Upgrading & improving a shuttle SB87G5 to its limits.

[jrturbo]

Hi Guys

Some time ago I bought a second hand shuttle SB87G5 as a back up computer for my work, and I was imressed that it still worked well and had no problems, never the less it had been used an HTPC with W7.

When I bought it it came with the following spec

 P4 3.06 ghz 533fsb Northwood cpu
 1 gb of ram (2x512mb sticks)
 1 ATI 1650 graphic card
 TV nuner card analog and DTV
 1x 80gb ata hard drive
 DVD recorder ATA optical drive
 3.5 multi card reader
 optional case cover with mesh windows

Although everything worked, as you can imagine it wasnt exactly blazing fast with the above components, but I had in mind giving it to my daughter as her first computer, and she only uses it for web surfing and school work, so she doent need the latest hardware and felt that with few upgrades I could make a reasonable improvement and keep it usefull with out spending a fortune on it, and by the way according to W7 performance index the weakest scores where the Cpu and the memory.

The first I looked at was the memory, and lucky for me I swaped the mememory from my work computer and intalled 2 gb of ram kingston (2 x 1gb) this made a noticeable improvement to the speed of the computer, next I looked was the cpu, and had a go at overclocking it, did not hold much hope since there is no provision for cpu or ram voltage adjustment, but surprisingly it allowed to me to go from 133  fsb to 167 fsb, the max the bios would allow, this meant cpu was running now a 3.6 ghz not a bad overclock. another jump in performance at the expense of having to run ice cooler fan at high speed to keep temps under manageable, I had another cpu from another computer a p4 630 prescott 3 ghz 2mb 800 fsb, gave that a go a found I could overclock up to 230 fsb, the max the bios will allow you, giving me a 3.45ghz, performance felt the same but it had the same problem as the other cpu that it required a high fan speed to keep things cool.

Out came the dremel, I cut the rear exit grill of the ice cooler and installed a spare noctua fan I had spare on the outside of the rear case in push pull configuration that allowed me to select smart fan again and bring the noise down.
I also installed a zalman heatsink to the northbridge, I removed the TV tuner card and installed a pci Wifi card in its place.

Next Item on the agenda was the hard disk, so I hooked up a spare Velociraptor behind the card reader and did a fresh install of W7 another improvement in the performance  and now the noisest component in the computer is the ati cooling fan, took the graphic card apart cleaned the fan and lubed it this made a huge improvement to the noise but it still relatively noisy and the fan bearing looked like it has some play, so no doubt the noise will return soon.

So far I had not really spent any money on upgrades this box since I used components I already had in my posesion, so I decided to see what else could be done to it whilst spending as little as possible, I checked on shuttle website what was the fastest cpu suported by the motherboard and found it listed a p4 660, which is a 3.6ghz chip, but searching the clasifieds I found a p4 670 which runs at 3.8 ghz, although not officially suported by shutlle, I checked the specs of the processor and found it was a prescott chip with a higher multiplier so in theory it should work ok, I bought this cpu for 40 € and installed it, the shuttle booted up and the bios recognized the cpu correctly as did windows, this chip has speed step which means that when its  idle or under light load it drops to multiplier 14x200fsb= 2.8 ghz and under load it runs multiplier 19x200fsb= 3.8 ghz.

So far so good, since the p4 630 would overclcok up to 230 fsb, I was curious to see how far the 670 would overclcock, well I got up 218 fsb, but any faster than  this and it would not boot or it would freeze looding windows, since the board has no voltage adjustments, I tried turning the cooling fan up to full speed, this allowed me to reach 220 fsb or 4.18 ghz, giving me hope of a higher overclock if I can improve the cooling in some way(not much scope here, I allready have 2 fans on the ice cooler) so in the meantime the fsb stays at 218 fsb.

Regarding the graphic card, I decided to invest in a current card, taking into consideration the limitations imposed by shuttle, which requires a single slot card and no pci express power connector, this means that the most powerfull graphic card you can install is an ati/amd 6670 with 1gb of GDDR5 memory, the problem is that for some reason graphic card manufacturers have decided to sell this card with a double slot cooler and only make the DDR3 version as a single slot, the ddr3 memory cripples this card, so I decided to buy a 6670 1gb gddr5 version and I shall seek a cooling solution that fits within the case, and one posibility is to fit a zalman passive cooler VNF100, I shall have to wait for the card to arrive first and see how much space I have to play with.

