Dual 5830's on AMD 939 nForce4 SLI Motherboard?

[kcobra]

I was thinking of putting two 5830's in an old EPOX 9NPA+ SLI motherboard. This is an old AMD Socket 939 nForce4 board. Anyone know of any issues with this setup? I have a read of couple reports on the web where people say the ATI 5000 and 6000 series have issues with the nForce4 chipset. Others say they work fine. Thoughts?

[1715332080]

1715332080

[1715332080]

1715332080

[AdamStinson]

I registered just to post this

I just put a 5830 into an old foxconn nforce4 sli mobo I had laying around. It wouldn't post. Just no signal to the monitor but all the fan's were spinning and such. According to my research some nforce4 motherboards have an updated bios that allows PCIe 2.0 graphics cards to work other companies didn't do the update.

On a side note I had spent a good portion of my free time during the day cleaning dust out of the case and moving hard drive's, did a fresh install of the OS (with the old graphics card in it still) tracked down some extra fans for more cooling and THEN put in the 5830. If i had only tried it first to see if it would even boot.

Bah! So much for PCIe 2.x being backwards compatible with the older slots.

If you get lucky and have a bios update that lets the 2.0 cards work with the mobo turn the chip around so its in "sli mode" it really just activates the 2nd slot.

[kcobra]

Thanks for the advice. I went ahead and ordered two 5830 cards for this box so I'll try my look out. Will also look for a BIOS update for the board, but I am not optimistic. EPOX has been out of business for quite a while. Worse case I can shove each card in newer boxes I have lying around.

[Carandiru]

wont work trust me, I've run into this too with nForce 4 motherboard.

[PcChip]

I just pulled my brother's old DFI Lanparty NForce4 SLI Motherboard from my closet and installed Win7 on it yesterday!

It's got a 5850 and a 5830 hashing away as we type. 

Only issue I'm having is probably unrelated to the NForce4 board itself - downclocking memory on the 5830 to 300MHz is crashing the system, where it works fine on the 5850 reference.

[kcobra]

No luck for me on this Epox nForce4 mb. Same experience as a lot of people have had. Fan spins but no video output. Motherboard shows a post code of 25 which some googling seemed to indicate meant missing video card. Makes sense.

Guess I will be running these two 5830's in separate boxes.

[PcChip]

On the old nf4 board I'm using as a dedicated mining rig with two cards, it was really finicky about booting.

It would only take one of the three ram sticks I had, and only in one slot out of the four.

Also, I found out that apparently the latest video cards won't even boot if one of the PCI-E power cables is unhooked. (the old ones used to boot into windows, but not load any 3D Games if you forgot to plug in additional power)

[bitlackey]

Well damn there goes that 2x gpu rig.
I guess I'll be running singles until I can get some adapters or a dual x16 slot mb, and try to compensate for the extra power usage.
I put in a request for an updated bios before putting this system to rest, but I doubt that will happen.