Shuttle J2/H3 and Radeon 6850

I'm planning a Shuttle gaming system. The Shuttle J2 comes with a 300W power supply (and I presume the H3 will too).

From what I've read, the Radeon 6850 is the most powerful card I could use. I did also consider the Geforce 460, but that seems to need too much juice. According to Tom's Hardware the 6850 has a TDP of 127W while the Geforce 460 is 160W*.

Dropping down to a Geforce 450 or a Radeon 5770 doesn't seem to save much power, but comes at a large performance cost.

Any thoughts or experience of this?

*I can't post a URL as new member, search for "Best PCIe Card: $175 To $275" to see the page I'm referring to.

A decent 330W PSU will run an HD6850 1GB fine it seems:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...-pictures.html

Thanks. That's encouraging.

I'm thinking of taking the plunge on a J2/Core i3-540/6850 in early Feb.

Just need to wade through all the 6850 models and reviews to find a quiet one which vents out the case.

I built a Shuttle J2 gaming system this week and it's working well. Installation was a breeze (I'd not built a PC in over 10 years). The 300W PSU copes with the Radeon 6850 and I get around 40 FPS in the original Crysis GPU benchmark with all settings on high and 4xAA at 1920x1200. I only use the machine for gaming and running Boinc projects, so the small SSD is managable (my main machine is a 15" MacBook Pro).

BOM

• Shuttle SH55J2 - £149.99
• Intel Core i3-560 (3.33GHz) - £112.32
• Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 - £129.00
• Crucial 2x2GB 1333MHz ram - £35.98
• Crucial C300 64GB SSD - £99.99
• OCZ SSD 3.5" mount - £5.39
• Samsung SH-S223 DVD drive - £13.89
• Edimax Wireless-N150 USB wifi - £12.99
• Arctic Silver thermal paste - £6.39
• Hardware Total - £565.94
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OEM - £74.29

Total £640.23 inc. 20% VAT

If you were prepared to swap the SSD for an HD and opt for a slower Core i3 you can shave about £100 off that total. You get thermal paste with the Shuttle, but I stuck with Arctic Silver.

Overclocking wasn't particularly successful. I got my Core i3 560 to 3.75GHz, but it wasn't completely error free in Prime95 (after around 2 hours) and Crysis crashed a couple of times in extended play. The Radeon 6850 worked at 850/1050MHz for a while, but in stressful situations in Crysis it would sometimes freeze, so I've stuck to stock speed 775/1000MHz.

Overall I'm very pleased with my system and would recommend a Shuttle gaming rig to anyone looking for a decent gaming machine in a compact case.

Nice one, thanks for the feedback.
It's rare to hear people talking about using a PSU of less than 400W in a gaming context, and i've often argued that people "needing" a 700W is just marketing, so it's good to read this. :)