SLI issue

[Rachmaninoff]

Last night instead of going out and drinking me and my friend sat around tweaking my computer and drank. While doing so we discovered that my CPU was floating around 60-65 degrees C... That we are going to fix this weekend and put in a water cool system. What we also discovered is that my cards are not running in SLI. I've been running 2x 9800 GT. I'm pretty certain that they were working in SLI because when I first got the second card there was a noticeable difference. Lately, I can't remember when, there was a sudden drop in quality.

Here's my setup
cards
board
processor

I believe part of the problem may come from the board being an ati compatible board and not a nvidia board. I should have looked at this when bought it. (But you live and learn.) What doesn't make sense is why did it work at one time and now its not? Could it be the bridge or a physical problem?

In the nvidia settings it is not showing SLI connection and it has been a very long time since I tweaked with my settings personally so I'm not 100% sure I ever was running SLI.

I have been thinking about getting a new video card like a 460-465GTX. But if I could get my cards working in SLI it would save me a bunch of money. Any thoughts?

[laterna]

For starters

a) Check the bridge is sitting properly
b) Check that you have SLI mode selected
c) Fresh re-install of drivers
d) Call Asus tech support. Give them the rundown on whats going on and they might know a secret or two.

However, egg says your motherboard doesn't support SLI but it does crossfire. If it all goes to naught, try using a driver from around when you got your cards working in SLI.

[cerwillis]

My understanding is that boards are either Crossfire compatible OR SLI, I've not seen a board that was both.

[Levantine]

Gigabyte P67A-UD4. I know because I have the board and I'm looking at. One would assume it's not the only one.

...

By the looks of it though, that board is a Crossfire only board.

[Rachmaninoff]

For starters

a) Check the bridge is sitting properly
b) Check that you have SLI mode selected
c) Fresh re-install of drivers
d) Call Asus tech support. Give them the rundown on whats going on and they might know a secret or two.

However, egg says your motherboard doesn't support SLI but it does crossfire. If it all goes to naught, try using a driver from around when you got your cards working in SLI.

thanks, I'll give it a shot, it is tough to figure out what driver since I don't remember when it was working, I'm going to try to clean the SLI spots and try a different bridge

but this is more and more looking like my stupidity and should have looked at the mobo when I got it... then does anyone have suggestions? my friend suggested either a new mobo, just a single nvidia card, I'm thinking possibly a new ATI card but I haven't really heard too much about them recently

[gibborim]

In the nvidia settings it is not showing SLI connection and it has been a very long time since I tweaked with my settings personally so I'm not 100% sure I ever was running SLI.

I doubt you were ever actually running them in SLI mode. AMD boards are crossfire only(if anything is supported) while intel boards are generally both(again, if anything is supported). There is no particular reason AMD boards can't support SLI. They just choose to not provide that functionality. If you feel particularly intrepid, you can try out the hacked drivers that allow for SLI functionality on an AMD board. I don't understand why they don't support it, but I effectively stopped caring about AMD products after Intel ripped their faces off with the Core Duo line.

Strangely enough, some AMD boards are supporting a ghetto-SLI between a single video card and the embedded GPU on some chips.

[tullock]

You can make sli work on any motherboard that supports crossfire. You just have to take a few steps to change windows at startup so that the nvidia drivers think you have a board capable of sli. I have personally run sli on a gigabyte ga-ex38 dq6 (in windows 7 professional 64bit) which is a crossfire only intel x38 board.


Edit: http://xdevs.com/e107_plugins/content/c ... content.30 is the path i took to get it done, and some basic results were

[Kelaan]

This is a side question, but does SLI or Crossfire work with WoW yet? All the stuff I've seen in it was from a couple years ago of people saying No, but then they DID do a bunch of engine improvements for Cataclysm.