I have just finished a couple of modest upgrades to my shuttle SB51G XPC.
I have upgraded my 60Gig Seagate Barracuda hard-drive to a 160 gig Samsung SpinPoint. Great drive - silent and fast.
Anyway the main upgrade was swapping out my ageing Ti4200 for a nice shiny new Leadtek FX5900XT card for about £130 squids from Tekheads. I have to say I am well impressed with this card and here's why:
Noise
The Leadtek card comes with a custom cooler which is not only nice looking, but very quiet too. My Ti4200 was passively cooled and noise is a big issue to me so I was very pleasently surprised by the lack of fan noise.
It is quite noisey at boot up, but once you are in windows it settles right down to a much lower RPM and is just a very faint whoosing of air. This I can tolerate - it's the hairdrier noise you get from some small fans (like on the 9800pro) that I can't stand. So it's great when you're just doing 2D stuff in Window's as the fan noise is pretty much non existent.
It has onboard temp monitoring, and the fan gradually speeds up during heavy 3D gaming, but never up to annoying levels.
Overclocking
Here comes my biggest surprise!
Out of the box it clocks in at 390Mhz core and 700Mhz memory. Some manufacturers seem to sell 5900XTs overclocked slightly out-of-the-box (420Mhz core seems to be the norm)
Anyway I played a bit of Doom 3 for a while to heat the core up nicely and to make sure there were no problems with the card and then I let the drivers determine the maximum overclock. It came back with 468 for the core, and 814 for the memory. Not bad - that's an extra 78Mhz and 114Mhz for the core and memory respectively.
Anyway, I played around with some manual overclocking and settled on 475Mhz for the core, and a whopping 925Mhz (yes NINE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE) on the memory. That's a monster 225Mhz overclock. I left it running 3DMark overnight and amazingly it was still running this morning which no crashes or artifacts so I guess I must have got lucky with this and got some cracking memory!
Benchies
I haven't run many yet as I've only just got the card. I believe some of them are CPU limited, not least because my PC is fairly "old" technologically (P4 3.06Ghz with HT DISABLED). It only uses a 533Mhz bus, 4x AGP and single channel DDR333 memory. Anyway, even with these limitations...
16,011 3Dmarks (2001 SE version)
5,898 3Dmarks (2003 version)
Not bad really!
Doom 3
It runs great at 1280x1024 medium quality. I have a TFT and this is it's native res and partly one of the reasons why the Ti4200 puked at D3 - that res was just a slide show! The 5900XT runs it great - nice and smooth. It will run it in high quality mode fairly smoothly but the actions gets a little choppy sometimes.