Surge, is that a 90s brand soda that is making a come back? 😉
Haven't tried it yet, who knows they maybe they will bring back Pepsi Crystal.

nforce4max wrote:

Surge, is that a 90s brand soda that is making a come back? 😉
Haven't tried it yet, who knows they maybe they will bring back Pepsi Crystal.

Yes! It's rare here where I'm at, I've only found it at one gas station and that's it. Thankfully they had tons of it 😁

nforce4max wrote:

Surge, is that a 90s brand soda that is making a come back? 😉
Haven't tried it yet, who knows they maybe they will bring back Pepsi Crystal.

Wish I had it here, prices online for it are INSANE !

Bullmecha wrote:

nforce4max wrote:

Surge, is that a 90s brand soda that is making a come back? 😉
Haven't tried it yet, who knows they maybe they will bring back Pepsi Crystal.

Wish I had it here, prices online for it are INSANE !

Tell me about it, Waco just sucks in general but when you want something nice it is either stupid expensive or they don't have it all. 😢

Uploading pics to Imgur of new hardware as I type this, this Surge tastes good too 😀 the second 7950 GX2 should be coming in tomorrow.

USPS brought me even more goodies today..

Comes with a handle? lmao. Note the rigid SLI bridge off to the right.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+

Notice that the rear fan is mounted as an intake, wanted to retain positive air pressure. CPU needed some extra cool air anyway. I also took the bottom 140mm fan out and replaced it with a 120mm fan.

Sound Blaster Audigy (SB0090)

I'm a little disappointed with the AMD stock cooler, temps look a little high while idling (go to link below for full resolution screen shot). The Windows XP theme is the Zune theme Microsoft gave away years back. Top CrystalDiskMark window is the boot 32GB SSD and the bottom is the 500GB storage HDD. This is excluding the second 7950GX2 (hasn't arrived yet).

http://i.imgur.com/4XEu3pL.png

Okay, the second 7950GX2 arrived today, it works great and thankfully not damaged (the box was literally half destroyed). But..

I'm not sure if this is a hardware issue with the motherboard or just a driver/software problem, but I can't get any piece of software (Nvidia Control Panel, 3DMark 06, GPU-Z, etc.) to recognize the second card, which is in the second PCIe x16 slot. The system recognizes the first two GPUs, both with and without the second card installed, and I can even swap the card's positions (move the bottom card to top slot and top card to bottom slot) and the issue still exists. I also have set the jumpers appropriately, the jumper settings can be found on page 21 of the user manual.

http://www.biostar-usa.com/app/en-us/mb/intro … php?S_ID=351#dl

I suspect that maybe it's just because I'm using 64-bit XP? May be a long shot, but I can dig up a spare HDD and load 32-bit XP and install the drivers to see if anything changes. I know the launch Forceware driver for the 7950GX2 (91.45) actually doesn't work with 64-bit XP. Thoughts?

At first you can try 32 Bit XP and with 91.45 driver and with 160.xx driver which is also good even for older games, also you can try Vista or 7 x64 or 32 bit version of these systems, and at beginning is good to use another disk for that.

Alright I'm installing XP 32-bit onto a spare drive, lets see how this goes. I'll be taking some more photos with most of the hardware installed, still missing the SATA card (shipped today) and some other little misc things.

I'm also updating the motherboard to the latest BIOS.

Alright I've updated the motherboard BIOS and the second card not being detected MUST be a motherboard issue, or there's something I'm doing wrong. XP 32-bit and 64-bit, along with Windows 10 only show half of the GPUs, regardless of which card is in the top slot. The SLI jumpers on the motherboard either set the lanes to x16/x0 or x8/x8. I can set it back to the normal position in case the manual and the silkscreen on the motherboard are labeled incorrectly, but most likely I think they're labeled correctly. Not really a whole lot of options left other than to get a new motherboard, which I'd rather not do. Any ideas?

This is so funny... I'm doing the exact thing right now: building the machine I had in late 2006. I went with a Core 2 Extreme X6800 and two 8800 GTXs. I still had my Pcpowerandcooling 1KW SR psu lying around. 😁

As for your issue, I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I see you've swapped card positions to no avail. With the jumpers set to x8/x8, have you used a SINGLE card in the second slot to test the functionality of that slot? Have you used any other cards in that slot? Test this out, and if you get no results, I'd lean towards a motherboard issue.

Yawnald wrote:

This is so funny... I'm doing the exact thing right now: building the machine I had in late 2006. I went with a Core 2 Extreme X6800 and two 8800 GTXs. I still had my Pcpowerandcooling 1KW SR psu lying around. 😁

As for your issue, I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I see you've swapped card positions to no avail. With the jumpers set to x8/x8, have you used a SINGLE card in the second slot to test the functionality of that slot? Have you used any other cards in that slot? Test this out, and if you get no results, I'd lean towards a motherboard issue.

