Installed my new D14 yesterday, needless to say it was a bit of a squeeze. I was having problems getting it to sit straight-the darn thing kept wanting to rotate slightly to the left. I remounted both the hsf and bracket several times in an attempt to get it straight. This is as good as I could get it: The bottom of the D14 was actually touching the solder joints on the back of the STX and shorting it out! For now, I've resorted to spacing them apart with a credit card, but a more permanent solution is needed. I can move the STX to the slot immediately below my 7950, but that will block airflow to the card significantly. I can put it in the second pci-e x16 slot, but that will throttle both slots back to x8. I've also tried moving the 7950 to the bottom x16 slot, but the heatsink on the card does not clear the power/reset headers for the case :wanker: Anyone have any suggestions on how to rearrange/fix things, short of going out and buying a new mobo?
It's something that would nag at me, regardless of the intangible performance loss. Actually, I'm now unsure as to whether both x16 slots will throttle back to x8 if I install the sound card in one of them. Can someone please clarify this?
I'm pretty sure that as soon as the motherboard detects a card in PCIE slot #2 it reverts both slots to 8x whether or not the 2nd card is a full length card or not.
A bit of an overclock and you're golden! It would nag at me more having that Noctua cooler resting on that top card.
Ended up modifying the case headers and moving the 7950 to the lower x16 slot, with the STX in one of the x1 slots above. However, after installing the card in the lower slot, it is reporting to be running at x8 v1.1 (according to GPU-Z). Not sure how this is possible, but after checking some benchmarks it appears that this will be noticeably detrimental to performance. Can anyone chime in and clarify what's going on here? On the plus side, there's more breathing room now.
Running a single card setup on x8 speed isn't optimal and you're right it is detrimental, at least in my experience too. You gotta have that gpu in the main pcie slot for optimal performance.
Ended up going full circle and returning everything to their original positions. Remounted the D14 one final time, before carefully inserting the cards. I separated the sound card and D14 with a layer of ESD paper to ensure no shorts. All seems well now-the 7950 is running on a full speed bus and the sound card isn't shorting/producing any static from interference. I'm just going to leave it this way. Click for high res version
I remember buying that cooler and it blocked one of my rams and i had to move the fan. That cooler is very huge.
Looks fine now, M3ta1head. My case is around the same size, it's the case i got with the pc i bought from ebay around ten million years ago haha.
