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Comrades

I have taken on the task of helping a friend upgrade his Shuttle sb61g2 system (Radeon 9700, P4 2.8c). Despite being almost 6 years old, It's still a pretty good system and I am impressed with how solid and well built it is. But it needs some lov and tweaking at least, or an upgrade if possible. There are a couple of issues with it. Firstly, he's pretty much messed up his XP install, and he's seen my shiny Windows 7 installation and wants that running on it. Is it possible to install Win7 on this system? Would I use Vista drivers? There are no Shuttle specific drivers for Vista for this model. Would I just acquire the specific drivers from the manufacturer?

Secondly, the fans on this system have gotten loud and need to be replaced. Has anyone had any luck with opening up the PSU and replacing the fans on these with newer, quieter ones?

Finally, and I'm not expecting to hear good news on this, is it possible to put a new Mobo in this thing? A Zotac GeForce 9300-ITX, a C2D, and a passively cooled video card would be awesome in a small box like this.

My friend bought this system, at my recommendation, to play Starcraft on it, and besides websurfing, office, and media playback, Starcraft 2 is what he aims to do on it post-upgrade.

Any help appreciated.

Plazmo

1) Windows 7 might work, it looks like the Intel 865 chipset has driver support. Although its unlikely that Windows 7 will be faster than XP on this hardware. Just use the Shuttle website to identify who makes what components and download the drivers from the source. A new OS install would be good either way.

2) The power supply fan is an easy swap. Check out Sudhain shuttle forum for more info http://www.sudhian.com/index.php?/forums/viewforum/4/

3) Your out of luck trying to get a non shuttle motherboard into a shuttle, the shuttle G series cases are to small for even Mini ITX. You can buy replacement boards and power supply's both new and second hand, but your normally better off just buying a new shuttle.

As dragmore mentioned, Windows 7 should be fine with that hardware - although you don't mention how much RAM he has. If it's not 2GB +, I wouldn't bother with W7 or Vista over XP, as they'll just chug.

As to the upgrade, you're entirely out of luck I'm afraid =(. Mounting holes and everything are different for the "FlexATX" motherboards Shuttle uses. If you wanted to go with one of the Zotac boards and a discrete GPU, I would probably point you towards a Sugo SG05-B (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811163149), which is a Mini-ITX cube case w/PSU, space for a 9" graphics card (which is pretty much any of the mid-range ones) and a big 120mm fan which could be easily changed to something nice and quiet. The only downside being you'd also need to purchase a SATA laptop optical drive, which would set you back ~$50 more. Then there's the problem that the 9300-ITX doesn't have any IDE ports, so you'd need a new SATA HDD. You could go with either a 3.5" or 2.5" SATA HDD, as that case can hold either - 2.5" if noise is a major issue, 3.5" if capacity and speed are more preferred . I think that's all the potential downsides...

Radeon HD4870-1GB and HD4890 are 9½" long. Radeon HD3870X2, GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 275 are 10½" long

With the possible exception of the 3870X2, all of those I'd count as high-end parts o.o. Maybe I'm living in the past, heh.

By mid-range I was thinking of things like the 4830/50, 4770 or GTS 250.

i have a shuttle box with a 1.5ghz p4-m and 1gb ddr2 667....and it is running win7 32bit without issue. don't believe the people who say it won't be faster than xp on that old hardware....it will be and it will be noticeable too.

also i think u probably could cram a 9300 mini-itx in there with a bit of modding work....would recommend switching the psu too...the original shuttle psus have a tendency to crap out unceremoniously.