Ooh that should be fun; I have an 8800GT SLI setup and it's still very capable (especially for me, who doesn't buy that many new games). Heck even my single 9600GSO (the good version that's basically an 8800GT with 6 RAM chips) was really performing fine in my main rig when my 6870 was out of commission for awhile; just cranked down AA and was good to go in everything I play.

CapnCrunch53 wrote:

Ooh that should be fun; I have an 8800GT SLI setup and it's still very capable (especially for me, who doesn't buy that many new games). Heck even my single 9600GSO (the good version that's basically an 8800GT with 6 RAM chips) was really performing fine in my main rig when my 6870 was out of commission for awhile; just cranked down AA and was good to go in everything I play.

Yea, I'm pretty excited! Hopefully it works. I just cleaned out a TON of burnt dust from my existing 8800GTS. I really liked this card back in the day. I could run just about anything MAX, except Crysis.

Now that I think about, my current PSU probably can't handle SLI..
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16817104953

I guess I'll swap out the one in my Retro-Ghetto rig and see what happens
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16817171046

Yeah both of those dust busters will be using around 270 watts. Your PSU will also need two PCI-E power connectors (surprised they didn't use a P5 like the quadros: which use 200 watts for just one card opposed to two).

I still have my pair of 8800 GTS 320 meg cards put away. Good classic cards. I had been considering selling or trading them off, because I have a pair of GTS 280 cards now for older SLI tech.

Those were the days, back then when people had an 8800 (didn't matter which one) people were very quick to envy or drool.
Good luck with your rig 😀

Nice!

I remember periods of certain "value cards" offering incredible SLI bang for buck. 9600GT SLI or 8800GT SLI come to mind.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Nice!

I remember periods of certain "value cards" offering incredible SLI bang for buck. 9600GT SLI or 8800GT SLI come to mind.

WoWcrack melted my 7800GT. I paid full retail for the best card I could find that same day.. enters the 8800GTS.

USPS is taking their sweet time! :p

simbin wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Nice!

I remember periods of certain "value cards" offering incredible SLI bang for buck. 9600GT SLI or 8800GT SLI come to mind.

WoWcrack melted my 7800GT. I paid full retail for the best card I could find that same day.. enters the 8800GTS.

Just couldn't go more than a day without the grind ... ^^

£600 for the TNT2 Ultra? I'LL TAKE IT!!!

Iris030380 wrote:

simbin wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Nice!

I remember periods of certain "value cards" offering incredible SLI bang for buck. 9600GT SLI or 8800GT SLI come to mind.

WoWcrack melted my 7800GT. I paid full retail for the best card I could find that same day.. enters the 8800GTS.

Just couldn't go more than a day without the grind ... ^^

£600 for the TNT2 Ultra? I'LL TAKE IT!!!

Yeah, I was a WoWcrack-head back then!!

Looking like a no go.. there's a rusty screw that wasn't shown in the pics.. I can only imagine the condition under the fan shroud.. Maybe I can clean it up.. I don't know. I'm just glad it didn't blow up the computer I tested it on. I freaked out when I first plugged it in w/o the 6-pin connector LOUD SQUEAL !!

CapnCrunch53 wrote:

Ooh that should be fun; I have an 8800GT SLI setup and it's still very capable (especially for me, who doesn't buy that many new games). Heck even my single 9600GSO (the good version that's basically an 8800GT with 6 RAM chips) was really performing fine in my main rig when my 6870 was out of commission for awhile; just cranked down AA and was good to go in everything I play.

My brother is running my old 9600Gt which i have running at 800mhz core clock, i can't remember the shader clock but, it's well over 1 ghz, all while on stock cooling and volts at nice 30-45c, and it is single slot at that. 😎

I'm thinking about making this into a Linux/XP gaming rig. Can't wait to see all the Steam games come to Linux! Windows 8 feels like a PoS!

simbin wrote:

I'm thinking about making this into a Linux/XP gaming rig. Can't wait to see all the Steam games come to Linux! Windows 8 feels like a PoS!

Well that will probably be some time.

As stated by Valve, they are working to make all thier games work with the Linux Steam Client, as for other game developers/publishers ?

Well I'm not holding my breath.

As much as I want to go over to an all Linux environment, it's just something I can do as a gamer in the immediate future, not yet.

