The Elitegroup PF88 Extreme: An Athlon 64 or Pentium 4 Motherboard

Metamorphosis Step-by-Step

Next come the memory modules. We reached for two DIMMs from the American company OCZ, which support fast CL2-2-2-5 timing.

Around the Elite Bus socket you'll find 12 jumpers. If the CPU sister board is to do its job, all jumpers must be reversed, to let the card communicate with the Southbridge chipset on the motherboard.

After the A9S is fully assembled, it must be inserted into its intended slot.

Don't forget: the four-pin AUX connector for sister board power must also be hooked up to the sister board.

The next step is to switch over (or insert) the graphics card into the secondary x16 PCIe slot...

...because the primary slot only works with the Pentium 4 Northbridge. But because the A9S CPU heatsink impinges on that very space, the primary graphics slot becomes inaccessible anyway.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.