DId I fry my second graphics card?

Don't you love it when you come home to the BOD?

Well, I don't. I have two 7800gtxs is my ASUS A8N-SLI nForce4 SLI Skt 939 motherboard. These cards are watercooled and have been working fine for about 4 months now. Now everytime I try to start up with both cards activated it gets past the windows xp loading screen....hangs....hangs a little more, then BOD. When I restart with (1) card selected it works fine.

I have tried opening the case and everything seems in order. I downloaded new drivers for the cards and the nforce drivers and installed them thinking maybe the drivers were corrupted, but, nope. The blue screen of death is a little whacked because I can't even read the error message due the fuzziness of the screen. One time it did come out clear and it said the error was something to do with the "nv4_disp.dll" or something VERY close to that.

I would change out the cards to the main PCI slot to see if one was bad but its not that easy due to my watercooling set-up.

Am I missing something? Help!

OS: Windows XP
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 4000+, MMX, 3DNow, ~2.6GHz
Memory: 2048MB RAM
Graphics Cards: (2) 7800 gtxs
Oh! Also I have a 500w power supply

Message quoted 1 times
Message edited by kinglou on 07-17-2007 at 06:06:23 AM

Reply to kinglou

kinglou wrote :

Don't you love it when you come home to the BOD?

Well, I don't. I have two 7800gtxs is my ASUS A8N-SLI nForce4 SLI Skt 939 motherboard. These cards are watercooled and have been working fine for about 4 months now. Now everytime I try to start up with both cards activated it gets past the windows xp loading screen....hangs....hangs a little more, then BOD. When I restart with (1) card selected it works fine.

I have tried opening the case and everything seems in order. I downloaded new drivers for the cards and the nforce drivers and installed them thinking maybe the drivers were corrupted, but, nope. The blue screen of death is a little whacked because I can't even read the error message due the fuzziness of the screen. One time it did come out clear and it said the error was something to do with the "nv4_disp.dll" or something VERY close to that.

I would change out the cards to the main PCI slot to see if one was bad but its not that easy due to my watercooling set-up.

Am I missing something? Help!

OS: Windows XP
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 4000+, MMX, 3DNow, ~2.6GHz
Memory: 2048MB RAM
Graphics Cards: (2) 7800 gtxs
Oh! Also I have a 500w power supply

You should swap out your cards and try each as a single. If both cards check good individually, your power supply has given out. Replace with a PSU that has at least 22/22 amps on the 12v rails for those cards.

Reply to badge

thanks for the quick reponse.

but can my power supply go half-ass broken? Like I said I am to do everything normally until I activate the second card.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to kinglou

kinglou wrote :

thanks for the quick reponse.

but can my power supply go half-ass broken? Like I said I am to do everything normally until I activate the second card.

yup. My two 7800gts ran fine for six months with an Enermax 535 watt 18/18amp dual 12 volt rail. System started acting like one of the video cards was toast crashing all the timme, blue screening, lines all over the screen. It was the PSU. Replaced with 22/24 12 volt amp psu an all is well.

Reply to badge

Yup, that'll happen :-/

Reply to leo2kp

Thanks for the reponses guys. I think I will purchase a new PSU to see if thats it first.

When you guys mention "22/24" or "22/22" what are those in reference to?

Reply to kinglou

They ment the amps on each 12v rail. Did you try each card seperatly as posted above? Also try older drivers and see if that works.

Reply to smokedyou911

If it's the psu is normal when you activate only one card to work well and when you activate the second one to become unstable because it increases the load on your psu.

Reply to cristip60

Hah, well when I was looking searching for a solution to my problem (above) I found out when you type "SLI BOD" in Yahoo its the first link to show up and its the third link on Google!

So I took the advice on this thread and purchased a brand new 600w Zalman power supply:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 17379003&T pk=zalman%2b600w

Thinking my problems were over I installed my new PSU and came upon the realization that the exact same problem was happening again. Everytime I enable SLI mode (even in BIOS) the computer crashes to the BOD. And again, enabling a single video card works fine.

As I mentioned above my SLI system is water cooled and I can't just remove cards and try them in different machines because I do not have the heatsink fans anymore. They are literally locked together with their water blocks.

So as I was searching for a replacment 7800gtx online I realized why don't I try giving power to the SECOND card and not the first card like I have been doing. Sure enough with the second card powered up windows booted fine but it came with a message saying that the card is not getting its neccessary power and must clock down to work properly...or something like that.

Now I don't know if this is something that happens all the time when you use the second PCI-E exclusively or not. But non-the-less the second card seems to be fine...and the first card as well!?!

I have updated the BIOS, done a virus check and installed all new drivers.

Any other ideas?

FYI: I also should mention when my computer first went down it was in the middle of encoding a movie.