There is one more upgrade I am considering and thats installing a SSD, having seen the improvement in speed it brought to my other shuttle, it would help counter the limnited system memory and the slow cpu performance of its p4 even overclocked when you compare it to more modern processors.

In the meantime I have some ideas I am going to try to improve the cooling, my next step is to lap the cpu, this will hopefully let me raise the FSB up to 220 without having to turn up the fan speeds, I might even try the h60 water cooling from my other shuttle to see if it can be cpu can be maxed out to 230 fsb limiton of the motherboard which with a 19 multiplier on the cpu would give me 4.37 ghz although this looks to me like a lot of effort for the return.

I will post some photo as a i get the chance.

Regards

Joe Rubido

[daboggeyman]

Sounds like your on the right track so I see no need for suggestions , keep us updated 

[jrturbo]

Hi Guys

A further update on my little adventure

I have recieved the Graphic card an HIS Amd 6670 1gb Gddr5, and it uses a stupid double slot cooler, which although quiet, there is no reason why they cant fit a single slot cooler as they do on the DDR3 version which runs the same gpu core speed, things like this really get on my back specially considering that XFX has 6750 amd 6770 available as single slot and that is more powerfull card.

Well trying to find a decent single slot cooler as an aftermarket accesory is a nightmare as everything is geared towards double slot coolers and in some cases they ocupy three slots, or realy small coolers that use push pins, I know of one passive cooler which would get the job done and also fit and thats a zalman VNF100, what I am not so keen on is spending 30 Euros + shipping, I am thinking about a solution. let just say work in progress on this front.


I know that the overclocking facilities on this board are very poor, but I am begining to think that the motherboard is not much better than the bios, and then you find out that shuttle has never released a single bios update for this model, so its not very promising, with other cpu I and the same memory as is installed currently I have reached 230 mhz FSB and it has been stable although running hot, now I have installed a 3.8 ghz cpu and the max FSB I use was 220 mhz and this required fans at max speed and an open case, this led me to beleive that perhaps by improving the cooling It might let me push things a little further.

So removed the Cpu for Laping, I have laped the cpu and the Ice Cooler, re installed and temps where lower than before and I could push the overclock a little further, It would even boot into windows at 225 mhz fsb, but soon after it would freeze followed by BSOD, so not a huge improvement there either.

So to cheer myself up, I did something else that could not fail, and that was to do install an X25m 160gb SSD and proceed with a clean installation of windows 7 with all its updates and service pack 1 to ensure Trim would be enabled, and this upgrade is really noticeable, and this is considering that the previous hard drive was 10k rpm Velociraptor and the motherboard is only Sata 1. but as you can all this updates take while to install , but early n I installed Speedfan to keep an eye over the temps, and there is a Temp 3 on speedfan which I not absolutly certain what it is, but after prolonged use the temp will get really hot, 80c when running overclocked and under load, as an experiment I placed a 120mm above the cpu socket and northbridge blowing cold air straight down to the motherboard and this brought the temp down to 40c, I tought that the solution then was to provide cooling airflow to the motherboard, I decide to relocate the hard drives to above the ice cooler where they do not interfere with the internal airflow, then cut the drive cage to secure to 100mm slim fans blowing down, this was a success as it would maintain the temp 3 around 60c, but I when I put the case on the temp 3 would slowly increase up to almost 90c, so the this fan arragement did not work very well with the case cover on the shuttle because the hot air would recirculate inside the case , and the ice fans would speed up to 2500 rpm to keep the cpu cool. so it looks like the motherboard basically cant handle the handle very well the power draw of an overclocked p4 prescott runing above 4ghz and probably pulling more than 100 watts.

I am going to remove everything again and try using some small heatsinks on the mosfetts, laping the zalman nb cooler and checking everything along the way just in case I missed something. I will post some photos tomorrow.

Regards

Joe Rubido

 

[jrturbo]

Hi guys

Some photos as promised of some of the things I have done to this shuttle SD87G5, by the way much of this would also apply to more modern versions, including some current ones, as the internal distibution of the components is similar.

