SLI - Screen Flicker in Games

[ottar97]

So I recently built a new rig and have ran into a problem when I try to play games. When I load the games, I get screen flickering every 3-5 seconds or constantly if I move the camera to a certain spot. I have only tried two games, those being World of Warcraft and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. WoW tended to do it much more than BF:BC2, but both did it pretty consistently. I've tried a few things to diagnose the problems. I turned off SLI and used the top card in my setup and the games work fine, no flickering what-so-ever. I swapped out the SLI connector to see if it was possibly bad, but that was not the case. Just wondering if anyone had a clue. I am on the most recent drivers from nVidia being 260.99.

Here is my rig.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
CORSAIR HX Series CMPSU-1000HX 1000W ATX12V 2.2 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Modular Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply
Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz - Overclocked to 3.5GHz
CORSAIR Cooling Hydro Series CWCH50
MSI Big Bang-XPower LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
Kingston HyperX 12GB (6 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
EVGA 012-P3-1472-AR GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi) SuperClocked 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card
EVGA 012-P3-1472-AR GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi) SuperClocked 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card
Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFSRTL 300GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5"

Appreciate the help!

 

[dokk2]

http://www.slizone.com/page/home.html

Go here let Nvidia tell you everything there is to know about SLI..

 

[Maziar]

Try an older driver and see if it helps.
Also enable V-sync and check if the flicker disappears or not.

 

[skolpo]

^To dokk2: How would that even help him?


Have you tried running the computer using the other card (lower card) and also running the computer using the lower slot only? Are all the PCIe connectors firmly connected? Using GPU-Z, are both your cards detected and in SLI mode? Try uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers. Jump back down a driver to see if the problem persists.

 

[ottar97]

OK, going to give all those a try. Will let you know how it turns out. Thank you for the quick responses!

 

[ottar97]

So here's an update:

Before removing I did check and the computer does recognize both cards in SLI mode. Also yes I tried V-Sync on and off and still flickered. So after that I removed both cards and took the bottom card and moved it to the top slot and ran the system with only that card. Loaded up WoW and no jitter or flicker with the screen. Going to try and put the second card in, so the two will have switched places from their original spots.

Update #2:

Dropped the second card into the system and still have the flicker when loading in SLI mode. Going to give an older driver a try and see if that will help.

 

[Maziar]

If it didn't help,then try playing the game with SLI disabled. Some games don't benefit much from SLI,and also a single GTX 470 can handle it fine.
However,definitely test some new games(especially the FPS titles) with SLI enabled and check if your screen still flickers or not.

 

[ottar97]

Ok so it seems that I solved the problem. Found the beta drivers for 261 and ran those. Games don't flicker anymore! So I'm guessing it was just a driver issue. Thanks all for the help!

 

[notty22]

If this 'comes back' one thing to try is another sli connector. I noticed a batch of people having weird trouble where the fix was a new connector. There seemed to be a common theme ,it was msi m/b's. Made they got hold of a bad batch ?

What are all those connectors that come with the big bang boards ? Are those all standard sli connectors of various lengths ?
Or do they make some kind of custom connectors ?