Well,
Seeing as I really have nothing to do at work this week, I decided to try and build the most powerful PC I can with the pile of "too old to spent time testing" parts.
In the pile, I found an old Asus Crosshair II. There seems to be some damage to one of the power traces in the back, looks to be a deep scratch. I soldered a piece of wire over the gap to try to fix it.
Next I found a few old M2N boards. Most had blown capacitors. One of them had a Athlon 64 X2 6000+ still on there. I cleaned and took the Athlon. Not that big of a power house, but better than the 3200+ I had already. Plus I have a brand new Phenom II cooler (the nice one with the heat pipes) that I never used on mine.
I changed my PSU recently because my old one for some reason didn't want to power-up all the time. When it did bug, I had to unplug the power cable until the LED on the mobo turn off. I guess it might work sometimes. 850W is nice.
Now, I have an old GeForce 7950GX2 that I know works. But it was such a pain to find a mobo to work back in the days, that I was not even sure it would boot on this one. To the pile of GPUs I go!
And what do I find under countless X1600s and broken 7600GS : 5x GTX280 from BFG! That will do it.
Now I grabbed an HDD from my pile of old, but good ones. A Maxtor 500GB drive... probably the last model ever made under the Maxtor label. Some DDR2 ram (I think 3GB of something) and we are ready to try this!
Everything plugged, the PSU starts, Mobo seems fine and on-board VGA displays the Republic of Gamers logo in 8-bit colors. Nice!
A little jump in the Bios lets me set date and time (obviously the battery was dead...) and boot order.
Fast forward to a completed W7 installation.
Time to try the little gems I found: GTX280. The Crosshair II supports SLi in 16-16 or 8-8-8 in triple.
I have no idea what was run on theses (and 5 is a weird number for GPUs), and 4 of them have a coat of brown crap cooked on the cooling fins and fan.
Let's try the first one, it actually looks brand new. Hook up and reboot. I am greeted with the great random colors of doom (for epileptics). I guess now I know why it looks new, it probably never ran.
Strike two : I got the second card to boot properly on first try. Yay! Time to start FurMark. BAM! BSOD. I did try a few times again and as soon as I start the test it crashes.
Ah well, might be something else, but it's easier to change the GPU. Third car runs perfectly, just under 80c after 15 minutes full load (1920x1080 full AA).
Maybe lucky with the fourth? Not so much. At least the card lets the PC boot... but 3 minutes of test brings the GPU to 98c. Hmmm something is wrong. Turns out the fan is not spinning (and was unhooked from the board). Even after fixing the fan, that card caused full system lock after a few minutes. I guess it was run for years with no fan and was damaged in the process.
Maybe lucky with the last one... (at this point, I am really glad that one of them works). As a preventive maintenance, I opened the cooler to clean it. I had to physically remove the "dust" from the fan and fins. Also replaced all the thermal pads that where dry and paste. It works. Well it boots.
FurMark brings the card to 85c, but at least it did complete the 15 minutes run. Yus!
I grabbed a SLi link from my mobo box and hooked that in with the two cards that work.
FurMark now runs at 30-35 fps with the same settings (it was 10-15 on each card before). Defenitely some nice scaling.
I grabbed a cheap case from our distributor to put all that in and voila!
Too bad it only took a few hours, now I still have nothing to do.