Thinking about grabbing one of these to act as my 2nd system for
soft-synth and MPEG encoding (not at the same time mind you).

I had problems on my current Athlon board with GeForce video, 3 hard
drives, CDR, sound card, LAN card, USB2.0 card, 1394 card... it would
lock up regularly until I went from a 300W PS to 400W.

Some of the barebones systems only have 200W PS, and while I imagine
that I could strip it down to 2 hard drives (one on mobile dock),
eliminate the CDR (I have an external USB unit), and skip the 1394,
USB, and LAN cards (they're built in to newer mobo), I would still
like to use my AudioPhile 2496 sound/MIDI card. Video card is of no
great import, as I am not going to play games on this system.

But I have real doubts that a 200W PS is going to cut it with a 2.4
GHz P4, 512MB of DDR400 RAM, possible overclocking (though I don't
tend to do that anymore). Anyone care to relate personal experience
with one of these "Ice Cubes"?

I just bought the shuttle sn45g but I'm yet to fill it out with
components. I bought it exactly for the reasons of having a portable
studio and for playing softsynths live, as well as other progs. I'm
also going to flog it as a vj/mpeg player for live gigs where I'm a
lighting tech - i.e as a source player for projections. While it is
only a 200 watt power supply I researched heavily before commiting and
I'm pretty confident it will do the job. It is built for power. Stay
in touch if you want to see how I go.

Simon

"Gary" wrote in message
om...

But I have real doubts that a 200W PS is going to cut it with a 2.4
GHz P4, 512MB of DDR400 RAM, possible overclocking (though I don't
tend to do that anymore). Anyone care to relate personal experience
with one of these "Ice Cubes"?

I suggest you browse the forums here at
http://www.msi.com.tw/program/service/forum/ , since getting the Neo board I
visit the Intel based forums, but they also have AMD-oriented areas too. The
point is that there's a LOT of discussion about how much power your PS needs
to put out, and how many amps on the various rails, in order to power just
your CPU, chipset, drives and RAM. I wouldn't spec less than 400 watts for a
P4 with any appreciable amount of RAM. I have a P2.8 with a gig of RAM and 2
HDs, and I feel my 420W supply may be a little weak. Dunno how recording
stresses your hardware compared to Photoshop or gaming, which is what I
mostly do.

While i'm still yet to spec out my shuttle these units were
specifically designed for gaming and overclocking. They have been well
tested and benchmarked with no-one yet talking about the lack of
power. It will be interesting to see how they shape up with audio
systems cause these little babes are the immediate future of
computing.

Simon