ZOTAC GeForce 9300-ITX WiFi

My SG05 just arrived today. My 9300-ITX comes next week. I've got the chassis stripped down and ready for some interior paint. Also gonna work on a mod to allow 2 3.5" HDD's, instead of just 1. Gonna sacrifice the DVD burner though.

What do you mean by "interior paint" ? Sorry, but I;m not familiar with modding stuff.
And yea, I think that's a good idea to get rid of the DVD bay.
For the few time I'd need a DVD drive, I could just plug one in.

I'm painting the interior of the case. It's bare metal when you get a case. I'm priming and painting it matte black

Wow, make sure to post some pics about it, otherwise it never happened ...

Have you guys seen the Gigabyte 4850 passively cooled? That heatsink is so sweet. Looks like a great fit with SG05's intake fan!
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...ve-review.html

I think I will order one Vertex SSD drive (60GB) from OCZ together with the Zotac motherboard.

Any objections ?

Anyone get the audio working with Windows 7 x64 Beta build?
If so what drivers did you load?

I think I got it to work with the one that is on the CD with Vista compatibility.

Yea, I had to set compatibility mode to Vista then run it.
Default it is set to XP. Now it is Windows 7 with audio and sweet!

Is anyone else having smart fan issues with this motherboard? I can't get the PC health status menu to show up in BIOS, and my fans are REALLY loud. I tried a BIOS update, and talked to a Zotac rep, who said that they disabled the smart fan function, and the OC functions as well, because people were toasting the boards. I'm skeptical at the least. Considering the fact that he just walked away from our conversation without really giving me an answer, I wanna know what other owners of this board have.

Just using it as a temporary holder for some of the stuff going into out (Geno and mine) Star Trek project. I will take this to a small LAN party tomorrow. It has a QX9650 (having issues with clocks on the Zotac 9300 mini-ITX mobo) and Geforce 280 . . .Silverstone Zeus 1200 M PSU. Need to clock it correctly I guess . . . .only 6-9 multiplier available . . . .

Awesome rig you have there DarthBeavis!

A PC case made of plexiglass !
Is that custom built ? Awesome idea. I have vivid images about what I would like to design.
Wasn't that difficult to glue together ?
But what about fingerprints ... easy to keep clean ? I'm getting exited.

Originally Posted by Cov

A PC case made of plexiglass !
Is that custom built ? Awesome idea. I have vivid images about what I would like to design.
Wasn't that difficult to glue together ?
But what about fingerprints ... easy to keep clean ? I'm getting exited.

That is a customized Danger Den Torture rack. No glue. It goes together with screws and nuts.

Are there two hard drives and one DVD drive in that case? How did you do that? There are only two SATA ports on the zotac... did you attach one by USB port?

Originally Posted by Potato

Are there two hard drives and one DVD drive in that case? How did you do that? There are only two SATA ports on the zotac... did you attach one by USB port?

The Zotac has an eSATA port on the back panel. Probably attached the optical drive to that.

Second drive not attached. One has Win 7 one Vista

What fans are those on the back of the rad's... AC Ryans?

I'm trying to find a cool fan for the front of an SG05... simple LED's to show through the grills being the only light in the case...

Was thinking of going with White LED's.

Right now I got the build priced at $600 with a 500GB Laptop drive, 4GB ram, 9300 Zotac, EVGA GTS250, Silverstone SG05, Sony Slim Slot-loading DVD burner, Gemini II S, and some other misc stuff... then finally the processor (Depending if I buy used or not) should bring it up to $680-700 for an E7200.

The idea was to remove the 3.5" HDD cage and use the laptop drive instead... should be fairly quiet, just depends on what I put up front for the 120 I think.

Anyone having BIOS issues with this board?

I've spent the better part of this week trying to track down why my new HTPC build's audio occasionally stutters during SPDIF playback of dolby/dts encoded streams. It is completely random, does not coincide with any kind of video slowdown or stutter and ONLY does it with SPDIF passthrough of 5.1+ streams. It's just a very slight random "skip" of the audio cutting out for a split second then right back to business. I've checked latency on the computer and Windows XP/Vista/7 with a multitude of drivers/codec packs/media players etc etc. Now here's the kicker;

If I take the case enclosure off, it stops skipping.

Now, the computer IS a tiny HTPC build using the Zotac 9300 board in an Apex MI-100 enclosure (pretty cramped). However, I have already done a lot of things to make sure airflow in the case is adequate, so much so that without further extensive modding, I do not see how I can reduce the heat any more.

Has anyone ever heard of an issue like this? I don't understand how a difference of a few degrees could be causing such a problem. Could it just be a faulty/finicky board? Everything else is flawless. In fact I can play back full 1080p rips and never see CPU usage over 50%. I've pegged prime95 on both cores while playing back these rips and the video was still smooth. Never BSOD'd, hasn't been overclocked, memtest passes, prime95 stable for 12 hours.

The temps DO get a little warm. With the case enclosure on, the e5200 45nm chip sits @ 50C idle and can reach up to 58-60C during playback. With the enclosure off, the temperature drops ~8 degrees on both idle and playback.

I am using a Silverstone NT07 on the cpu for cooling and there are two 120MM fans providing airflow from the sides of the case. I relocated the hard drive to the bottom of the case with rubber standoffs to create air pockets above and beneath it. I even created a little "cubby" for all the wiring so it's all out of the way as much as possible.

I really am out of ideas. Is it the ambient case temp causing the onboard sound to get hot and cause errors? All I am doing is passing the dolby/dts signal through optical so my receiver can decode it. I've tried 5 different cables including coax with same results.

My OCD won't let me rest until this is fixed, help me [H]!