YEEEHAW!!!!

Got the parts for my Shuttle XPC Barebone SG33G5M yesterday:

• 1 250W Shuttle XPC SG33G5M / Intel775-G33 / HDMI
• 1 CPU775 Intel Core 2 Duo 3.00GHz (E8400) / 6MB / 1333 / Box
• 2 DDR2-800 2GB Kingston / CL5
• 1 DVDRW IDE 20x Samsung SH-S202J / BEBE Bare black
• 2 HDSATA2 0500 7200 Western Digital WD5000AAKS 16MB
• 1 VP-NV8800GT-512A XFX GF8800GT 512MB (600M / 2xDVI / TVO)

Started by putting it all together. Wow, the Shuttle G5M chassis and FG33 motherboard are really well-thought-through. It may be small (31 x 20 x 18.5 cm) but somehow Shuttle managed to find room for a whole bunch of stuff found on full-size motherboards. The board has on-board Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 (GMA 3100), 250W mini power supply, 775 CPU socket (supports 65 and 45 nm), two memory slots, 1x PCI-E, 1x PCI slot, 2.1 and 7.1 sound, 3x internal SATAII, 2x external SATAII, 6x USB, 1x IDE, Gigabit ethernet, firewire and a bunch more. The black aluminum chassis has a mirror front face with gold trim and an integrated display compatible with Windows Media Center. A remote control is also included.

I first mounted the Intel Core 2 Duo. The cooling unit - Shuttle I.C.E. 2 (Integrated Cooling Engine)- is one of the most amazing components of the system. Three heat pipes run from the heat sink into a small cooling grill mounted behind the main housing fan. The first time I started the system, I had forgotten to reconnect the housing fan (oops) but the system got halfway through an XP installation before overheating. The ICE can passively cool an 3.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo for over 15 minutes (don’t try that this at home :D)!! After inserting the RAM modules, I mounted and connected the two 500GB hard drives and the DVD drive. The last component was the XFX GeForce 8800GT Alpha Dog Edition which requires extra power (3x 24 volts :D) and the motherboard needs to be jumpered so it uses the PCI-E graphic card instead of on-board.

I then fired up the system, and was amazed at how quiet such a high-powered system can be. At first all fans come on at full power, but then the intelligent cooling logic from the housing fan and graphic card kick in and you can hardly hear anything. After installing XP and upgading to Vista Ultimate with Media Center, the fun really began: over-clocking :D. I started at 333MHz FSB x CPU factor of 9 (3.0 GHz) and slowly cranked it up. At 450 MHz FSB the system died and I had to reset by pulling out the CMOS battery. After crashing the system a couple more times, I got it running stably at 441MHz FSB (3,98 GHz).

Time to fire up some games…. I started with Hellgate London. Running with DirectX 9.0, all options maxed - no problem at all. DirectX 10 was a bit slower, had to turn off the trilinear filtering to get the same performance. NFS Most Wanted and Carbon were also sweet, still gotta check out Pro Street. And I’m looking forward to Crysis and UT 2008!!! 1080p HD movies were also no problem at all and the Media Center remote control is a really nice feature. After five hours of heavy duty gaming, I got a blue screen. Haven’t found the problem yet, but I’ll most likely have to adjust the overclocking values a little.

All in all, it’s a really sweet system! I’ll definitely be having some fun in the future

UPDATE (April 29): This baby is sweet. Had to drop the overclocking down, now running stably at 3,4GHz. All games run perfectly, except for NFS Carbon… gnrgh… Lovin’ it!!!!

UPDATE (May 13): Running at 3,6GHz…. Get’s pretty warm in this kind of weather, but seems to be working