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SLI option not showing up. I thought Nvidia drivers 'just worked'

The 5850 I had wasn't as bad to be honest, but it could probably still have done from better thermal paste.
 
Marvin said:
The 5850 I had wasn't as bad to be honest, but it could probably still have done from better thermal paste.
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when you wer a kid... did any toy last longer than a week before it was taken appart to see what it was made of? :p
as an 8 year old (30 years ago) i decapitated my stretch armstrong to see what he was made of.. turns out it was some sticky goo thats probly still stuck to the walls of my old house to this day
 
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Well, I got an answer from Nvidia's tech support over what is checked by the drivers.

Tech Support said:
For SLI approval driver will check the following:

1. MB chipset device ID - Must be approved for SLI
2. GPUs device ID - Must be SLI capable
3. GPUs architecture (same family) - Must be the same
4. GPUs Frame Buffer Size (dedicated video memory) - Must be the same

Any mismatch will causes the SLI approval to fail. According to the information #2 - #4 does match with the two GTX 470 cards. And since the Asus Maximus III Gene is listed as SLI capable it should in theory be true for #1 as well. The SLI approval should be embedded into the system BIOS, unless it was removed, so need to make sure the system BIOS currently on the MB has NVIDIA SLI support enabled. Have you check for updated BIOS? I see that the latest version is listed as version 2001 dated 7/30/2010.
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As far as I can tell at this point, maybe the Xeon CPU causes the chipset to do something so it's not recognised. It's all I can think of now, besides a faulty motherboard (even though both lanes work fine).
 
Interesting, with regard to #1 "MB chipset device ID" the P55 doesn't actually have a northbridge chipset does it? all of the northbridge functions were moved onto the actual CPU, so I think you could be right that the Xeon is at fault.

Any chance you could borrow an i5/i7 from a friend to try it?
 
Nah, all my friends either have older LGA775 or earlier PCs, or AM2/3. Only chance I'd have had would have been to buy a Pentium G6950 then return under DSR. Didn't have the spare cash, and ultimately, if that worked then I'd need an i7 860 at >£200, so I've sold the GTX470, sent the other back and bought a GTX480.

I do suspect the CPU is the problem, though on ASRock boards (the Deluxe and Extreme P55s anyway) Xeons are supported, and they support SLI, so I wonder how that would have worked...
 
Last update before I leave this be. Got a reply from customer support after I asked whether having a Xeon CPU would be an issue, and they said:

Tech Support said:
That could be the problem since we do distinguish consumer vs. workstation motherboard/chipset. Take the x58 chipset for example, it only support SLI with Quadro boards but not GeForce boards. The Xeon CPU may very well resulted in MB to be considered a workstation rather than a consumer system. That is the only explanation I can think of. But I'm afraid that is by design since Intel chipset will vary in SLI support with Quadro vs. GeForce cards.
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Don't think thats possible anymore, you'd need a customised bios flashed on the cards. Interesting, tho annoying if it is the problem here.
 
Well, to be honest I didn't have the extra cash to throw at an i7 860, and even then it's not 100% guaranteed to work.

What I don't get is this:
-If Nvidia's drivers see a Xeon, and assume that GeForce cards can't be SLI'd (basically), how can ASRock boards, and the Asus Supercomputer P55 boards support Xeons and SLI? Both are P55.
 
Overslop said:
Do they claim that they work in conjunction with each other or state them as individual features?
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The latter. However, there are no footnotes or anything to the affect that if a Xeon CPU is run, SLI won't run. And without some kind of reference to that fact, I can't see how they would be able to get away with it...
 
My guess is its an oversight on the part of the programmer(s), but getting them to even acknowledge this or look into/fix it is gonna be tough.
 
Marvin said:
Well, to be honest I didn't have the extra cash to throw at an i7 860, and even then it's not 100% guaranteed to work.

What I don't get is this:
-If Nvidia's drivers see a Xeon, and assume that GeForce cards can't be SLI'd (basically), how can ASRock boards, and the Asus Supercomputer P55 boards support Xeons and SLI? Both are P55.
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I just had a glance at the ASUS P7P55 WS Supercomputer and it appears to have an NVidia NF100 chipset for two extra 16x PCI-E lanes, so presumably the NVidia drivers will see that chipset and engage SLI, although whether tri-SLI will work with a Xeon (using the CPU's own PCI-E lanes) I'm not sure, it claims to officially support Xeon so should do.

I can't find any ASRock P55 motherboards that claim to support Xeon but if SLI does work on them with Xeon's then maybe ASRock did a little trickery with the BIOS or something.

This is unfortunately the type of crap that happens when you try to use Xeon's in unsupported boards, I remember when I once had an Opteron (those were the days :p) and there was a game that wouldn't run on it because it didn't recognise the CPU. :(
 
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