The Candidate a Supermicro X38 Motherboard. i bought it back in 2008-2009. Was my daily driver for years until I upgraded.

What a workhorse and after all these years only 1 capacitor had gone bad which I replaced.

After giving her a bath and replacing the Cap, I re pasted the north, south and PCI-X Bridges.

When she was my daily driver, I squeezed as much power I could out of her and socketed a XEON X3380.

With 4 GB PC 1333 Ram, and a GTX 960 her performance at stock clocks is nothing to laugh at.

This setup can run quite hot without the proper cooling, so I added a few fans to the case. A Corsair maglev 120 in the front and a Noctua 92 in the back.

That sounds all good but what I really needed was another fan to blow across the RAM, North Bridge and CPU. So I mounted another 92 Noctua with the ZIP ties and using the dremel tool I cut a piece of plastic from a crate to mount the fan to.

Did I mention there was a giant hole in the back, I fabricated a metal IO bracket and bolted it to the back, so the IO shield would have a place to rest at.

For Drives I chose a SSD, an LG Bluray burner, Media Card reader and a Floppy.

3d mark 06 score defaults, no over clock.

There she sits in her final resting place. With the PCI-X slots I want to try out my Parhelia PCI-X thats rusting away somewhere in my basement to test out retro compatibility.

Also I still need a sound card so I'm on the lookout for one.

It's hard to tell sometimes what people will think with a build like this. But even though I couldn't bring her back to her former glory I tried to be respectful. It will play Crysis.

1600X1200 High Settings. AVG 76FPS