This is one of those things I’m posting solely for the purpose of perhaps saving someone else the same headache I’m now going through because I wasn’t able to find this information when I was searching. In a nutshell: I wanted to get the fastest, but completely silent, video card that I could find for the Shuttle SD39P2 system I was putting together. I looked at every option on the market, and it boiled down to one: the XFX GeForce 7950GT, a passively-cooled card that out-performed the 8000 series cards that were passively cooled. I knew it had a “big” heatsink and cooling fans, but I wasn’t sure how big. I also knew the SD39P2, like all Shuttle XPCs, was “small” – but that’s a relative term and I couldn’t find out how much space there was on all sides of the PCI Express slot. So I took a leap of faith and ordered this card for $325 and when it arrived I tried to install it. It would not fit. The picture pretty much says it all:
The heat pipes connect to the radiator and it sticks out the back a good 2cm or so, making it impossible to put the case back on. So scratch that plan, it looks like I’ll be putting this 7950GT in my big tower and I’ll either put the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro in the Shuttle, or perhaps sell it on eBay and get a new 8000 series passively cooled card. And I’m still waiting for a new SD39P2 to come my way – this project is turning out to be a bit of a nightmare…