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Meatball (OP)
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June 03, 2011, 12:05:35 PM |
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Hey guys,
I've seen a post or two about setups/rigs people have made to support GPU's without a case or even above their mobo for better cooling. What have you all done to either support cards in your mobo that doesn't have a case or mount the cards off the mobo with extender cables?
Love to see some great pics or ideas.
Thanks!
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Genrobo
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Activity: 28
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June 03, 2011, 12:48:20 PM |
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I have two rigs running caseless.
One has a Biostar AMD 770 ATX motherboard (got it on sale for $45, came with a free 120Gb HDD)
The other rig has a Foxconn 790GX ATX motherboard (got it on sale for $45, free shipping)
The Biostar board doesn't have an onboard power switch to turn the unit on...
So I have to short the on/off jumpers on the motherboard with something metal for it to turn on.
At this point I've turned that mobo on, via a key, a penny, pliers, scissors, a knife, pretty much any nearby metal object.
Works perfectly fine though.
I made a makeshift case for this board out of a shoebox.
It's currently hashing using a single 5830 and a Xigmatek 400w PSU(The Xigmatek PSU is practically silent, I am very surprised at it's awesome build quality, 80+ Bronze and a lifetime warranty.).
The Foxconn board actually has a power button built onto the board.
So I can turn it on/off directly on the board.
It's running two 5830's, powered by a 750w Antec Earthwatts PSU.
I have it laid out flat across the box that it came in.
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Meatball (OP)
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June 03, 2011, 01:31:23 PM |
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Are you doing anything special to hold the cards up, or just letting them hold themselves up from the slot?
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Genrobo
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June 03, 2011, 01:35:42 PM |
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I literally just having them sitting vertical in the slots.
There doesn't appear to be enough stress to snap them or anything.
They sit just fine, mind you they have a very slight angle, (5 or less degrees off from what it should be) definitely nothing I'm worred about.
The PCI-E slots give a lot of leverage.
These are Sapphire 5830 Extremes, so they have pretty big heatsinks on them too.
As long as you're not trying to do this with massive dual GPU cards and like a flimsy motherboard, there shouldn't be any issues.
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Meatball (OP)
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June 03, 2011, 01:52:44 PM |
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Yeah, I'm using a MSI 890FXA-GD70 Mobo and 4 x XFX 5850's and they're all doing what yours are. They're just being held up by their slot and some have a slight angle, but I'm really trying to figure out what's best for cooling. With the same OC of 850/300 on all of them and fan set to throttle up to 100% around 65 degrees I see a huge variance in temps between the cards ranging from 63 and 72 on the outer cards and 75 and 80 on the inner ones.
They're just too confined I think and I might need to come up with some sort of way to mount them above the case with cables.
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bcpokey
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June 03, 2011, 01:54:16 PM |
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The best caseless rig I saw was posted on these forums a couple weeks ago by a user who built a cheap wooden double rack for 5 cards, had a simple crossbar to support the cards (connected via pci-e extenders). He said it cost like $40, supported 10 GPUs (2 mobos) and was basically just wood and nails. I wish I had bookmarked that page as I can't find it now.
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Genrobo
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June 03, 2011, 01:55:30 PM |
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If you look around one of the common things people do is tie a fan or two down right over the internal cards on multi-gpu setups.
It probably helps to have airflow directly over those points.
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Meatball (OP)
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June 03, 2011, 02:23:50 PM |
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Yeah, I saw that setup earlier. Looks awesome, though not sure I could build that out myself  |
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JWU42
Legendary
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June 03, 2011, 03:00:14 PM |
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I went low tech last night - some 1x2 wood and a piece of aluminum.
2 x 10.5" legs for the front and 2 x 7" legs for the rear. Used a 16" piece of wood for the back (7" pieces) to rest the cards. The aluminum strip will have holes drilled in to secure the cards (similar to pic below). Also need to add supports so it is one unit versus a separate front and back.
About $5 and 30 minutes of work.
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Meatball (OP)
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June 03, 2011, 05:17:07 PM |
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Sounds cool, can you post pics when you're done?
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MZZM
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June 03, 2011, 11:41:35 PM |
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