Cut exit grill at the rear of the case for the ice cooler, this helps the fan push air throught the ice cooler and if you are after improving the cooling and lowering the noise level, a second fan for push pull configuration is the way to go and is quite easy to do since the same screws that hold the ice cooler shroud are used to secure the second fan, ideally you want to use a pwm splitter Y lead and 2 identical 92mm pwm fans. I went one step further on the cooling front and laped the cpu and the ice cooler. The cpu overclocked to 4.1 ghz now stays below 65 cº under load with the fans spin up 1600 rpm  at which speed the fans are reasonably quiet still quiet, compare this to the single original fan which would have to spin up to 2500 rpm to maintain the same temp.



I also fitted a zalman NB47 flower heatsink to the northbridge, this works far better than the orginal



In this model shuttle which is a 2005/6 model does not have any heatsinks in the VRM, with a lower power cpu this probably would not be much of problem but with a P4 670 which runs at 3.8ghz standard and in my case as fast as I can overclock it, the power draw does increase and the same time up goes the mb temp, in more modern units shuttle does cool the VRM, I used some spare heatsinks I had from Scythe kit, I decided to do this after intalling Speedfan programme, which reported a MB temp which is not reflected in the bios (the bios only shows NB and CPU) and that seemed to suffer from heat soak and after an hour of normal light usage would show a temp of nearly 90c !. I used the highly scientific method of using my finger to touch diferent parts and chips of the motherboard and the only thing that seemed abnormally hot was the VRM part of the MB, in actual fact by blowing my breath at the area of 3 blue electrolitic capacitors closest to the edge of the MB, would lower the temp almost inmediatly but requieres a strong airflow for it to have an effect, I decided to use the original fans from scythe mushashi vga cooler, these are 2 slim 100mm fans to blow down air onto the MB, I cut the bottom section of the hard drive cage and bolted both fans onto the cage and this solution seemed to work only with an open case, the moment the case cover was fitted the fans would not stop this misterious temp 3 from reaching 85º, so no real improvement, here is a photo of the set up I tried 

But now I knew the specific area I needed to cool down I have trieda selection of fans, and I have come up with another solution which involves a shroud and a 80mm fan, I have built a prototype with a cardbox and a spare 80mm fan if it works I shall refine the idea further.

Unfortunately the PSU has died on me, Trying to locate a replacement 250 watt psu, I have found one that seems a fairly good copy of the original for a lot less than what shuttle wants for a replacement psu and I shall have to wait for it arrive before I can continue testing.



I shall keep you guys updated

[jrturbo]

Hi Guys

Well the postman delivered yesterday a small parcel which looked too small to be psu, but I was wrong, indeed it was the replacement psu ordered from overtek,I checked the spec, and it was a 250 watt psu which was shorter and noticeably lighter than the original.

I installed the psu and found that it was also nice and quiet here is a photograph with both for comparison


The new psu got me thinking again about the cooling and deciced to take a similar solution I had implement in my other shuttle, which involves cutting the drive below the optical drive to improve internal airflow, by removing internal obstacles, I relocated the SSD and the Velociraptor to to sit above the  ice cooler and by sheer luck they perfectly.


Another benefit I had from cutting the drive cage was the space now avaible allowed to remove the VGA fan from the the cooler and relocated at the end of the card under the optical drive, here a photo




This arragement works surpringly well at keeping the card cool, keep in mind that this videocard doesnt draw a lot of power and the heatsink is quite large, in addtion it also helps with the internal airflow which is now a lot better due to the removal of the HD section of the cage. so I felt the improved airflow inside the case might keep things cool without the need for another fan to cool the VRM, it was worth a try I thought

View from the psu side



I fitted the casae cover with care noto dislodge the VGA fan and fired the shuttle up, started speed fan to check the temps, by the way the latest version also reports the Temps on AMD cards, so with one programe I can check all the relevant temperatures on the shuttle, speedfan reported a cpu temp of 57 c, northbridge 31 c, VGA 38 c and the VRM temp of 76 c at stock settings at idle , I tried overclocking and the max stable speed was 216 fsb which meant the cpu was at 4120 mhz, any further increases required upping the speed of the ice cooler fan and became noisy, I reckon I could improve the cooling by installing  2 pwm fans, at present its fitted with the original pwm fan on the ice cooler and a additional noctua 92 mm fan on the outside in a push pull configuration, this second fand is connected the 3 pin fan header on the motherboard with and adapter which lowers its speed to 1100 rpm at which speed it silent. The noisiest fan is the ice cooler fan, I have 2 suitable fans to replace them , a couple of scythe 92mm pwm fans, but the motherboard onlyhas 1 pwm header, so i need a pwm spliter lead first.

At present its perfectly useable as it is