CAD work

[Arct1k]

The shuttle will take 45nm chips - Q9440/9550 - the Q6600 that is a little old now - The newer ships will use less power which is good for a shuttle (i've built two shuttles before - my wife still uses one)

If you want the full 4GB you will need to look at running a 64bit OS

The built in graphics will be ok but not up to gaming...

Rather than a Raptor (again this is the older model) it might be worth looking at some of the 750/1tb drives they actually have great transfer rates acres of storage
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148274

Originally Posted by Arct1k

Did you have a specific MB that restricted you to the Q6600 that is a little old now - I would have gone for a 45nm chip...

If you want the full 4GB you will need to look at running a 64bit OS - What graphics card do you have?

nope, price at the moment. and I figured quad would be better than a slightly higher clock on a duo chip. I'm not sure. I do alot of encoding and rendering. if I feel it's still too slow, I'll get a faster chip. the shuttle barebones comes with a motherboard, with onboard video, vga, AND dvi.. i'm already running dual monitors, so I thought that would work perfect.. but now that you ask, I realize that the onboard video might not support solidworks' "realview".. I've got an nVidia 7600gs, not sure if that works, or if I can edit the driver to make it a "quadro".
my current pc has an ATI 9800pro in it mod'd to a "FireGL X2", and it works great, but it's an agp card.

and 64bit, yes :)

Originally Posted by Arct1k

The shuttle will take 45nm chips - Q9440/9550 - the Q6600 that is a little old now - The newer ships will use less power which is good for a shuttle (i've built two shuttles before - my wife still uses one)

If you want the full 4GB you will need to look at running a 64bit OS

The built in graphics will be ok but not up to gaming...

Rather than a Raptor (again this is the older model) it might be worth looking at some of the 750/1tb drives they actually have great transfer rates acres of storage
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148274

I was thinking I'd just use a spare ~400W psu if the included one isn't stable.
I don't need any storage, I wanted a FAST drive.. but just not scsi fast ;). my other computer's a mini server with 9 hard drives ~3.5TB.