Great news guys! A 6-Pin PCI-E connector fits like a glove. The voltage layout is also exactly like alexanrs said.

NICE!!!

A very interesting update. I've ascertained that you can definitely fit AM3+/AM3/AM2 coolers onto the stock Socket 939/940 brackets (I fitted my FX 8350 cooler to the Opteron 165, since the old cooler's fan was buggered). I also managed to find someone who is selling an ATI FireGL V7200 on a local South African forum. Would the FireGL be a wise purchase for a 2005/2006 era machine? From the specs it seems like it's about the same as an X800/X850. I'm a little worried about replacing the cooler too, will it be able to take regular after-market coolers? I got an image of a reference card with cooler removed:

To me, it looks like it uses regular 55/60mm holes.

Update: I still haven't heard from the guy with the FireGL V7200, and I have since stumbled across a very interesting find:

Club3D Radeon X1950XT:

This thing has a really big cooler that might need some maintenance or replacement, but I'll easily be able to find something to do that. I'll keep you guys posted.

Another update: I've managed to obtain both the X1950XT and FireGL V7200 for $30 and $20 respectively. So I'll be taking both of them.

Okay, an update. I bought the X1950XT and it's working pretty well. The 'stock' cooler seems to be an Arctic Cooling Accelero X2 clone. It's pretty noisy and takes up a lot of space. I will definitely replace it with something a bit more sensible like an Arctic Cooling Accelero L2 Plus. I've looked at some reviews and read on forums, most people seem to use either a Zalman CNPS9500 or a Cooler Master Hyper TX3 CPU cooler. I'm leaning towards the CM, since you can easily replace the 92mm fan and from what I've seen the Zalman is only slightly better. The IDE Super Multi Sony drive on the computer is completely buggered and needs to be replaced - I'm thinking of just getting a 'modern' SATA super multi drive. Interestingly enough, you can install Windows 8.1 32-bit on this system, so you can actually do some modern computing with it if you wish.

Try putting the Windows 10 TP and make it bleeding edge rather than modern!

I'll wait for the official release before I do that. But I'm confident that the 32-Bit version of it will work 100%.

The X1950XT is a good choice, of all single GPU DX9 video cards only the X1950XTX is faster.

I would use Windows XP with this system but I have no doubts Windows 8 or newer would run just fine.

Yeah, I was thinking of running XP on it - I was just screwing around to test the limits.

Were there ever dual GPU DX 9 cards?

cdoublejj wrote:

Were there ever dual GPU DX 9 cards?

Yes, the Geforce 7900GX2 and the Geforce 7950GX2.

This system would make the perfect DX9 xp gaming machine 😀

Well, I wouldn't mind running another X1950XT, but I'm going to hook this system up to an 18.5" screen and run most games at 1024x768. You really don't need that kind of power for that resolution and the tearing will just be horrible.

The only drawback of this mother is the sata and usb performance. The r480 and r580 were awful at this

At the time i had in my 2nd pc an ECS RS480 with athlon 64 3000+. Man...i was running bf1942 and it was between 30 and 40% slower compared to a nforce 4 board.

The Problem isn't really the R480 and R580 chipsets. If I recall correctly ATI only worked on the chipset that controls the Crossfire and a few other things I can't remember (I'm not sure if the R480/R580 had the memory controller or the CPU itself). The SATA and USB were provided by the ULi M1575 chipset. ULi was formed when ALi broke away from Acer, if I remember correctly. So they were a decent chipset maker (in theory). The sad thing is that nVIDIA bought ULi and the drivers could never be tweaked more, otherwise it would've been just as fast as the nVIDIA counterpart.

This should be a great System for running XP and Games for XP.

XP is now Retro, too.

Evert wrote:

The Problem isn't really the R480 and R580 chipsets. If I recall correctly ATI only worked on the chipset that controls the Crossfire and a few other things I can't remember (I'm not sure if the R480/R580 had the memory controller or the CPU itself). The SATA and USB were provided by the ULi M1575 chipset. ULi was formed when ALi broke away from Acer, if I remember correctly. So they were a decent chipset maker (in theory). The sad thing is that nVIDIA bought ULi and the drivers could never be tweaked more, otherwise it would've been just as fast as the nVIDIA counterpart.

Some of those ATI boards did use ULi southbridge chips, but ATi did make a few southbridges as well. And they were relatively slow at USB and SATA compared to NVIDIA and Intel. The ATI chipsets were a mix of outsourced tech AFAIK. SB450 for example uses Silicon Image SATA controllers.

Interesting! It looks like AMD will return to this model in the near future, with ASMedia developing chipsets for their future products.

A small update, after much deliberation I've decided to get a Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Evo cooler. Even though the Socket 754/939 platform isn't officially supported, it should theoretically fit.

Edit: I also got an Arctic Accelero L2 Plus cooler for the X1950XT:

Update: The build is still a work in progress, but it's nearing completion every month. Still on my to-do list:

• Replace the Opteron 165 with an Opteron 180/185 (still looking)
• Get a 5:4 17" / 19" monitor with DVI output (I found a good 17" Dell monitor, but I really want to see if I can't get a 19" monitor instead)
• Replace the aging 250Gb Hitachi with something more quiet and modern (possibly a 500Gb Seagate laptop hard drive).
• Get a new case - good candidate so far is a Cooler Master N500 or K280.
• Find out why EAX doesn't work on the X-Fi Xtrememusic.

[*] Buy a Seasonic MII520 Bronze PSU

Right, so an update as well as something worth discussing: passive cooling.

I was thinking of putting the Arctic Accelero L2 Plus on the X1950XT today and it occurred to me that doing this I will need to sacrifice multiple slots (including a PCI-E 16X slot) if I were to use this. So, I thought I'd look around quickly and see what were people doing back then and I found this interesting news article from bit-tech (published December 2006). It looks like PowerColor released a passively cooled X1950XT sometime in the past, but upon seeing this picture:

I realised that Artic Cooling had gotten yet another tender to do the cooling on a popular Radeon card, because you can actually still buy the Accelero S1 PLUS. I'm strongly considering getting this, since it seems like it uses less space (as unbelievable as it may seem) and you can't beat passive cooling in terms of reliability and noise.

Another consideration I'm making is re-building the computer into a Deepcool Tesseract case. It's got a lot of cooling options, plenty of space for cable management, lots of good cutouts and the USB3 connector comes with a built-in USB2 adaptor so you can easily use this case for late Socket A (462) to Socket 939 builds (including the Intel options from that era).

how will a TX3 fit, the AM2/AM2+/AM3 mounting bracket is diffrent in that it uses 4 screws vs 754/939 uses 2