SLi Help needed please.

Z

ZaX

New member
Lo all,

Just recieved an xfx 7800 gtx from Philip1193 today (thanks Phil) to run in SLi with my existing card. The system detects the card no probs, latest drivers installed, but when I bench i get 1 card scores. I enabled the show GPU load feature in the Forceware drivers to see what the cards are up to but I don't get the load shown whilst benching. This leads me to think that one of the cards is not getting enough power, could this be a power issue? I've got the 600W Enermax Noisetaker PSU, which is supposed to be SLi approved, but I do have a stack load of stuff runing of it (see sig + lights fans etc). Any ideas guys?

Thanks.
 
With the latest drivers you can now run cards from different vendors in SLi aslong as they are the same model, so I shouldn't think that the bios version would be a problem. Cheers.
 
Welcome to my world mate my system seems to do it every now and then as well firstly have the cards at stock speeds and do the whole enable sli and show balancing.

In you desktop it wont show until you go 3d run a simple benchmark like aqua mark if it doesnt show in this then re install your chipset drivers also have you enabled sli in the bios??

and are the jumpers set to sli mode??
 
Hey Fatty, you're da man :B saved me splashing out like £160 on a PSU. I did like you said, reinstalled the chipset drivers and then the graphics drivers. Now to play some :) Thanks dude.
 
I'm a bit behind the big boys here but this SLi lark is brilliant especially when gaming at 1600x1200 or more. I can now wack up the eye candy and still get good fps. BF2 and CSS look amazing. First run on 3dmark 2005 I got 13400, which was not bad, I thought without tweaks. However only scored 107k in Aquamark :( which is only 2k more than my single card results. 3dmark2001 and 2003 scores were below par too, any ideas folks?

Cheers.
 
AQM is not SLI friendly ZAX mate - really to get a better score u need to tweak to the max - I am sure there is 115000 in there if you spend the time on it, as much as I like AQM it's not really relevant nowadays.

01 and 03 - you should see some decent improvements in 03, again, how much are you scoring now and how much time are you wiling to put into it Zax mate - I can help I am sure.

what scores are you managing in 03 and 01?
 
Off the top of my head, for 01 and 03, they were 1 card results :(, I remember because at the time I had a look at the EP-UK leadertables to compare. I mean even 6800 Gts in Sli were beating me :$.

I can't understand how comes it runs relatively well in 05 (I'm happy at being 3k behind Mav :)) but not in 01 and 03 :?
 
Weird one mate - but if the results dont look too good then it could be a cold issue - are both cards watercooled? If so, ensure that card temps are above 35 degrees before running the tests and all should be well.

Some people have experienced that an over-over clocked CPU can be a problem also (this has not happened to me thou) try dropping a few Mhz off the CPU clock.

I know you installed the chipset drivers but perhaps using driver cleaner and re-installing the chipset and GPU drivers (use 81.98 from Nvidia)

will help?

Cheers

Mav
 
At the moment one card is on water and the other on the stock cooler (until I get my second block of M8trix), both are running at stock speeds. I did have the cold bug on the water cooled card when I first got it but then I flashed it with an edited bios and all was OK (Mav, you gave me the tip for that quite a while back) Could this be the problem? Anyways, I'll probably flash the second card to the cold bug free bios when I get the block. Is it possible to flash the bios on each individual card whilst they are both plugged in? or do I have to put them in individually and then flash them?

Cheers.
 
I use SLI Flash which will do both cards (sometimes) and is quite a useful tool to have. I'll drop a linky in here http://www.mvktech.net/downloads/MVKFLash_SLI_Flash.V1.1.zip

Unzip this program straight into a floppy disk as it has boot files on it too. Then set floppy as first boot device and menu drop open.

Copy the BIOS u want to flash into the Master directory a:\

It will back-up your exisiting BIOS if required and flash new one - but I always just download the corresponding BIOS from MVKTECH.NET when I need to go back to the original.

Always best to have the same BIOS in both cards.

Just try and put the SLI bridge in the other way around to see if thats the problem.

Mav
 
I must have downloaded 06 about 3 times now and each time its been corrupted. I've even tried different machines, just incase my OC was some how corrupting the download. Got a link mate?

Cheers.
 
cant remember where i got mine from but it will not work if your overclock is too high for some reason??
 
OK guys, I used the SLi flash prog and flashed both bioses with a cold bug free bios. Is there a way I can check my bios versions from windows?

(Dos scares me, reminds me of my days of confused programming :? using Fortran77, nooob I know :$)

By the way Mav, I used a driver cleaner before reinstalling the chipset and graphics drivers and I also inverted the SLi bridge but still no increase in 01 or 03 :( I get about 32k in 03, shouldn't I be hitting 40k?

Thanks guys.
 
I dont think you can check in windows Zax mate - normally when running the benchies you will see some peculiar behaviour. But to be double safe - selcet option 4 everytime you flash (but just take the top card out and flash then replace and flash again, thats what I do).

Understand that I was running my SD FX55 at 3.5Ghz with some serious tweakage on both with fresh install of Windows.

I would hope that you would achieve 40k in 01 and 30k in 03 sounds about right to me - knowing that you are not fully optimised, running 300Mhz slower on the CPU and my cards are volt modded to run 610/1500.

Try a run in 05 and see how things have improved there mate.

Here's a couple of compare URL's that might help ya:

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=4142023

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=8652865

I think 77.72 drivers are good benchie drivers for single core CPU.

Both scores from respected bencher, same cards, similar clocks for CPU and GPU.

Mav
 
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