Interesting build. Though I think perhaps the Pentium 4 will be a bottleneck?

Most likely yes, but we will see what the prescott is able to.

Looks amazing.
You do know X38 will need "hacked" drivers to work in QuadSLI (since it's not officially supported), right ?
Single 7950 GX2 will work in SLI no problem though.

What sound card/hard drive and OS you plan to use ?

agent_x007 wrote on 2025-01-04, 14:09:

Looks amazing. You do know X38 will need "hacked" drivers to work in QuadSLI (since it's not officially supported), right ? Sing […]
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Looks amazing.
You do know X38 will need "hacked" drivers to work in QuadSLI (since it's not officially supported), right ?
Single 7950 GX2 will work in SLI no problem though.

What sound card/hard drive and OS you plan to use ?

I was thinking that quad SLI is just above XP a problem. Did you have a link to that hacked drivers?
Still not sure i use two of them because my CPU bottleneck, but will see.
If i really go quad sli, i think i cant use a soundboard, because the pcie slots shared with the pci ones.
If not i would go with a SB XFI Elite Pro

GPUs arrived today:

Need to replace the thermal paste first, and also add putty for the VRams.

Original QuadSLI was invented to work on WinXP (Quad SLI works on pre-DX10 stuff, which You have 😀)
Only Kepler generation and newer doesn't allow SLI under XP.
I don't have a link to a driver for you sadly.
But there may be a tool that hacks driver (if it's supported), to get SLI working on early Intel X-series chipsets, IIRC.
Again this is only something that I remember being "a thing", not sure if it's still available.

agent_x007 wrote on 2025-01-04, 19:51:

Original QuadSLI was invented to work on WinXP (Quad SLI works on pre-DX10 stuff, which You have :)) Only Kepler generation and […]
Show full quote

Original QuadSLI was invented to work on WinXP (Quad SLI works on pre-DX10 stuff, which You have 😀)
Only Kepler generation and newer doesn't allow SLI under XP.
I don't have a link to a driver for you sadly.
But there may be a tool that hacks driver (if it's supported), to get SLI working on early Intel X-series chipsets, IIRC.
Again this is only something that I remember being "a thing", not sure if it's still available.

good to know thanks! Found the drivers from Phil: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/sli-on-chine … therboards.html

Quad sli unfortunately doesn't work very well, even under Windows XP and Windows 7 with NVIDIA chipset. I have experimented a lot with it (two of 7950GX2) and had the same experiences as everyone else before. Newer drivers didn‘t made it much better.

https://www.computerbase.de/2006-08/test-nvid … 0-gx2-quad-sli/

Some more work done. Installed the radiator with 3 slim noctuas.
Unfortnatly the P4 CPU i got was garbage so i switched to a Q9550 instead.
Installed the waterblock on the MB.

So anything ready now. The bad cooler design got me to use the second card on air for testing.
Im using driver 275.33 and tryed all the SLI patches with no luck activating SLI so far. Is there a hacked bios or driver im missing for X38??

got it working with SLIpatch 1.5 and Nvidia driver 93.81 !

3dmark03 , with fsb400 3,4GHz default settings in Quad SLI 33785 points, Single card scores 20500

Awesome!

I think QuadSLI isn't working correctly ?
Why PCI-e speed is at x8 1.1, instead of x16 1.1 ?

Here's an underclocked 7900 GTX single card (600/1400) + OC'ed X3370 CPU on P45 DDR3 platform.
25k in 3DMark 2003 :

6456 in 3DMark 06 :

agent_x007 wrote on 2025-01-12, 23:44:

I think QuadSLI isn't working correctly ?
Why PCI-e speed is at x8 1.1, instead of x16 1.1 ?

Here's an underclocked 7900 GTX single card (600/1400) + OC'ed X3370 CPU on P45 DDR3 platform.

X38 and X48 chipset has 2x PCIe 16 channels, I guess that quad SLI uses 4 PCIe slots (all though it's only 2 physical cards) thus only 8x available for each, wheres the single 7900GTX only uses one slot, having the full x16 available?

i also notice that x8. But it makes sense that the 7950gx2 each board layer use x8.
Thanks for the compare with the 7900gtx. For a "non SlI" X38 board i think the quad SLI scales pretty good!
I still need to test games because i need a soundcard. But i ordered that X1 supreme FX2 card for the dedicated slot, because no other free slot available.
I think first Game i will test is Doom3, because i want use the system as early XP DX9 mashine (2002-2006) running on high resolutions.

Nice! What a beast of a machine. I like to pair my Q9550 with a radeon HD 7970 or a R9 290, I'm not so much a fan of NV-SLI microstuttering and it's more efficient than a SLI. How did you manage to get rid of the stuttering? Or is it not that noticable?

Man that system is awesome. Definitely love the water cooling. Well done my friend!

I did not played much so far. But i did change some stuff. First i installed a supreme2 Sound card. Works great with the quad SLI.
For the TFT i used a Asus monitor that support 1600x1200. Its that Art RGB line. Really good TFT..

The Fan Control from the MB is really bad, so i switched to a hardware solution inside to setup the voltage for the fans.
Doom3 runs on max settings 1600x1200 and 8x AA on solid 60fps with Quad SLI enabled. I think doom3 is capped on 60fps. But when i go up to 16x AA fps drops to 25 . But even with 8xAA it looks really good and performance is great!
I run FSB400 with 1066 Ram and CPU 3,4GHz.
Pretty happy with the setup 😀
It fits perfectly after my Voodoo5 setup and before my win Vista 32bit titan sli stuff.

Jackhead wrote on 2025-01-22, 12:12:

I run FSB400 with 1066 Ram and CPU 3,4GHz.

Ah, those were the days. 😀 My QX9650 Vista desktop spent most of its useful life running at the same RAM and FSB speeds (effective CPU speed 3.6GHz). It was remarkably stable and cool with the default overclock settings on the ASUS P5Q PRo. But eventually the board gave out, and a few years later the next one. Now I don't bother overclocking it, since it's already kinda unstable...

I also want to say something to the case, if you have hot GPUs the fractal cases did a really good job on air cooling.
I testet also the Torrent from Fractal. The combi with 3x140 front fans, and open mesh on the back did work great!

dr_st wrote on 2025-01-22, 13:29:

Jackhead wrote on 2025-01-22, 12:12:

I run FSB400 with 1066 Ram and CPU 3,4GHz.

Ah, those were the days. 😀 My QX9650 Vista desktop spent most of its useful life running at the same RAM and FSB speeds (effective CPU speed 3.6GHz). It was remarkably stable and cool with the default overclock settings on the ASUS P5Q PRo. But eventually the board gave out, and a few years later the next one. Now I don't bother overclocking it, since it's already kinda unstable...

Maybe because the NB SB overheat? They are really a problem what i see. Adding a fan on some point did help, but its still the hottest point in the build.