That's great, dude! Very professionally done job on the extender (looks like it was made in a factory) and on the case as a whole.
congradulations an nicley done i had faith in you man, and even if it idnt work you gave it a try. had to say i tol you so but i id say it would work(i think i did) well done keep us poster
amazing!! dude!! the fact that you even got the comp to POST with this most is incredible, let alone score 10k plus in 3d mark. I've always wondered how i could squeeze a top end GPU into something like a htpc, but you just answered it for me One question, you say that it didnt initially work in 8x mode and then after rebooting, starting with 8x disabled, then restarting with 8x enabled again, you had no probs? Is that the case or did i just misunderstand? enuff credit for this work though, even more so considering v. few ppl said it would work. .: Fillip :.
The first time i powered on both 8x and AGP fastwrites were enabled in bios. I installed the 9600xt drivers and rebooted with both 8x and AGP fastwrites still enabled. Windows frooze on startup and gave me a driver error. I rebooted in safe mode. loaded drivers latest drivers from ASUS website and restarted windows with both 8x and AGP fastwrites enabled. This time windows loaded fine, but there were artifacts on my desktop and when I tried to launch Halo, the game told me my graphics card wasn't recognized. That is when I decided to disable both 8x and AGP fastwrites in bios. I rebooted and everything worked fine. I decided to restart and go ahead and press my luck by enabling 8x in bios. Everything still worked fine so currently the only thing disabled is AGP fastwrites. However, I'm starting to wonder if the problems I was having had anything to do with my adapter. I have been reading up on peoples problems with the 9600xt and nforce2 chipset, and more than a few people have had similar problems solved by turning off AGP fastwrites in the bios or in windows. Has anyone else had similar problems and/or solution? Maybe I should try those Omega drivers.
Mission Accomplished.video card secured and operating within normal parameters. I did run into a couple of problems. The card on the motherboard kept wanting coming out on one side of socket when I pushed the graphics card toward the motherboard. This is because the 124 wires make the adapter very rigid. I solved this easily with zip ties. I was lucky the cards have holes on each side and the AGP on my motherboard had that locking mechanism. The next problem was a little harder to figure out. I originally didn't have that vice clamp on the connector for the graphics card. Without the vice clamp, it would power up, but nothing would happen on screen. Only a blue icon would float across my screen saying "no signal". I scratched my head and after a while I noticed that connector on the graphics card wasn't flush with the graphics card. Of course, this again was due to the rigid nature of the wires in the adapter. I figure some of the connectors weren't even in contact or there was an attenuation problem as Altron predicted. I added the vice clamp and everything worked perfect. The plate holding the graphics card is anchored at three points. Two are right next to the adapter to keep it from moving and the other is against the case to prevent rotation. It is all very tight and secure. I even put a dab of loctite on each of the bolts so they don't come loose. We'll have to see how it holds up. I'm still a bit at a loss to explain why this works. Its kind of sad, but I would really like to know why this works and the the professional adapters I pointed out earlier don't. I emailed ASUS and ATI about this. Hopefully they will have the answers. Or , maybe there is a conspiracy to keep graphics cards tied to the motherboard. FREE THE GRAPHIC CARDS NOW. I'm gonna make bumper stickers. Anyway, Let the mobile gaming commence. To bad there aren't any LAN parties in West Virginia, at least none that I could find. I think that I could win a few of the early games just on shock factor.
Dude with this mod you are treading on the same turf as ZapWizard, watch it Zap might bit you J/K anyway good job. You should get this idea patended and sell it to a manufacturer there are a lot of people that could use something like this.
I admit that I had my doubts, but you did it. One question though, does disabling fast writes slow the system?
It doesn't apear to slow the system. Just for kicks I decided to enable AGP fastwrites again to see what happened. To my surprise, windows loaded fine and I played a level of Halo without problems. The only difference between this test and before was the position of the graphics card. Since it worked, I did some benchmarking with 3dmark 2k3 with and without AGP fastwrites enabled. scored: 3549 disabled 3554 enabled The difference probably isn't even significantly different so I would say AGP fastwrite disabled doesn't slow the system.
hehe wanna make me one? naw, I could prolly make one myself, got any links to those cards you bought to make yours? What guage and length are the wires?
congratulations on not only completing such a difficult mod, but doing it with so many people throwing so many huge simple reasons in your face on why it wouldn't. that's some serious determination
you should be able to make something that blocks interruption in the cables and give you more agp dude (tinfoil?) just a though
Wrapping foil around the outside of the wires,(making sure it is grounded also) shouuld block external RFI, but if you can wrap each wire, and wrap the whole bundle, that should block crosstalk also.
nice job, tought this would work just not as well as the results u seem to have, nice work and good commitment man... even when people douted u
