trust in the Raptor drives, 100% duty cycle etc.
• graphics-wise, i'm going el cheapo because i don't play any games, Vista does like to have proper DX9 support with pixel shader etc., so i've picked out a 256Mb sapphire X1600 Pro off dabs.

my main problem is with the graphics card. the motherboard has 2 PCI express slots, rated at 8x by Shuttle. apparently the 16x is shared between the 2 slots giving 8x. i have no need for cross-fire so will that mean my single card will run at 8x instead of 16x? will it even work? i couldn't find anything about this online.

has anyone got this system and run vista on it? it should work because it runs on my current old shuttle no problem.
thanks for any help
tim

8T8

Don't worry about the PCI-e link being split into x8 it wont affect your graphics card in any way, in short the X1600 will work just fine. An X1600 will never come remotely close to saturating an x8 link anyway.

You don't actually need the X1600 in fact I'd get an X1300 instead with 256MB of RAM like this one may as well save a few pennies. It also has passive cooling so less noise.

Again don't worry about the difference in bandwidth the Raptor S150 line are very, very fast hard drives.

As for RAM personally I would go with 2GB on Shop4Memory there is a 2GB kit from Mushkin going for €225.

2Gb DDR2-667 EM2-5300 (5400) Mushkin

Vista should fly along with a system like that.

zero_mac

hey 8t8 thanks for the reply.
excellent tip on the graphics card, a welcome saving, i think you're right about the RAM too, i may as well get the 2gigs now. i haven't heard of Mushkin before, are they any good?

by the way, i found a great product on marxcomputers.ie which is a combined floppy drive and flash card reader. my current shuttle has no floppy drive and i ran into trouble once or twice with SATA drivers installing windows XP and early vista betas. luckily the vista crew threw in proper support for loading drivers from CD or USB drive, so i probably won't ever need a floppy again, but just in case, it's handy to have.

thanks
tim

8T8

Mushkin are a good brand they have been around for a while.

Thank fully SATA drivers are now part of the OS in Vista at least but a handy item to have for XP though you could always use nLite and integrate the drivers into the install CD.