*DOH* Socket 775 Motherboard woes

Shiminay

Hello all,

I'd a stack of spare parts lying around after upgrading my own as well as my brother's PCs late last year and decided to be a good boyfriend and build what I have into a reasonable machine for my girlfriend who is as much of a gamer as I am, but has more sense than to try and spend all of her money keeping up with the latest tech

What I've got:

• Asus Striker Extreme motherboard
• Core 2 Quad *something* I can't remember the speed - it's not really relevant to this issue
• 8GB of DDR2 PC6400 RAM (4 X 2GB DIMM)
• 2 X nVidia 8800 GTX (one EVGA and one Club3D)
• Coolermaster GX-750W PSU
• 1 TB Hard Drive
• Basic case and DVD drive

So, having started building all this I ran into a couple of problems. I've even drawn a diagram to show what I mean:



The SLi bridge I have is too long - I can't use it to link the 2 cards. I don't have any other SLi bridge, so am wondering if there's anyone who can maybe help me out with a suggestion or maybe even offer of a spare bridge

Since I'm here, does anyone foresee any difficulties in what I'm building for running Win 7 and games?

Thank you as always for any and all help offered.

farna_boy

Just did a quick check there and according to the user manual (page 2-20) both of the blue PCI-E slots are x16, so can you just use them for the SLI setup?

Shiminay

Thought of that too, but the SLi bridge isn't long enough for that

[edit]
I should add that the SLi bridge as I've drawn it in blue above is pretty much to scale (as are the video cards)

ShadowHearth

is that sli bridge a hard piece of metal or a like a flat wire? i seen a few of them just bent over.

cant you order a shorter version of it?

Shiminay

Hard piece of plastic, so no flexibility :S

This has all just been upgraded to "Urgent" as the PSU in my girlfriend's PC has popped as of last night, so I may just finish the build with one of the cards and come back when/if I can find a more suitable SLi bridge.

TO EBAY!

dwighet

what length do you need..i might have one here...

I dont need em so I can post it to ya if I have the right length

ShadowHearth

Shiminay wrote: »

Hard piece of plastic, so no flexibility :S

This has all just been upgraded to "Urgent" as the PSU in my girlfriend's PC has popped as of last night, so I may just finish the build with one of the cards and come back when/if I can find a more suitable SLi bridge.

TO EBAY!

ah, so i guess the only way for you to solve this - get the flexy sli bridge. the one i got with gtx570 is flexy, so i guess they learned their error since 8800 times

Shiminay

I've reconfigured what I'm doing and now have the following layout:



So the 2 8800's are in the "blue" X16 slots and there's a USB 2 PCI card in between them (the USB controller on this board is banjaxed for some reason and only operates in 1.1, so I bought a PCI card for USB2ings). This is the most snug fit for all the cards and so there's no real wiggle room left. I guess this means I actually need a longer (12cm) bridge connector, not a shorter one

nesf

Yeah you'll want the longer bridge for that. You should be able to get one pretty easily off eBay.

Edit: Oh, and that board and a stock cooler??

ShadowHearth

Get flexible one and longer one. You can't go wrong with that m8.