Well, it’s done. I got my processor via FedEx from NewEgg on Friday and assembled the thing on Saturday. This was my first Shuttle Xpc – so it was an entirely new experience for me. Some observations… First, I praise the genius engineers that figured out how to cram all this into a bread box. Second, you have to be a contortionist to put one of these things together if you don’t follow the directions and assemble your components in the order they recommend. One lousy missing power cable to the HDD and I found myself tearing it all down again to fix the mistake. J
Overall, I’m very pleased with this system. The value (granted, I got a deal on the refurbished version) for what you get is outstanding. All that was left for me to add was a processor, some memory and a HDD…after a quick swap of the built-in DVD-ROM with my TDK DVD burner, I was off and running. The thing turned on, posted, and booted off the WinXP install media right out of the gate. I was pretty pleased with myself to say the least.
One downside to this system that caught me quite by surprise – it is loud. Now, granted, I built the Sonata that I had previously with silence as the primary design goal. You could hear a mouse fart with the thing running.
The Shuttle is quite different. There are two fans – what appears to be an 80mm exhaust fan for the CPU cooling mechanism and a small fan that’s part of the power supply. I can’t tell which it is that’s making the racket, but my guess is the PSU fan. Even tweaking the “smart fan” settings in the BIOS has no effect. The weirdest part is that one of the two fans’ noise levels seems to speed up and slow down based on my usage of the computer. For example, as I click on items in the menu or drag windows around the desktop, it speeds up and slows down.
By no means is this thing a 747 during takeoff, but it is louder than I am used to and much louder than I expected. A lot of enthusiasts recommend this for a home theatre setup – it’s about 3 times louder than the Tivo that sits in my living room rack. I supposed in a closed A/V cabinet it would be OK. Sitting next to me on my desk it’s taking a little bit to get used to. The grilled side panels in the Shuttle SB61G2R don’t help any either. They allow you to bear the brunt of the HDD noise, which with this Maxtor 250GB ATA133 drive seems to be louder than others I’ve used.
Here I am complaining and this thing is the fastest PC I’ve ever used. 3.2Ghz with HT is a far cry from the first PC I ever bought with my own hard-earned cash: an 8088 w/an 8 MHz processor. To think that thing ran the average consumer thousands of dollars…
SiSoftware Sandra
Processor
Model : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.20GHz
Performance Rating : PR4265 (estimated)
SMT Support : 2 Unit(s)
L2 On-board Cache : 512kB ECC Synchronous ATC (8-way sectored, 64 byte line size)
Mainboard
Bus(es) : ISA PCI IMB USB FireWire/1394 i2c/SMBus
Mainboard : Shuttle Inc FB61R
Total Memory : 1015MB DDR-SDRAM