Hello,
I have made a potentially expensive and futile attempt at transforming a used S5500BC board in to a "super" desktop PC - consider this a bit of a story to share, and perhaps you might have some ideas on what I can do. I received the board and found the SSI-CEB format will fit in any case that fits an ATX board, so I went ahead and installed it in a non-Intel chassis. Given that this particular board has the need for only 1 4+4pin connector, I chose a Thermaltake Toughpower 750w PSU to power it. I got 2 x5670 CPUs and some ECC ram, fired it all up and it was working.
Naturally, to have a PC with a decent amount of CPU power, I wanted a decent graphics card to assist. Then I had found the 8x PCIe slots on this board were 8x in both throughput AND mechanically - naturally, any 16x PCIe graphics card will not fit.
Well, I wasn't willing to take no for an answer and decided to do what I've read about and seen videos of - to perform some surgery on the board to allow it to fix a 16x PCIe graphics card...
This seems completely insane, but much like what I had read with others having success, it actually worked... I dremeled the rear edge of the slot away (making sure I didn't take out any pins on the slot, or destroy anything on the board itself) and it both fit and worked... I had a NVIDIA GTX 650 ti running seemingly without issue for about a week.
Well, after successfully putting it through some paces (prime95 for the CPUs to make sure they would not overheat, and Furmark to see if any power-related issues would surface when pushing the GPU to its limit) I got comfortable with using the system. Then on a particular occasion I shut down the computer. It was taking a while, so I held in the power button. Inexplicably the machine turned off but made some beeps which later I found correspond to a power failure. When I switched the system back on, I heard my graphics card fan at full speed, and no longer saw a screen (no signal)
I plugged a VGA cable back in to the onboard graphics to see if the board was still working, and it was - the screen displayed properly, although I didn't seem to be able to boot the OS at all, it was in an infinite loop...
I left the machine overnight and plugged back in the next day and initially I had the same issue. I unplugged it and moved the chassis in to a different room, and when powering it up, the graphics card was working again and I was able to boot back in to the OS. So, scratching my head I moved it back to its original location and it started again. I was beginning to think the problem was related to the power outlet, but when I moved back in to the other room and plugged it back in, the problem persisted, and continues to persist.
I wonder if I just made a complete mess by using a physically incompatible card and have possibly destroyed the board (despite it still being able to POST) or if I have a PSU issue? Well, luckily I was able to pick up the board very cheap, so not much money was lost as a result of my experiment. Well, I took receipt of another S5500BC, loaded it with all my parts, made sure it was working okay (which it was) then performed the surgery again and installed the GPU. It powered on and the GPU fan was normal. I went in to the BIOS to disable VT-d and after saving the changes, the board powered down, and upon restarting, the fans on the GPU were back at full speed and I was back to square one...
Well I am at a loss as to whether the issue is related to power or the GPU... If you buy in to my crazy experiment and think you can help that'd be great - otherwise feel free to have a laugh at how crazy the idea was!