candle_86 wrote:

So I acquired a matched triplet of GTX 280 cards and a GTX 275. My thought replace my 7900GTX's in my X2 4200 939 rig. Would this be worthwhile or total overkill

When you say matched triplet, do you mean 3x GTX 280s? That definitely would be massively CPU bound, but I guess it depends what you're doing with it whether it'd be worth doing. If you want to heat your house in the winter, cook breakfast with your graphics cards and play any game a Socket 939 Athlon can handle with lots of AA and AF, then it would probably be a good setup.

... seriously though, I hope you have a really strong power supply (1KW would be safe) and lots of cooling. One GTX 280 has a 236 watt TDP. Under a gaming load with settings high enough to stress those cards you'd be pulling some serious power from the wall. I would do it as an experiment but I certainly wouldn't use a computer that way. If it was on a newer platform with more CPU headroom it might be a bit more interesting to see what a trio of massively power hungry DX10 cards could manage in newer titles, but a 4200+ will keep your framerates fairly low in anything later than 2008 or so.

929 x2 is almost certainly a bottleneck for a 280 sli rig and I would consider skipping 775 for a couple of reasons even though it was not uncommon during that time for someone to do that but I feel something more modern would give these cards a breath of fresh air. 7900 GTX sli on a 939 is just right in my book and it is attractive building a rig like that myself to be honest.

Ok so socket 1366 is what to look for, and I have a Dell precision 1000w I need to solder on some extra pcie plugs to

They also came with a GTX 275 I paired with my q6600