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Help SLi graphics problems....

briantonkinson

briantonkinson

briantonkinson

Associate
Joined
24 Mar 2008
Posts
26
Wondering if anyone can help. I have recently built an SLi system (see specs below) I am running Windows in SLi mode fine but when I try and play SLi games such as Trackmania nations and Quake 3 in SLi mode I get graphical glitches in the form of horizontal lines across the screen and quick vanishing blocks. These disappear if I throw it into Single GPU mode through NVidia control panel.

I am using latest none-beta BIOS (1302) and latest graphics drivers (169.21).

Spec:
ASUS M2N SLi Deluxe MB
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
2 X Gainward NVIDIA GeForce 8600 256MB Silent FX GCards
2GB GEIL DDR2 800 (4.4.4.12 latency).
300GB Maxtor Diomandmax10 SATA HDD
480W Tagan PSU

Everythings running reasnably cool. CPU is water cooled. MB and GCard are cooled by two internal fans (1 120mm and 1 80mm) and there are three intake fans at the front of the PC.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

Brian
 
Hi,

Hoping you may have found a solution to this as it seems I am suffering from a similar problem.

With SLi enabled 2d is fine but as you enter a game even at the menu screen I get a flashing blue cast around everything which sometimes then degrades into blue horizontal bands approx an inch wide which travel down the screen. Disable SLi and everything is fine.

What frustrates me most is that SLi was working fine until I changed the cards from GTS 320's to GTS 512's and the cpu from a 6750 to an 8200.

The problem arose straight after the swap but was resolved after switching to the 2nd dvi output, this worked fine for two days but now the problem is back!.

Driver wise I was using the latest whql with the 320's and stuck with that when I installed the new cards but have since tried the later beta drivers with no improvement.

I would have assumed that power was not an issue, can't remember exactly what psu is in but probably a PC Power & cooling 700w or therabouts would need to check the box (in the garage) to be sure. I had assumed that the G92's would use less power, the cpu certainly does for the same speed.

Will have a look at re-installing the drivers again using the standard vga option before installing the 169xx whql.

Any advice appreciated, Simon.
 
i had a similar experince with 2x 8500gt's

when i took the sli bridge off they worked fine in sli mode, i couldn't figure that one out so just accepted it
 
ca9phoenix said:
i had a similar experince with 2x 8500gt's

when i took the sli bridge off they worked fine in sli mode, i couldn't figure that one out so just accepted it
Click to expand...


Very similar to the problem i had and never really solved it apart from using pretty old drivers
 
Are these issues happening in all games or just old ones? Have you tried forcing a different rendering mode to see if that makes it go away? I've not run SLI for a while so I'm clutching at straws...:)
 
With me it was in everything 3d related. Try the older drivers and i think you'll find the problem almost dissappears
 
Seems to be with all 3d apps yeah - I have tried disabling all overclocking but to no avail.

ca9phoenix - what you mean you took the SLi bridge off and it worked fine in SLi mode. I assume you can't do SLi without the SLi bridge??? Going to try swapping the cards over when I get a chance in case I perhaps have 1 buggy card but doesn't soyund like it.
 
OK run SLI without the bridge - but there is a performance drop (noticeable). I'm not impressed. Surely this makes the cards faulty technically?

To be honest there aren’t many games that support SLI anyway - even 3D mark is recommended to run as single GPU by NVIDA.

Would have to say NVIDIA have gone down quite a way in my estimation. This is rubbish and I am going to contact advertising standards about the whole "twice the performance" business because it's clearly nonsense.
 
Try changing the multi GPU acceleration mode from single to multi performance or the other way around if its already set to multi - sometimes one of the cards only runs 2D clocks while the other runs whatever you have set if you don't do this and it can cause issues...

I can show you tons of screenshots of SLI running pretty close to double performance - minus 1-2% to overheads - it doesn't always give those gains - but it does happen.
 
briantonkinson said:
OK run SLI without the bridge - but there is a performance drop (noticeable). I'm not impressed. Surely this makes the cards faulty technically?

To be honest there aren’t many games that support SLI anyway - even 3D mark is recommended to run as single GPU by NVIDA.

Would have to say NVIDIA have gone down quite a way in my estimation. This is rubbish and I am going to contact advertising standards about the whole "twice the performance" business because it's clearly nonsense.
Click to expand...

SLI works very well when its set up correctly, ive had SLI setups at least 8 or 9 times with different cards. Only my last setup caused me any issues, but that could be down to anything, drivers, motherboard or windows.

If the cards work ok on thier own then the cards cant be faulty.
 
Just tried taking one card out and it performs exactly the same as with both cards in (but without the SLi bridge). The only way I seem to get a performance increase is using the bridge but that causes graphical glitches (lots of people have reportied this if you google it and nvidia have done nothing about it).

Full specs are:

ASUS M2N SLi Deluxe
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
2GB GEIL DDR2 800 (4-4-4-12 latency)
2X Gainward GeForce 8600 GT 256MB
Maxtor Diomandmax 10 300GB SATA HDD
Tagen 480W PSU
Windows XP Professional SP2

BIOS revision 1302
NVIDIA Forceware version 169.21

Open to suggestions
 
Try what I suggested please...

also check in everest when 3d clocks are in use - i.e. run atitool or something - and see if both cards are running the same clocks...
 
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