Nvidia 9800gtx/gtx+ SLI problem PLZ need to game! :(

[twisted politiks]

i had purchased an nvidia 9800 gtx+ card back in august/september of last year, only to realize in january of this year that it had the wrong bios,(it had the 9800 gtx version). i had returned it and recieved a new one, with the name of 9800 gtx/9800 gtx+. the card is manufactured by BFG. in january, along with getting the "new" BFG card, i purchased a second 9800 gtx+, from evga. i had these two in SLI for a while, but had a hard time setting them in place due to the fact that the BFG card was the older version, so it was bigger, and since it was bigger, the SLI ports were not aligned with the evga video card. however, this did work, up until now. for about a week now, i have been getting extremely slow boot up times, erratic reboots during the computers boot process, and a few crashes with random video "stripes" along the screen. today my pc crashed with a BSOD and began to dump the physical memory, and once rebooted, gave me a choice to let vista find out what the error was. upon letting vista do this, it came up with a video card error, and told me the drivers were bad, which i am using 181.20, since the new ones dont want to play very nice with my HD TV. ive tried running stress tests on the video cards in SLI, to no prevail. i have also run stress tests on each individual video card, while one was in, the other was out, and visa versa. this didnt have any effect either.

i would think from the recent events that these two cards arent compatible, or that one is failing. the problem with them not being compatible is that up until now i have been able to run every game, including crysis at 1280 x 720 full settings with at least 4x AA, above 40fps. and i cant tell if either one is failing because ive run stress tests on both individually with nothing bad. i ran Furmark in stability mode with everything maxed out (no MSAA) for about 2 mins each, letting them both reach peak temp and level out. if this isnt enough to find out if either card is bad, then let me know so i can run them longer.

i have also ran memtest86+, full diagnostic in DOS mode, with no errors found, and ran all of the tests for my HDD with the tools provided by seagate with no errors either. ive reinstalled my OS two times in the last two days in hopes that something in had installed before had caused the problem, but this is also not the case

my system is as follows

Vista Ultimate x64 SP1
intel core i7 920 stock clock, with vigor monsoon 3 (stays around 30c idle, 60c full load)
gskill 3x2g 1333 ram (clocked at 1066 due to me being lazy and not setting clock speeds for my rig yet)
gigabyte ex58ud4p mobo, latest drivers
evga 9800 gtx+ nvidia 181.20
BFG 9800 gtx/8900 gtx+ nvidia 181.20
Tagan BZ 800w PSU
seagate 7200.1x 500gig hdd
no dvd drive atm due to the sata power connector lighting on fire/smoking when i turned on the system after doing some wire management (sad i know)

if anybody could shed some light on my problem i would be greatly appreciative.

pictures of each video card individually in gpu-z 0.3.4

9800 gtx+ http://i565.photobucket.com/albums/ss97/twisted_politiks/9800gtx.jpg

9800 gtx/9800 gtx+ http://i565.photobucket.com/albums/ss97/twisted_politiks/9800gtx-9800gtx.jpg

 

[Mousemonkey]

IMHO Vista64 is the culprit, my friend and I run near on identical rigs the only difference being I run dual boot XP32/Vista32 he runs Vist64 my rig has been fine for over a year and his runs for a couple of months before SLI fails and the only cure he has found has been to format and reinstall the OS which cures the problem for a couple of months and then it fails again.

 

[baddad]

There's nothing wrong with Vista 64 bit I use it on my game machine running triple SLi. Down load the newest drive from Nvidia 185.85. What problem are you having with your HDTV? Also update Vista to SP2.

 

[twisted politiks]

thats the thing mousemonkey, i just reformatted my machine, twice, and each time i would have the same problems. baddad the problem with my HDTV is that when they are in SLI and i set my resolution it doesnt fit right, so i go to resize my machine. when i resize it manually it will never be the right aspect ratio, and when i let nvidia resize it by just clicking the tick resize then hitting apply, it does a really funky resize. the weird thing is that when only one graphics card is in the auto resize works fine for both the older and newer graphics card. but this only started happening with the 185 drivers, and since then, even after the fresh install of the OS, it has been messing up.

 

[twisted politiks]

guess nobody has an answer for this?

 

[Mousemonkey]

Have you tried a different OS?, I use XP32 & Vista32 for gaming myself but if you don't have either of these you could always try W7. Oh, and set your RAM to correct speed (just because).

 

[twisted politiks]

k i will def try a diff OS, didnt think of that, lol. n yea, i keep meaning to OC my comp. but ive been so busy at work i havent had time to learn how to yet. so hopefully its just an OS CD that corrupted or something. ill update when i load the new OS

 

[twisted politiks]

oh and justa note, now it takes about two minutes to load the windows loading with the green ticks moving across, then it will boot up fine, cept the startup services arent starting as fast as they used too

 

[Helloworld_98]

it could be that because one is 65nm and the other is 55nm that they don't want to SLI.

 

[twisted politiks]

yea i figured that Helloworld_98, which is why im just going to buy a gtx285 and SLI it wither another gtx285 when i get the money. but even now when i am only using the evga 9800gtx+ 55nm it takes at least 3 minutes to boot up when it used to take about 20 seconds, and this is after ive reinstalled the OS