Actually yes I have tried that and had no video output, although I'll give it another go. I can also take the GPU out and put in a wireless card I have lying around to test if it'll even work at x1 speed.

Haha, well isn't this embarrassing..

I was putting the GPUs back in when I noticed the small and super easy to miss "JPSLI9" and sure enough, that fixed the issue. Looking through the manual confirmed that I overlooked this jumper that was needed to also be set, ALWAYS THOROUGHLY READ THE MANUAL! I had to set it to the other position (it's a 3 pin jumper). Now running quad SLI! So glad that motherboards aren't like this nowadays haha.

Also, after class a few hours ago I went to Half Priced Books and picked up 12 or 13 PC games on clearance, $1 each! Most of them look horrible, there's even a Valusoft one in there. Most of them are from the early to mid 2000s, and most of them are also FPSes. This will be fun haha.

Cool that you got it working. Can't wait for some benchmarking, especially if you are looking into how SLI scales going from 1 to 4 cards 😀

Good to hear you got it going! I am also very interested in benchmarks.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Cool that you got it working. Can't wait for some benchmarking, especially if you are looking into how SLI scales going from 1 to 4 cards 😀

3DMark 06 runs horribly with quad SLI, one 7950GX2 ran better than two. Granted, I am using a relatively new driver, I might roll back to an older one and see if it fixes anything, and the textures in Far Cry are messed up. You mentioned that happening with newer drivers in one of your build videos, do you know what GeForce 7-series driver would work well with Far Cry?

Cooling is something that I really had to plan out for this build. I have two 120mm Corsair intake fans in the front, the same type of fans that come with the H100i (black frame with gray blades; sounds like jet at full speed). Two Cooler Master 120mm exhaust fans on the top, one of these same fans in the rear as an intake (made this an intake to retain positive air pressure and to give CPU more cool air), and another one of these fans on the bottom as intake.

For now, I will be using the stock cooler that comes with the AMD FX-8350, it's probably the exact same cooler that shipped with the Athlon 64 X2. I won't be using this forever because it doesn't cool very well at full load and the 80mm fan is LOUD. A relative of mine has a Xigmatek Gaia that I gave to them a while back that I can go get soon, I used that back when I was running a Q8200 in my main rig, super quiet cooler and cools very well too. I still even have all the AMD mounting hardware and the original packaging here somewhere.

Now here's where I had to get creative: cooling the GPUs. I ordered this contraption from Hong Kong: http://www.ebay.com/itm/251879093930?_trksid= … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT#

I also ordered three 80mm fans to go along with it, if you don't use the two metal brackets on the bottom of the fans you can actually use FIVE fans. Pretty cool stuff, now I just have to wait a while haha. The case I'm using is a Fractal Design Define R4 Blackout, and it has one of those expansion slots that's mounted sideways and placed on top of all the other expansion cards. You can see what I'm talking about here: http://www.vortez.net/index.php?ct=articles&a … n=file&id=17856

I also have two 12v green LED strips coming from Hong Kong too, when those arrive I will take some glamour photos of this rig! But now that I think of it, I might need some molex splitters. Speaking of molex, there's a PCIe molex power above the first card and to the left of the CPU, see here: http://www.dosv.jp/mb_bb/img/2008/08/biostar_01_01.jpg

Do you think I should supply extra power to the PCIe cards? If so, I'll have to order a molex extension too, could get one of those sleeved cables and run it under the gap under the PCI/PCIe cards (between the card edge slot and the rear expansion slot). What do you all think?

Yawnald wrote:

This is so funny... I'm doing the exact thing right now: building the machine I had in late 2006. I went with a Core 2 Extreme X6800 and two 8800 GTXs. I still had my Pcpowerandcooling 1KW SR psu lying around. 😁

You should start a build log thread of this system, I'd love to see it!

Edit: Gonna try to stop with the double/triple/quadruple posting and condense my posts after this one. Mods are probably getting upset with me right now 😜

AlphaDangerDen wrote:

3DMark 06 runs horribly with quad SLI, one 7950GX2 ran better than two. Granted, I am using a relatively new driver, I might roll back to an older one and see if it fixes anything, and the textures in Far Cry are messed up. You mentioned that happening with newer drivers in one of your build videos, do you know what GeForce 7-series driver would work well with Far Cry?

Yes, that's because if the driver 😀

Check the Far Cry thread under Windows here, I;m sure I've posted the version number there.

Good for benchmarking are FEAR, Doom 3, Serious Sam 2. They all come with built in benchmarks. You might have to enable AA to get proper scaling beyond 2 cards.

In my opinion your CPU is bottleneck for that cards, I see somewhere that for normal SLI of 7800GTX is good a OC`ed Athlon 64 to 3 Ghz, so will be good use a Athlon 6400+ or Phenom with 4 cores if you can use him at your mainboard.