Working behind the scenes on the membership part at Steamy3d at the moment. It has been delayed because of bugs but it is getting there. The aim is to have it ready at the end of this month.

I just wasted 3 days on installing hardware and software. I mean totally wasted! I ended up with the exactly same setup after 3 days.
I had a GFX card doing weird things and rebooting my 7 year old slave PC in the middle of rendering. First I thought it was a GFX problem but later a motherboard problem. Many things I learned in that process.

It’s hard to find a used motherboard with LGA 1155 CPU socket. You can’t flash a motherboard bios without the CPU on it is supported. Installing a new motherboard on a already installed windows 7 OS is not going to happen. Installing windows 7 from a CD require additionally a 1.7GB update download and 200+ update installations. Some motherboards doesn’t know what to do when a second GFX card is installed and goes black – even though it should support 2 GFX cards. If its old shit you are dealing with – read on the internet what flaws it has before buying/installing it.

I could also say fuck it – and buy new hardware. But windows 7 doesn’t run on new hardware. And why does it have to be Windows 7. Because Windows 10 Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) steals 20% of your Vram. Something that Microsoft didn’t tell you about!

So I dusted off the old motherboard I though was broken. Cleaned it with alcohol, changed some wires and used different PCI-E sockets on the PSU – and the damn thing runs fine again. So maybe next time I should start by cleaning the hardware first. Just hope it doesn’t start doing weird things again – but so far so good.