SFF gaming on the cheap

J

jack9800XT

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 7, 2004
Messages
98
I want to make a lite gaming rig to carry around to friends' house for lan gaming as well as the occasionbaly lan party. Ideally I want the absolute cheapest SFF I can get and still be able to play newer games (i have an x800pro that i can slap in there but thats ALL that i have).

I have seen alot of shuttles around at good price, any recommendations what to get/not get?

also, newegg doesn't ship to canada :(
 
i got my biostar iDEQ from exaliberPC for like $170 shipped (model 200vb) love this thing, very well made. check it out.
 
biostar seems to have the _best cheapest_ sff around. i picked up my 200v from newegg for $155 USD. I've seen them on ebay around $170 so if you can get them to ship to Canada. Although I did have lots of trouble getting my 8500 128mb in there. It took about 2 hours of fiddling and taking nearly everything out. And you'd need a desktop XP or wire trick a XP-M. I did the latter and run at 2.08ghz off a 2200+ 35w just fine with 512mb Cosair Value PC3200. The gig of unknown brand I had in there before crashed at 2.08ghz and would only run with it set to 1.666ghz (yeah it showed up in bios as a 1.666 not 1.667 :cool: )

i have no experience with shuttles but most of them come with a bigger PS than the biostars, which you can get a 250w power supply for them for about $55 USD more. They also might fit the larger graphic cards better. As I understand, a lot of the newer companies in SFF have problems with heat so the temp stays up a lot more. I generally run at 48c and into the low 50s under a full load. Which I don't consider too bad considering my old mid size tower with a huge ass thermaltake hsf, 750 duron, and 2 case fans with the sides off still ran about the same temp if not more some of the time.
 
why not just build a machine you're going to be happy gaming on instead of something that will just "get by"? when i put my shuttle together i built it to around the same specs as my desktop and now i've migrated to a shuttle completely. handles all my gaming and workstation needs.

proc a64 3400+
gpu 6800gt
1gb ddr
storage = 500gb
dvdrw

what else would you need in a pc?

cheap is good but not when you want to seriously play some games.
 
thanks for all the suggestions but I alrady have a main gaming rig

Athlon64 3500+
1 gig OCZ pc 3200
Radeon X800pro

I just want this to lug around mostly so cheap is very important.

I got a great deal on X800's from a friend who owns a store ($350 CDN for retail box ~$260 USD :p) so I am not toatlly cheaping out but I do want the cheapest

What are some recommended models of shuttle? Those biostar SFF seem so cheap and to be too good to be true, are the temps really that bad or is there any other problems with them?

Thanks for all the imput
 
hold on, you already have good components all you need is the case. if you got the s939 shuttle then you would be happier than if you spent the extra for a lower-grade shuttle w/ all the extra stuff (proc, ddr)

are you saying you would rather build a seperate comp and spend ~$500 than use your existing components, have a bad ass shuttle, and spend ~300?

IMO unless you have more than 2 hdds and 2+ optical drives then you have no real excuse NOT to migrate completely to the sff.
 
well... the reason is that I want another pc that I would mostly use as a lan gamer and i would let the girlfriend use and such.... my main rig has an asus a8v wifi that i use as well as a nice slightly modded antec sonata.

but aside from that are there any more model suggestions?? would there be any reason to go for a p4 based system? There are some VERY cheap models that have a 4x AGP which would probably not really be of much use right?

how is overclocking on some of the shuttle/biostar barebones?

I might have gotten my hands on a A64 3000+, any good suggestions for s754?
 
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