Installation

The hardware installation is pretty simple. You plug in the two cards, connect power and you are done. Depending on your case size this may not be so easy because the space is rather tight. Don't forget to connect your SATA cables before installing the cards, usually the SATA connectors are located directly under where the cards go.

Once the system has booted you install the NVIDIA Display Drivers (87.24 in our case), and that's where the problems started.

Right when the progress bar of the driver installation got near 100% the screen went black and in most cases the system immediately rebooted because of a blue screen.



In some very rare cases, like one out of 10 the device's installation completed. Problem is that there is four of them and that Windows usually doesn't save any installation information due to write caching when it crashes two seconds after making the change.
So it was card out, card in, swap cards, think of calling it a day and going home, etc..

What I also noticed is that even if you use the NVIDIA Software Uninstaller it does not remove all the PCI-Bridge devices from device manager, nor the drivers for them.

Ok. Time to reinstall Windows.

After the installation, when I wanted to install the NVIDIA graphics driver:



Yay, now we have an English BSOD, instead of a German one. Great progress.

After about two hours of tinkering I finally got the four 7900 GX2 devices running. But I was still seeing more crashes in games. After some time I found that changing the "PEG Link Mode" from "Auto" (CMOS default, system shipped with it) to "Normal" or "Disabled" helped stability a lot. PEG stands for PCI-Express Graphics, so it would make sense that ASUS overtuned something in their BIOS. Nothing is known about what this option really does.

So finally about three hours into "testing" the system could run the first benchmarks. Now the system was pretty stable, I saw about three or four more system crashes during a whole day of testing, which isn't too bad for a brand-new technology.