Reply to kinglou

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you bought a power supply (http://www.zalman.co.kr/usa/produc [...] 3&code=015) that has 16A per rail on four rails. The other guys told you to lookout for that. You still haven't eliminated PSU as the source of the problem. I myself thought I was having similar problems so I've been doing a heap of reading about this stuff recently.

Message quoted 1 times
Message edited by TJ_the_First on 07-25-2007 at 07:52:56 AM

Frick on a stick! Your right.

How about this one. I looked at the specifications and it have two rails running at 28 amps??? Which should be good???

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817194021

Al so runs quiet I think which is a must.

Reply to kinglou

I just checked your psu http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817194021 It will work no problems, but is lil overkill, but itll supply all the power youll need for any upgrades, also it becomes pcie2 compliant when needed. Ive owned enermax, solid psu's. If this baby doesnt work, then theres a huge problem elsewhere. Good choice.

------------------------------ If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening
Reply to JAYDEEJOHN

That looks like it should do the job. I just hope for your sake this turns out to be the problem because it certainly ain't cheap.

This thread http://www.xtremesystems.org/forum [...] p?t=108088 ranks all the CPU's and seems to be a good guide as to what you get in terms of quality. You'll see the Enermax Infiniti right up there in the Tier 2 and looking like a damn good unit. On the Enermax site http://www.enermax.com/english/pro [...] sp?PrID=66 they say it has 28A per rail so it looks like it's easy good enough. I wish I could afford one, then I'd be confident moving to dual 2900Pros when they come out.

This has to be the solution to my problem, yes?

It just seems weird that my set-up has been working fine for about 4 months and all of the sudden one day when encoding my copy of "Children of Men" it goes BOD on me.

I do remember playing some games and the computer just turning off on me. But it always came back and worked fine.

If the second card was bad it would of not booted correctly (like it did)...or at all?

I will order (another) PSU tomorrow morning. Ugh.

Reply to kinglou

Other options are to run virus scan, malware etc. If you havnt done this do it anyways, then maybe spend your money

------------------------------ If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening
Reply to JAYDEEJOHN

Ya did all of those as well. Thanks for the help guys. I am ordering my second power supply.

Anybody want to buy that Zalman power supply off of me???

Reply to kinglou

TJ_the_First wrote :

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you bought a power supply (http://www.zalman.co.kr/usa/produc [...] 3&code=015) that has 16A per rail on four rails. The other guys told you to lookout for that. You still haven't eliminated PSU as the source of the problem. I myself thought I was having similar problems so I've been doing a heap of reading about this stuff recently.

I read a review on the smaller brother of that powersupply here earlier today.. http://www.guru3d.com/article/psu/445/

It is a very good powersupply and the reviewer gave it a thumbs up for what your system would have in it. The one you linked is the 720 watt one wich he recommends for use with dual 8800gtx cards. I sure do hope that it is the powersupply on your system causing the problems. If it is, then that one you have a link for from newegg will deffiantely fix that problem.

Reply to marike

Well I think he bought the power supply already and it still didn't help, probably because it has 4 12v rails with only a small amount of power on each.
Have you checked the video drivers, maybe something got corrupted and is causing the SLI setup to not work right. If safe mode works with both video cards, would reinstalling the drivers help?

Another thing, I think you are referring to the blue screen of death which is known by "BSOD"

Message edited by nitrous9200 on 07-25-2007 at 08:49:33 PM

Reply to nitrous9200

BSOD! Of course, my bad.

I certainly hope it helps as well.

My main question now is I hooked up power to the second card (in the secondary PCI-E slot) only and it booted up fine except when I got to the desktop it said something about it not getting enough power and it needed it to clock down to work properly. So both cards seem to be working, just not in SLI. I don't know what the "norm" is when you boot up windows with only the one graphic card in the secondary slot is, but it seemed to be fine which makes me think its still the power supply?

Message edited by kinglou on 07-25-2007 at 09:21:44 PM

Reply to kinglou

Hey...I hate to keep buggin you guys but....

Last night I figured I would start up again encoding some of my movies into divx files. I let one run overnight and I came back this morning and my computer had crashed and restarted. Currently I am now running 1 graphic card with my new Zalman power supply.

Now this is where almost two weeks ago my computer died on me. I am using the new Zalman power supply and encoding isn't graphics card heavy but yet my computer restarts?

Is there something more seriously wrong with my PC than just the power supply? Maybe Windows itself is fried? Motherboard..ack!?

Reply to kinglou

Random restarts are often caused by malware or overheating. Try using a different virus scanner and see if anything pops up. I recommend Avast, some people also like AVG, both are free for home use. Did you move the case at all, or any furniture around the case recently? Any sort of blockage in air movement can cause restarts when the cpu heats up.

Reply to Kordoyn

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