First time shuttle build. Anyone got an recommendations on this build!

[Grey M@a]

The PC I have now is coming close to about 5 years old, the machine I got now is a P4 Northwood 800mhz 3.2ghz chip, gig of ddr400mhz corsair and a 7800gs 256mb agp card so its getting long in the tooth with the latest games. I am wanting to build a machine that will easily last another 4 - 5 years etc

I am planning on dumping the 19" TFT in the future for a much bigger screen or dual 24" TFT's

EDIT:

The other option I have is try and get 2gb of memory for this machine and then update the 7800gs card to the ATi X1950 Pro 512mb card and push another year or two out of my machine

[Grey M@a]

Komplett have a HIS Radeon HD 2600 512MB AGP card, reckon it would be worth the update over the 7800gs 256mb card and if I got another gig of memory?

[jonathan_phang]

Any particular reason why you want a SFF? Is it just for the space, moving it to LAN parties etc? I only ask as thats a pretty intensive system for such a small case really. As mentioned, the heat may be an issue, and potentially affect your overclock of GPU and CPU.

Then again, the PSU alone would probably limit the chances too. I have a shuttle myself, love it to bits, but its my media pc, so just has the cheapest lowest TDP AM2 X2 there is and a passive card. Its just that I would want to overclock the components you have and I just think that the SFF case may not be conducive to doing this.

But you could just want to run it all at stock, in which case I'll say "I wish I could have one!"

Have a think about it though...

[HSK]

do peeps use shuttle based pc's more for like, media center setups? ie with the HDTV etc. and savin space n portabilty coz they are smaller...

[MSIC]

Komplett have a HIS Radeon HD 2600 512MB AGP card, reckon it would be worth the update over the 7800gs 256mb card and if I got another gig of memory?

I seriously doubt this would be an upgrade at all.
Look at this Trusted Reviews graph (i know it's quick and dirty but proves a point), and note that your 7800 will perform better than the 7600GT.
The extra memory on the Radeon will do nothing for games (unless you are running a very old game, say 2001 era, in stupid resolutions like a 30" or higher).

[Grey M@a]

Just been reading through six or seven reviews which are all using a very similar setup to the shuttle build above saying to stick to the GTS cards and as long as you don't overclock to much there is no heat issue as the cooling system and case is designed to take gtx cards and the like.

As I won't be overclocking I may just go with the build above. I have a few friends running Shuttles with far more powerful setups in them and they seem to be running cool enough.

The Shuttle is needed as space is very limited and the Chieftec case I have now takes far to much space on the desk so opted for the SFF route. The Custom PC review of the shuttle states the GTX cards are to much for the system but GTS cards should be alright. Just waiting on a few more reviews of the system before I make a choice. I suppose if the heat gets a bit to much I could look at a water cooling solution for the Shuttle

[stud]

I used to build Shuttles all the time, but they are now more specialist than ever before, imo. There used to be only a small difference in build cost between a shuttle and a comparible build using a tower which utilised *quality* components. However, things have changed. Much as I love SFF, my most recent build is an SG03, with quad core. It is larger than my previous machines, but the components I have in it simply wouldn't fit in a Shuttle.

[Grey M@a]

Looks as if Scan aren't stocking the shuttle anymore as its gone off their site so will look into the SG03 and the Lian Li option and work up from there

Thanks for the advice everyone.