Asus KFN5-D SLI Kinda Retro-ish Rescue / Build

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Asus KFN5-D SLI Kinda Retro-ish Rescue / Build

Thermaltake TR2-600W.... I've seen a lot of mixed opinions of Thermaltake power supplies; this is the first one I've come across. Not sure who OEM's them..... The supply is good....but when the time comes, I'll crack it open and have a look at it for sure.

thermaltake psus are oem-ed from channel well technology or cwt. the issue is that thermaltake likes to cheap out on the caps when ordering from cwt and they often have junk caps like junfool, fuh-joo-yoo and what not. definitely crack it open and recap if u want the build to last or run it 24/7 as a server.

I've never seen this before....a block for all the front panel connectors that plugs into the motherboard.... Interesting!

yea asus' mid and high end mobos came with that. asus' marketing nomenclature for it is "q-connector". see attached image of it from the manual of one of my asus mobos.

of course, it only works on asus mobos since their boards all have the same pinout for the different front panel connectors, tho u can try it on other brand motherboards if the pin positioning is similar or the same but different pinout function for each pin so beware of the differing pinout and connect it appropriately. dont fry anything!

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Asus KFN5-D SLI Kinda Retro-ish Rescue / Build

GTX285s are much later than 2006. An equivalent, would be an 8800 GT/GTS. Or 7-series, which commonly have the dreaded Sacon FZ caps!

[Topcat]

Re: Asus KFN5-D SLI Kinda Retro-ish Rescue / Build

Am I missing something here? Isn't that a P5N-D?

As explained, it's bad. It was in the case when I got it.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Asus KFN5-D SLI Kinda Retro-ish Rescue / Build

Am I missing something here? Isn't that a P5N-D?

Heh, I have a superclocked GTX 285. Used to have two in SLI (P6T Deluxe v2). Killed one of them by a bad wiring by yours truly. Motherboard wasn't drawing enough from the PCI 12v, so the cards drew more from the motherboard +4 pci express rail. Causing the +4 on the ATX 20 connector to get hot and begin to burn/corrode, losing contact, voltage drops, amps raise, PSU kicks. I soldered new pins from a donor PSU....and I reversed them (with one card in, not the other)

[Topcat]

It's been a while since I've done one....this one has been sitting for a while.

I say retro-ish; as this is all circa 2006. Yes, it's been that long ago!! The motherboard to be used is a KFN5-D SLI that was an ebay rescue sometime early this year...had bad caps; the seller knew it.....and was basically selling it for peanuts + the cost of shipping....and it's not a very common board, so I grabbed it. It has a pair of Opteron Barcelona quadcores @ 2.5GHz; the fastest it can take. This board does not support Shanghai cores. I added 64gb ECC RAM, ECC DDR2 is silly cheap these days, IIRC it cost be ~$40....you can barely feed two people at McDonald's for that these days.

Now for the GPU's....I have a pair of period-specific GTX285's and a not-so-period-specific pair of GTX 560Ti's. I'm leaning toward the period-specifics....

..and now for the case....it was a freebie I got from a local printing company a year or so ago, bad Asus P5N-D in it. I can hear Momaka's teeth gnashing over this build already because of the color of the case....but its actually a pretty decent and not over-done CoolerMaster....and here we go!!







...and the core hardware... Ignore that hard drive sitting there, that belong to something else.



Thermaltake TR2-600W.... I've seen a lot of mixed opinions of Thermaltake power supplies; this is the first one I've come across. Not sure who OEM's them..... The supply is good....but when the time comes, I'll crack it open and have a look at it for sure.



Now time to start tearing down the case. It doesn't show too bad in the pics, but it's filthy.

The bad motherboard....





I've never seen this before....a block for all the front panel connectors that plugs into the motherboard.... Interesting!



Bad board out. CPU was a C2D @ 2.1, a bit of a turd for what this board could accept.



Case roof & front bezel....again, the pics don't show the filth.



Front & inside...





All the fans pulled. This case has many fan ports that are drilled for both 120mm and 140mm fans. Ports that can take 140mm fans will get them....I have a big box full of them.





My wife thought this would be a great screw holder....



...and case apart! Next step is cleaning...



Until then!