8 Cores, Liquid Cooling and now NVIDIA SLI

I’m still making some final adjustments to the 8-core machine I put together a few months ago. I recently added the liquid cooling to the AMD FX 8350 CPU that I put in and I also got my hands on another EVGA GeForce GTX 600 video card. Now, these aren’t the most powerful cards in the world, but they do support two-way SLI and are very affordable. They’re good gaming cards, at least for the stuff I play, they’ve got the CUDA cores which makes them good for encoding video and like I said, they’re a good price. So, I put two of them together on my Gigabyte motherboard.

Now, if you look at this picture closely, you can see my festive 32GB of ram, the Corsair liquid CPU cooler and that I committed one of the classic blunders when putting the cards in. The second card is in the wrong PCI Express slot. There are 4 – 2 PCIx16 and 2 PCIx4. That second card is in the x4 slow which means it works, Windows sees it, but it’s not enabled for SLI.

This of course is fixed by simply moving the card down one slot. And it gives much better airflow between the two cards. It’s a small thing, but considering the size of the cards, it’s easy to cover up the labeling for that slot.

So anyway, there it is. I now have an AMD FX 8350 8-core with liquid cooling and SLI, plus 6TB of hard drive space and 120GB SSD drive for my applications. I’m going to say that this rig is now complete.

image image

The first is a better picture of the cards, but they’re in the wrong slots. The second picture is a little blurry, but they’re in the right place now.
As an aside, some say the SLI bridge comes with the card, some say it comes with the motherboard. For me, it was part of the motherboard set up, but you can get the bridge from the manufacturer and from Amazon. A simple two-way bridge is about $9 from Amazon. It’s just a flexible ribbon like you can see at the top. If you want something more sturdy, you’ll need to get it from NVIDIA and it’s about $30+.

Maybe I should've written that in a different font.

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