Replacement Shuttle PC - an untimely death!

Hi all,

Unfortunately my last Shuttle PC that I have used for 3 years now (an SX48P2) which had a very high spec has died an untimely death. Last night it blue screened and switched off, I switched it back on and on boot the same thing happened. So I unplugged it and left it for a while, went back and took the outer case off and powered it up again. This time via some sparks and a bang it went pretty lifeless very quickly. It was surge protected but it doesn't look good so I've sort of accepted I'll need most of a new computer, all 3 hard drives that were in it have checked out on a USB caddy and work fine.

So first question is what's likely to have happened or gone wrong? The sparks definitely came off the motherboard, would you throw all of the CPU, Ram and Graphics cards? I worry if I put them into a new computer they could cause something else to go wrong!

If I'm going down an entirely new route I still want a Shuttle and it powers 3x 1080p displays so need 2 single-slot graphics cards - which seem to be almost non existent now from what I can see.

I'm sort of looking at:

Shuttle SX58J3 V2
Intel Core i7 950 Bloomfield 45nm, 3.06 GHz
8GB(2x4GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3 PC3-10666 (1333)
2Tb Western Digital WD2001FASS Caviar Black, SATA 3Gb/s, 7200rpm

I've thrown in the new hard drive because I used to have 3 1Tb drives but the new Shuttle only has 2 slots so I'll swap 2 with this 1.

But then comes the sticking point, before now I had some sort of Nvidia card that was about £200 back then and a small one in the PCI port to run the 3rd monitor, nowadays I can't seem to find a single slot card or what the best solution would be for running 3 displays off the small layout available in a Shuttle computer.

At this stage all advice and suggestions for proceeding would be appreciated! I should probably add that this computer's sole purpose is HD video editing; it is almost entirely Premiere Pro crunching and hasn't opened a game in a good 2 years.

Many thanks,

Tim

ETA: How is one of these? XFX HD 5770 1GB Single Slot Cooler Edition 850MHz Dual DVI DisplayPort PCI-E Graphics Card
How will that stack up against the nVidia 9800GT 512MB that I'm probably removing?

I thought the 6000 series AMD cards can all drive 3 monitors with their "Eyefinity"? Assuming you can find one that isn't crawling with displayport connectors. Perhaps someone on here has actually tried it, I have only read about it.

9800GT is about on par with an ATI6570, allowing for a slight boost over an 8800GT (as 9800 isn't listed any more).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4278/a...deon-hd-6570/4

So a modern mid-range single card should see off a pair of 9800GTs, giving an easier choice of a single card in a dual slot format which most come in these days.

As for the sparks, look for scorch marks on the motherboard. It will probably be quite obvious. Now that might have caused the PSU to fail, or it might have been caused by a failing PSU. Never can tell with these things.

If it was just the PSU failing, then the motherboard will have hopefully protected the CPU and RAM.

You can get a new SX48P2E for around £170:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/145419

Remember that the Shuttle SX58J3 uses a steel case unlike the SX58H7 and SX58H7 Pro.

I currently own an SD37P2 myself with a Q6600 and an HD5850 but I would serious consider looking at Silverstone SG07 or Lian Li Q08 too. You could get a mini-ITX H67 motherboard and a core i7 2600 which will be faster than a Core i7 950 and cheaper overall.