Shuttle SN26P & nVidia 8800 GTS

Very recently I was able to get a hold of a new Shuttle SN26P for just under a third of what it initially cost. Ofcourse, it's been on the market for more than two years and the only reason I got this price was the fact that it was the last one that shop had on offer. Never mind.

I plugged in an Athlon X2 3800, two strips of Kingston HyperX memory (2 x 1024 MB), a Western Digital Raptor disk, a NEC DVD burner and - to finish it off - a XFX 8800 GTS (320 MB) card I'd also bought. I intended this to be a small games machine.

The system has a 350 watt power supply and after removing a small plastic clip used to bundle some cables the card fit perfectly.

I did some testing with memtest86+ to see how far I could overclock the CPU. The CPU could easily be overclocked to 2.4 GHz and beyond without breaking a sweat, but the memory was being a bit troublesome.

I installed Windows XP, heaps of drivers and then I was ready to install the video drivers. Right after the installer tried to initialize the video card, the screen went blank and after about 30 seconds the machine rebooted.

After a lot of testing, minimizing the power draw on the PSU (underclocking the CPU, using a less power-hungry harddrive, etc.) there was no way I could get the thing to run anything more than text or 2D.

After reading reviews I had concluded that the machine should be able to run a single 8800 GTS, since it was appearently able to run one or two 7800- or 7900-class cards. I was wrong.

However, in another system with a fanless 300 watt Silverstone ST30F it worked without any problems. I guess not all power supplies are created equal. Appearently there is a 400 watt replacement PSU (part number PS-400W) but it costs almost as much as I paid for the whole system and I have no guarantee it will work.

Oh well, you win some and you loose some. For the price it is a really nice system. Not the most quiet system I have, but it looks nice, it is cleverly designed and the system is easy to work with (upgrades, etc).