Travel back in your time machine's with me to the socket-775 era!

[The_Lanbone]

Ok so it has a heartbeat, but very irregular. Right now the system will only boot into windows successfully with 2x2gb sticks in opposite channels, cpu fsb matching the rated 1333mhz of the ram, and the 2nd GPU unplugged. Putting more ram in gives me the instant C1 error and the system locks up before it even gets started. Plugging the 2nd GPU in and it never loads windows successfully (guessing driver error here maybe) but it never displays the windows splash screen, just black, then the monitor stops getting a signal and goes into suspend. Are these 2 problems mutually exclusive? I have always assumed they were related and it was the board malfunctioning (which I still think it is). Driver wise I've tried a few - 3 official releases and like 2 different beta drivers. None have worked. 295.73 just finished downloading so I'm trying that now to see if that might fix the booting issue when I try and power the 2nd card on.

NB/SB felt warm but I put some fans in place directly on top and the heatsink is barely warm to the touch now. I haven't really noticed any type of performance or reliability difference.

 

[marsey99]

no, i was wondering more if the heatsink are contacting, if they was cool to touch then they might not be right and refitting them could help.

 

[The_Lanbone]

Is there a way to trick a motherboard into allowing you to run SLI in a different pci slot? This board only lets SLI run in slots 1 & 3 while the 2nd slot is used in triple SLI setups. I've tried putting the card in slot 2 and the system won't boot, it just tells me I have hardware installed wrong. The reason I ask is because I'm really starting to wonder if this PCI slot might be dead or just acting funny. The system is up and running (sort of) pretty stable now with 2x2GB of RAM and the 1 GPU. It's when I add in the 2nd card that I know the system won't boot and I have to start this whole 'What configuration will this want to boot in now?' game. I've tried swapping cards (the one currently working) but the system didn't boot. Pulled it out, left in card B in the primary spot and the system still didn't boot. Oddly enough, I then put both cards back in their original places, and the system booted up but then froze as soon as I tried to enable SLI in the nVidia control panel. Any ideas of how to test and see if it is 100% the slot and not maybe just a driver issue?

 

[Grizzly]

Try putting another PCI-E device in the slot you should be using for your second graphics card and then put your second graphics card in the slot you want it in.

 

[The_Lanbone]

Hahaha I found an old ATI Radeon X600 at work, popped it in PCI-e slot 2 and put the 2nd GPU in slot 3 and the system booted right up last night. Ran it all night testing for stability using OCCT 1hr test, 6hrs of Prime95, Unigine, 3DMark11, and 5 runs in IntelBurn test and it passed them all so far. The only bummer is that the system still refuses to boot with anything more than 2x2GB of RAM in opposite DIMMs. It still doesn't like to boot with the memory in dual-channel. Tonight I'll try and setup nVidia Surround and see how she likes doing a bit of wheeling on 3 monitors. So far so good. I am a happy boy. Good suggestion Grizzly, I felt stupid for not thinking of that! LOL