Scratching my head at SLI, help?!

[-fedexer-]

So i'm about to get rid of my old pc to my father in exchange for the one i'm currently going to be building, however before taking it off of my hands he wanted me to add the second nvidia 9600GSO card i bought a couple of years back so he can have 2x 9600GSO in SLI.

Now i've connected both cards to the mobo, and even flipped over the chip card on the mobo which states it's using dual video cards... and yet i boot into windows and nvidia control panel states: "For optimal 3D performance, connect the SLI-ready graphics cards with an SLI connector.". And now i'm lost.. i thought that was what i had enabled on the mobo with the chip flip.. (however all the images i see of SLI cards 9600GSO have a like bridge between both cards)

Am i missing something here? Is there something else i need to connect both cards in SLI which i don't seem to have? :S

Thanks for the help!

 

[reflux]

What's the motherboard?

 

[-fedexer-]

According to a very old original order sheet i just found, it's a A8N-SLI DELUXE.

 

[Scougar]

It wants you to put the SLI cable across the two cards. You don't need it as far as I'm aware with the newer drivers.

Just go into the Nvidia Control Panel and enable SLI. Then ignore the warning.

Once you've done that, run the program called GPU-Z, and check to see that it says SLI-Enabled. And you are ready to go

 

[martynbez]

Do you not have a connector block for the top of the cards to link them there?

 

[-fedexer-]

Do you not have a connector block for the top of the cards to link them there?

I don't however the mobo compencates for this

Thanks for the help guys, i've been fiddling more with the nvidia settings, and downloaded gpu-z, and i've now got the SLI working

 

[Rroff]

The SLI bridge will still give better performance.

All the chip on the motherboard controls is how the PCI-e lanes on the motherboard are allocated, typically in single card mode you have say 16x lanes to the primary PCI-e slot and 0-2x lanes to the second slot. In multi GPU mode it will generally run something like 8x lanes to each slot.

With 9600 cards on an 8x slot each even at PCI-e 1.x spec the brige probably won't make much odds (5-10% at best) but if it was a board that only allocated say 4x lanes to the 2nd slot then you'd see a bigger performance gain from having the bridge (possibly as much as 15-20%).