I may end up playing around with Ubuntu some more with Wine and see how that plays out for me 😉

@simbin, good luck on that card, it does appear to be only the ground plane ring that took the hit, however, sometimes with multi-layer circuit boards there could be another trace or two that got severed, most likley not since a large ground ring like that tends to be only connected to with ground traces, this however could be a potential issue if the ground plane traces got severed as well.

BigBodZod wrote:

Well that will probably be some time. […]
Show full quote

simbin wrote:

I'm thinking about making this into a Linux/XP gaming rig. Can't wait to see all the Steam games come to Linux! Windows 8 feels like a PoS!

Well that will probably be some time.

As stated by Valve, they are working to make all thier games work with the Linux Steam Client, as for other game developers/publishers ?

Well I'm not holding my breath.

As much as I want to go over to an all Linux environment, it's just something I can do as a gamer in the immediate future, not yet.

I may end up playing around with Ubuntu some more with Wine and see how that plays out for me 😉

@simbin, good luck on that card, it does appear to be only the ground plane ring that took the hit, however, sometimes with multi-layer circuit boards there could be another trace or two that got severed, most likley not since a large ground ring like that tends to be only connected to with ground traces, this however could be a potential issue if the ground plane traces got severed as well.

I just signed up for the Steam Linux beta today. One of the questions asked if I used Wine to play Windows-based games in Linux. So I suspect this will be working sooner rather than later. Probably using custom scripts and such. A lot of games already work with Wine.. most people just lack the knowledge to tweak all the command-lines settings, etc.

I'm not so good with circuit boards, but I plan to disassemble everything an see if anything looks out of place. I already noticed a rusty-looking screw on the back of the card in addition to the damaged corner.

Yeah i'm kind of pissed atm because *buntu is hard locking on me with nvidia proprietary drivers. I really wanted to run Lubuntu on my brother back up machine (939/GTS250) since i already have some linux native games from the humble bundle. Really am/was looking forward to Steam for Linux.

cdoublejj wrote:

Yeah i'm kind of pissed atm because *buntu is hard locking on me with nvidia proprietary drivers. I really wanted to run Lubuntu on my brother back up machine (939/GTS250) since i already have some linux native games from the humble bundle. Really am/was looking forward to Steam for Linux.

I can't stand the whole Unity GDM and switched to Linux Mint. Something still didn't sit right with me, so now I'm running vanilla Debian. The only drawback I've found is that the official repositories are bit outdated, so you have to manually update your apps to their latest versions. If you've been using Ubuntu for a few yrs, you shouldn't have much trouble finding your way around in Debian. It's just a little rougher around the edges. I use Lubuntu on an older laptop. It's good if you really want to go lightweight. Just keep in mind, virtually everything is stripped from it. I found myself installing several packages I didn't even know I had in Ubuntu -- basic core stuff. It also uses KDE GDM as default.

simbin wrote:

cdoublejj wrote:

Yeah i'm kind of pissed atm because *buntu is hard locking on me with nvidia proprietary drivers. I really wanted to run Lubuntu on my brother back up machine (939/GTS250) since i already have some linux native games from the humble bundle. Really am/was looking forward to Steam for Linux.

I can't stand the whole Unity GDM and switched to Linux Mint. Something still didn't sit right with me, so now I'm running vanilla Debian. The only drawback I've found is that the official repositories are bit outdated, so you have to manually update your apps to their latest versions. If you've been using Ubuntu for a few yrs, you shouldn't have much trouble finding your way around in Debian. It's just a little rougher around the edges. I use Lubuntu on an older laptop. It's good if you really want to go lightweight. Just keep in mind, virtually everything is stripped from it. I found myself installing several packages I didn't even know I had in Ubuntu -- basic core stuff. It also uses KDE GDM as default.

So my experience is with CentOS and Fedora Core 12/14 as I use these with our POS Servers that are installed on customer sites/locations.

Since I'm an old AmigaDOS and CLI user back from the CP/M days I really enjoy using the command line for the most part.

Now to get my feet wet in a nice *nix GUI should I just start downloading various distros and test them out or does somebody have a recommended distro like Ubuntu that works with WINE ?

I guess the thing would be which distro has the best support for either an AMD Radeon 6970 GPU or the nVidia 465 GPU ?

If the nVidia drivers are giving you grief in Ubuntu, there's a good chance they'll give you grief in Debian.

In terms of GPU support, all distributions use the same closed source binary blobs for drivers. I have heard that ATi has open source drivers now, but I don't know anything else about them. Might be something to check out.