Shuttle Zen (ST62k) Fan Failures - Widespread Or Rare?

[contrex]

Some people allege that Shuttle Zens have a bad flaw, which means that sooner or later the cpu fan and/or header will fail. Curiously, you only read about this on one particular forum, and nowhere else. If it is as bad as these guys say, you'd think there would be complaints and warnings everywhere. I don't understand why this might be. Anybody on here had any troubles with Zens?

Mine has worked fine for well over 12 months so far.

[torg]

I've lost two CPU's to this POS system. One time I had to carry it outside with oven mitts because it was so hot.

[contrex]

My ST62K has now been working fine for over 2 years. Definitely not a POS.

[Oakey]

Seems like Shuttle love to design their systems with huge design flaws (see my post below)

[torg]

My ST62K has now been working fine for over 2 years. Definitely not a POS.

well.. when it becomes a fire hazard it's a POS by default. I've had 3 shuttles, never EVER buying another.

[contrex]

well.. when it becomes a fire hazard it's a POS by default. I've had 3 shuttles, never EVER buying another.

Mine's been going nearly 3 years now (31 months) and still absolutely fine. A bad workman blames his tools.

[torg]

Mine's been going nearly 3 years now (31 months) and still absolutely fine. A bad workman blames his tools.

Just because yours works doesn't mean others aren't having problems. Trust me, I'm not a bad workman. I know bad hardware when I see it, I've been dealing with it long enough.

I've already replaced one of my shuttles with a homebuilt system (non-shuttle) and zero problems, couldn't be happier. As my other two fail I'll do the same to them.

Now go flame someone else

[jamshid]

Hey man you're not crazy, the Shuttle Zen does have fan and/or header problems.

Bought mine in November 2004. The fan's internal power connection went dead in July 2005 (still under warranty, fortunately). Shuttle support told me to just move it to another head. That went dead in September 2006. Fortunately Support didn't charge me to replace the motherboard, I guess since the original problem was reported under warranty. Or maybe they know these machines had problems.

Yeah, when the Zen fan dies, it's not obvious (since the machine is pretty quiet), but it starts rebooting and hanging and gets hot enough to start a fire.

I sure like the size of the box, but I don't think I'd recommend it, had lots of trouble with it and Firewire drives ("Delayed Write Failed") and I could not make it into a home theater PC with my widescreen LCD. I installed a Radeon X1300 PCI card and could get everything working except DVD video playback was choppy/scrambled.

Yeah, it would be nice if there was a single forum to report problems like this. I miss USENET sometimes. ;-)