power/led/reset headers in awkward place !!

wildman · 5 Apr 2011 at 12:53

I was having another careful inspection of the layout on my MSI GD65 as I am intending on getting another 6870 in there fore crossfire but looking at the length of one already in place I can see that if I put a second one in the card is going to be obstructed by the headers for power on, reset, led as they are located at the end of the mother board behind the PCIe lane i would need to use.

So I looked a bit closer thinking ahhh but maybe there is clearance between top of the plugs and bottom edge of the GFX card and now I am not sure there is enough space after looking at the board clearance of the one already in

Anyone else using this board with a crossfire set-up and if so did you encounter any issues with these headers and the 2nd card, if so how did you resolve them ?

I was thinking of breaking out the soldering iron and soldering the connection directly to the pins, but then common sense got the beter of me and I am decided against hard-wiring them in

Baldbloke · 5 Apr 2011 at 12:58

If it looks that tight, before you spend any cash, you could try your existing 6870 in the 2nd pci slot.

wildman · 5 Apr 2011 at 13:02

Baldbloke said:
If it looks that tight, before you spend any cash, you could try your existing 6870 in the 2nd pci slot.

yes but the bottom line is I am going for crossfire anyway so i need to find a suitable way to get around this. I am thinking how much play are in those pins ? Could they be bent some what to accommodate the card.

or maybe I can trim the pins down and then trim the plugs to make them shorted but ensure that contact is still in place so the front panel power / reset works. Those are the only 2 real important ones. All esle failing I can use the on board power on off, but I don't fancy leaning into my case every time I want to turn the rig on

Hagar · 5 Apr 2011 at 13:42

Reset is not important, you can just hold down the power switch. My v1000 case does not have a reset button.

Werewolf · 5 Apr 2011 at 14:12

The cables for the front panel connectors are from memory usually a little lower than most other headers, and they have one massive advantage - the wires coming out of the top of the connections are individual ones and they bend very easily (I'm talking about the wires, not the pins on the motherboard

).
Which means you should be able to have them going up for the top row of connectors and down for the bottom row very easily

The pins on the motherboard itself are lower than the height of the PCI/PCI-E slots so I doubt you'll have any real problems with the connectors obstructing the videocard.