Shuttle - Good for Gaming????

MR DAZ

Yeah....thanks anyway David.

MR DAZ

System crashed again ...with the covers off
So back to the drawing boards, I've tried about everything that i can find in the sudhian forums but to no avail.....

One last thing I might try this evening, i found this thread...

"Hello,

I realise that I cannot be of much help, since I don't have any experience with your particular model of PC. However, I had the exact same problems with my (new) ABIT 9600XT VIO card and my (new) Shuttle SN85G4L (boo..hiss!). I scoured many forums looking for possible solutions... Here is what 'could have been causing my problem' and what I tried to resolve it in rough order:

Drivers - I reformated/reinstalled a half dozen times. No-Go.

Heat - I removed the case and pointed a 16 inch desk fan at the powersupply side of the PC, blowing air over the CPU. No-Go.

Memory - Memtest86 for a day. Tried using one stick of RAM at a time. Tried alternating DDR slots. No-Go.

Power Shortage - I bought a 480 watt Thermaltake PSU. No-Go.

Faulty Motherboard - I bought an ASUS K8V SE motherboard. Wasn't gonna RMA the Shuttle if I wasn't certain. God, this transfer of hardware was a damn pain! No-Go.

At this point I was beyond peed-off. I was going to buy a sledgehammer and smash the crap to bits... Then I noticed something in the ASUS manual. It went something like "This motherboard only supports 1.5volt AGP cards. Do not use 3.3 volt cards with this machine." I was like "WTF? I didn't know that they made AGP cards requiring different voltages." I checked the Shuttle manual and saw no mention of AGP voltages. Since I've already dumped months of work/paychecks into this machine, would buying another new video card be too much of a bother? For reference, the manual indicated that 1.5volt AGP cards were the ones with 3 banks of contacts, 3.3volt cards only had two banks of contacts.

I bought a crumby Gainward FX5700 card and behold! I had a working computer that didn't crash while playing Far Cry, etc. I haven't tried putting anything back into the Shuttle, since it was such a pain getting the SATA drive to work with the ASUS board, but I suspect that everything would work fine in there as well.

My advice: Don't overlook the obvious. Check to make certain that your machine supports your video card 100%. If you only crash in games (like I did), you may have the same sort of problem... "


Could this be my problem???

My card has two banks of contacts, What do you guys think???
This is driving me nuts......Also I played at the weekend just using the onboards graphics no problems at all(battlefield vietnam)

davidclayton

well it looks like he might be right.
i'd email off to shuttle asking about 1.5/3.3V gfx compatability.
to be honest this is now a bit out of my knowledge,
so my only suggestion is to email shuttle and try to get a lend of a different gfx card to test.

dave

unkel

davidclayton wrote:

well it looks like he might be right

He's not. Your mobo might only support 1.5v cards, but that only means you can't use the older 3.3v cards. You can still use the new 0.8v cards

There are 3 versions of AGP:

AGP 1 Ancient 3.3v cards - from the nineties mainly
AGP 2 1.5v
AGP 3 Since last year 0.8v (9800xt is AGP 3 0.8v card)

It is very unlikely but possible that the mobo and the graphics card just conflict. I have had that once with the notoriously difficult nforce1 mobo. There was nothing that could be done about it, but change the graphics card

Most likely the problem is heat related - you'll have to buy yourself some cooling

davidclayton

if you could get your hands on another stock cooled 9800xt to compare,
and check for conflicts, you'd have a better picture.
[easier said than done though]

MR DAZ

Thanks for the help lads...

I'm going to contact shuttle and ask thier opinon etc....but if I get no Joy, I'll prob RMA back to komplett.ie, because there isnt much more I can do really

What I've done so far:

Swapped memory,processors,graphics card,

I put a gforce 3Ti500 in last night and the same thing happened.....

I ran memtest 86 overnight no errors

I've updated board drivers, flashed upto the latest bios,

I tried every tip I could find on various forums froms

Left the case off and tried to play without the case on

I had sp2 installed, I removed it....reinstalled windows and then installed sp1....no change

The only time the system doesnt crash is when its run off he onboard graphics....which is horrible for games


Is there much more I can try......

davidclayton

kick it?

MR DAZ

WOOOHOOO......its fixed ...well kinda

Thanks lads for all the help.

Solution:

Set the agp speed back to 4x from 8x in the driver settings and it works fine

But at least its not crashing during games anymore.


Cheers for the help

Dazza

MR DAZ

I should have added that there was a few things causing the system to hang.

a) Like mentioned in the above post the agp setting @ 8x

and

b) When the cover is on it bombs out during games


it was hard to figure it out as I original thought is was a heat problem..and so did yee

but kept hanging with the case off as well....and it was the same type of crash.

So I was more than stumped.


So i have ordered the the cover with the mesh sides , which I'd say should fix my problem with the heat


But all in all its working fine playing games with the cover off.

Soz for boring ya all this last few weeks

davidclayton

(i'll bet you kicked it)

MR DAZ

More than Once!