P5N-E and Dual 9600 GT sli failure

[EVLW8S4NO1]

Hello,

I have been battling with my SLI for almost 3 months now. No matter what I do, it seems I am unable to get ANY game to run in SLI without the monitor starting to flicker and then my system freezes up, I have to hold the power button in until the system reboots. Before I continue here are my system specs:

Intel Quadcore Q6600 2.4
Kingston DDR2 8 gigs 667 ( used what the manual said to use PC2-something, 6 months old)
P5N-E SLI/ 650i
dual Pny Gforce 9600 GT 512 mg DDR3 (3 months old)
Atec Blackwidow pc gaming 850 watts SLI/ATI cert PSU (3 months old)
Windows Vista Buiseness x64 bit (just installed as of 8/16/09)
Western Digital 1TB SATA (3 months old)
2 DVD/Burners
5 USB 2.0 devices (not always active)
Logitac wireless K/B with a logitec USB gaming mouse
22 inch Veiwsonic DVI monitor

I am pretty sure thaty is what everyone will want to know about the system.

Games played:
CoD4, Guild Wars, Planet Side, FEAR and FEAR E.P. Battle Field 2 and 2142.

Other programs installed: Ventrilo client. No DVD burning or movie veiwing program other then what came with windows. NO OTHER SOFTWARE at this time. This is strictly for gaming

I have installed ALL updates for the system (BIOS included) hardware and software (including games)

Fresh OS install, each Vcard was isntaleld 1 at time, setting are set in the BIOS, card is switch from single to dual Vcards and SLI was said to be active in both Windows pop up and in Nvidia control pannel. There is no sound card installed ATM but I use Sound Blaster X-fi gaming. I took it out because i heard there were issues with the sound cards and SLI, I removed the sound card before the last OS install.

I have switch memory sticks around and removed each one to check..the memory has been used for about 6 months now with no issues.

Tryed to change the settings in the 3D manager under Nvida control pannel with very little sucess, Guild wars is about the only game that will run lol, planet side will run but not in full screen and really bad FPS and yes I have changed the game settings in the games also.

Bottom line: No SLI system runs GREAT no matter what game I play, Active SLI= POS for games. But I can do anything else with it.

What am I missing here? PLEASE HELP!!!

 

[baddad]

What are your game setting?

 

[EVLW8S4NO1]

ATM, all game settings and Vcard settings are at default, at present I only have CoD4 and FEAR loaded. both games I allowed the to auto set for best game configurations based off of what the games found. If you need more indepth info on the settings I will post those around 1900 PST when I get home.

 

[baddad]

It sounds to me like the power supply may be bad.

 

[Mousemonkey]

How many sticks of RAM?, if 4 then try running with 2 if SLi then works put the other 2 back in and up the voltage to the DDR slots.

 

[MGDJoker]

P5n-e i know only supports i believe 8X on the PCI-E. I personally have had alot of bad experiences with those boards. I used to sell alot of them as an ASUS reseller. about 40% took a dump within a year or so.

Also try moving and swapping around the cards in the PCI-E slots could be a bad card. Make sure your drivers are up to date, and u have PC bridge connected securely and the SLI chip on the board is seated correctly too.

I noticed the games u are playing also are not "of the highest quality." most of the games dont support SLI, or for instance as with BF2 just a poorly coded nightmare. Even when running FEAR again on my old 8800 it ran like utter crap. I had to mess with drivers to make it run correctly.

 

[EVLW8S4NO1]

How do I up the voltage in my BIOS for the memory and what levels should I set it for? BTW under the SLI option in BIOS, there is a LTD setting and it is set at 5, what is this used for and might this be part of the problem?