Bad pci slots or bad cards?

[Blittzin]

Hi and thanks in advance to anyone willing to help me. I have dual nvidia gpu's configured 2 x 16 sli. I'm checking to see if my slots are bad or if its my card(s). I'm going to reset the cmos to clear the DMI pool and clear the info the bios sends to windows pertaining to the hardware connected to my asus m4n82 deluxe mobo. I know for sure that I will have to un-slot both cards and uninstall the related gpu drivers. Can anyone tell me if I should uninstall the nvidia chipset driver as well. Again any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Mousemonkey]

What kind of problems are you having?

 

[Blittzin]

What kind of problems are you having?

Hi mouse and thanks for your time. gpu-z shows my cards 2 evga 9500 gt's under-performing, or to me it seems like they are. only 24 mb's of memory used with each card having 1024 available. gpu load, memory controller load,and video engine load reading all zero to 1-3 percent max in all three readings. I'm trying to reset the bios and what it's sending to see if I'm getting false readings about my cards or if it's the slots. I just read a thread about some nvidia gpu drivers burning out card chips. Once I reset the bios and dmi I should be able to eliminate the cards. I'm just not sure if I should disable the chipset driver for the board. My fear is it's the slots and a 2 to 3 week rma to repair the board. Asus is famous lol for not following through on rma's. I'm bewildered as it's an asus board and kinda shocked that they would make or send a bad board. Thanks again.

 

[Blittzin]

Best answer selected by Blittzin.

 

[Mousemonkey]

By all means reset the BIOS and so long as you don't have or use the 196.75 driver you can rule that out as that's the troublesome one that's getting the complaints. A couple of things I'm wondering about though, what are you using to get the reading of how much RAM is being used? and do you have the 9500GT's with the SLi fingers or the ones without?

 

[Blittzin]

I'm getting worried now bud. lmao I'm almost sure at one time I had the 196.75 installed. I'm using gpu-z to track the sensors. the memory controller load, gpu load , and video engine load all at 0 percent to max 1 to 3 percent. It also shows the the amount of ram the card is using, usually around 24 mb's. I'll definitely reset bios but I still don't know if i should uninstall the chipset driver also. The model 9500 has the sli ready model and the regular i made sure I bought the ones that are made for sli, so they definitely have the fingers. I'm hoping I can fix this without rma's and between the mobo and cards alone I've got at least 300 dollars in it. I'm going to upgrade cards as soon as I figure out if they're ok. I have two mini atx pc's I'll install the 9500's in, and find a deal on maybe a couple of gtx. Thanks again for the help.
asus m4n82 deluxe, dual 9500's, 8 gigs ocz sli ready ram, amd am3 545 callisto, ocz modxstream 700 watt sli psu, seagate barracuda 500gig hd, coolermaster case. 15 dollars more and I could've gotten the 555 black edition DOH !

 

[Mousemonkey]

The 196.75 drivers were released on the second of March so if you haven't changed drivers between then and now you'll be OK, an obvious question is do you have the SLi bridge installed? and have you checked the cards one at a time and if so what readings did you get then? Just for reference my 9500GT 1 GB doesn't use much more than 535 -540MB and I've never seen the memory controller load, video engine load or GPU load sensors so much as twitch when I've had GPU-z running.