So yeah, I took care of this more than two weeks ago already, but my problem was solved by deciding to just do away with Shuttle (and their proprietary game) altogether and replace it with this:
Apevia X-QPack2 case (comes with 500w PSU) and ASUS M4A785-M motherboard.
Still sticking with a SFF-like case (because fuck normal midtowers
), but this thing takes standard mATX motherboards and standard ATX power supplies, which means if anything goes wrong or needs replacing/upgrading from here on out I can easily remedy the problem due to more parts being immediately available to me. I thought about holding out or ordering online for a green or black case, but the silver still looks nice when brand new and in person (especially compared to the floor display model at Fry's, which is scratched and worn like crazy
). This also means I now have potential for a new quad-core CPU, up to 16GB of RAM, and a bigger/stronger video card. Hell, even my current video card has benefitted from the switch, seeing as it's a PCIe 2.0 card and the old Shuttle mobo is just PCIe 1.0: not only do my games run a bit more stable now, but before I couldn't increase the clocks via ATI Overdrive without crashing the display drivers (and not even in-game either), and now I've been running close to max clocks and have yet to see any artifacts.
Also, bigger fans means quieter system, though because of my final experiences with the Shuttle I still get paranoid when I hear the new fans slowly wind down.
I wanna replace them with green LED fans sometime in the future. Also, front LCD temp readings are a nice bonus; I'm not too sure if the readings are perfectly accurate, but I suppose it can serve as a good indicator/warning system.
Of course, the whole mobo installation process reminded me of why I bought a Shuttle barebones in the first place.
But the headache of that process is well worth going through for the end result.
The new mobo means the front Firewire port and floppy disk reader part of my card/floppy combo drive are pretty much useless (no onboard connectors for them), but it's not like I use those things anymore anyway. Now, what to do with the spare 5.25" drive bay and PCIe x1 slot...
Topic: Post your PC's specs here! + Discussion about hardware (Read 105478 times)