Nice build you got there but moving to a bigger case will allow you to make further progress with that build, contrary to what some here think or say the case doesn't always have to be period accurate. Just go for what you want and to hell with what everyone else thinks 😉

It is good that you are thinking ahead and installing some good cooling for the chipsets rather than letting them roast.

nforce4max wrote:

Nice build you got there but moving to a bigger case will allow you to make further progress with that build, contrary to what some here think or say the case doesn't always have to be period accurate. Just go for what you want and to hell with what everyone else thinks 😉

It is good that you are thinking ahead and installing some good cooling for the chipsets rather than letting them roast.

Thank you!
The case is not a problem, I like the Grandia and it can accomodate anything.
The real problem is the cooling system for the nforce 2200 Chip and the VGA as you can see.

There are a lot of GTX650 and GTX650Ti with very short PCB, but there are no GTS250 or even GT 9800 that are short enough....
The only thing I can think now is to find somewhere a Thermalright HR-05 SLI, that is really rare now.

There is the 9800GT Eco and those are short but they are not particularly fast cards and using Kepler or newer cards is a compromise however they are faster. You can try scrounging eBay and amazon for the HR-05 sli but good luck. Sometimes sellers can get stupid and miss list stuff especially at low to decent prices (good for us) but those listings are found by chance sort of thing. I have in the past resorted to using socket 5/7/370/A coolers as chipset coolers after drilling them and mounting them with bolts. The only real problem was clearance and sourcing the right cooler is getting harder.

Bad problem here...
Neither XP64 nor Seven is able to recognize properly the nVraid array...
It is really strange, I traied all sort of direvers I could find (including the official ones found on nvidia site).
It Always recognizes two HD and not the Raid-0 array.

It is really strange.

I'm trying to install now win64 on a third HD hoping to clone the partition to the RAID array that should be recognized by the installed SO... I hope.

Any suggestions?

Back in the day a LOT of people avoided using the onboard raid on Nvidia boards because the drivers caused a crazy level of grief that it just wasn't worth using. I only did jbod and that was it.

Now is getting interesting.
While I am waiting for the GTS250, all tests are being made with a GT640 (fermi).

With the aid of Fernando (Dieter) I was able to install Win7 Ultimate directly on the Raid-0 array of Raptors:

http://www.win-raid.com/t2022f37-Guide-How-to … RAID-array.html

All appears to be smooth and cool, BUT I am having problems installing 8Gbyte of ram.
I have 4 sticks of 2Gb pc3200R, 2Rx4 so I think they should be correctly recognized by the nForce pro and the Opteron controller, all of them.

Unfortunately I am able to install only 2 sticks and if I enable ECC, at the start up the motherboard tells me that it is in safe mode for a not specified error, I can go on (pressing F1) and all appears to be ok, but I Think there is something related to the sticks.

I tested all of them in couples and in single. with a specified stick the system won't start, so I think that this specified stick is faulty.... Hell I was pretty sure they where new.

Do you suggest a particular model/serial number of ram to search for?

I need at least another pair, maybe all 4...

Do you have any updates on this build? Would love to see a finished shot with the nf2050 cooler installed and to see what GPU(s) you settled on. I'm so totally jelly - I've been looking for a NFPIK8AA for years! Cheers!

Dead Things wrote:

Do you have any updates on this build? Would love to see a finished shot with the nf2050 cooler installed and to see what GPU(s) you settled on. I'm so totally jelly - I've been looking for a NFPIK8AA for years! Cheers!

Hi, I was stuck by other troubles but now I have restart building it.
Actually I changed case for a Thermalright V31 case (very bad, trust me, but it was for free).
the coolers for the two chips are the blue Zalman and an anonymous chinese low profile cooler with fan taken from ebay (not noisy at all and perfect for long cards)

I had a lot of pain to set up a RAID-0 with Win64 and two SSD Intel320, but I made it.

Those are some results so far (with the Opty 285 runing at 2800Mhz at default Vcore: