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GTX 260 SLI Woes

speedalini

speedalini

speedalini

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Joined
10 Jan 2009
Posts
108
Just splashed out on a Gainward gtx 260 to run in SLI with my current XFX black edition - problem is that the Gainward, with has the twin rather than single fan configuration, has its SLI pins offset ~5mm along the card relative to the XFX. Annoyingly this means by rigid SLI bridge which came with my motherboard won't fit (I had a go forcing it, but there was more chance of it breaking rather than fitting). Anyone else had this problem? Anyone seen any flexible bridges available anywhere?

I gather the bridge isn't essential, so rigged it all up and booted. It posted fine but no display on the screen whatsoever. I tried attaching my monitor to the dvi ports on each card in turn without success. The Gainward card is in the place of my old card and connected with the same lead from the PSU, however there is no air exhausting out the back... The XFX card is connected to a previously unused slot and cable from the PSU and spins up fine, but still no picture on screen when connected to my monitor... Any ideas what's going on? I will try the Gainward card its own next to check that isn't dead :(

Any help much appreciated!
 
You can get flexilble SLi bridges, one came with my EVGA mainboard, just do a quick google for them plenty about on the bay etc.
 
The sli bridge not being present shouldnt cause no display, ive often forgot to install the bridge on my own sli setup, displays fine with no noticeable drop in performance.
 
speedalini said:
cool, so only available second-hand?
Click to expand...
Yes you will find it very hard to find sli bridges from a retailer online.
Do what coupe has suggested and you will find loads,and most will be brand new not second hand,not it matters if they are second hand?
 
cool, cheers, I'll check it out. I was initially going to try and avoid using that famous action site, after this potentially bad experience if this card is dead. Any ideas for the lack of display?
 
make sure the card is seated properly - when I first fitted mine it was like 0.5mm too high at the front and no display on screen as the bracket had bent very slightly.
 
Does the Gainward card work beyond getting into Windows?

Perhaps download MSI afterburner, run a game and monitor the temps.

A quick scan through the problems noted so far makes me feel that the Gainward is not 100%.
 
When I restarted after the freeze at the splash screen I got the windows start-up repair come up - I did a system restore and now it gets into windows now no problem. I also had to change a setting in the BIOS to specify the slot which it first tries to detect a card to display a picture (was set as PCI slot, now PCI-E 1) - not sure why this has only just become an issue! Temps wise, with the old card in the primary slot, this is idling around 15deg hotter than the gainward in the secondary!
 
Just worthy of note is that I have literally last night got 260 SLI running with an XFX 260 216 BE 65nm, and a BFG Maxcore 260 216 55nm, and I did NOT need SLI bridges, although the Nvidia control panel does tell me it prefers them when they are not detected.
 
Scougar said:
Just worthy of note is that I have literally last night got 260 SLI running with an XFX 260 216 BE 65nm, and a BFG Maxcore 260 216 55nm, and I did NOT need SLI bridges, although the Nvidia control panel does tell me it prefers them when they are not detected.
Click to expand...

yeah I have read it doesn't much difference to performance
 
Although the cards seem to be working ok, I am now suffering driver issues! I've tried to uninstall the driver, do a sweep in safe mode to remove any leftovers, then install the latest version. This works ok initially until I turn off the computer. Then I get 800x600 res and only one card showing up in device manager. Any ideas what's causing this? If I go to update the driver and locate one on my hard drive, there seems to be a few old versions listed on there already - how do I locate them to delete and how come the driver sweep hasn't got them already?
 
speedalini said:
Although the cards seem to be working ok, I am now suffering driver issues! I've tried to uninstall the driver, do a sweep in safe mode to remove any leftovers, then install the latest version. This works ok initially until I turn off the computer. Then I get 800x600 res and only one card showing up in device manager. Any ideas what's causing this? If I go to update the driver and locate one on my hard drive, there seems to be a few old versions listed on there already - how do I locate them to delete and how come the driver sweep hasn't got them already?
Click to expand...

As annoying as it can be it might be best to do a complete OS re-install.

As a quick test; try each GTX 260 seperately in the system. Do you get the same issue with both cards or just one?
 
oweneades said:
As annoying as it can be it might be best to do a complete OS re-install.

As a quick test; try each GTX 260 seperately in the system. Do you get the same issue with both cards or just one?
Click to expand...

It seems to be when I have both cards in - either one on its own works fine. At this rate I may have to try the OS re-install unless I can think up any other things to try. Trouble is I may get tmpted to buy an SSD to make it more worthwhile ;)
 
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part of the problem seems to be that, although I uninstall the driver and do a sweep, windows still has its own copies of old drivers that it automatically installs. Is there a way of disabling this so I can install the latest version first? Or delete the windows stored versions so it cant do it?

EDIT: I've now tried that but it makes no difference. After re-installing the latest driver and it working last night, this morning I turn on and it only recognises my original card in slot 2, which windows has stopped with a code 43 error.
 
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