Dual NVIDIA 8800GTX GRAPHICS CARD HELP

[Longknights]

Hello,

I'm abit of a noob when it comes to computing components so please bare with me

I bought an Alienware Area 51 a few years ago and it came with dual 8800 GTX cards so to cut a long story short one of the cards kept causing my computer to stall and not load here is a list of steps I took

1. Restarted the PC about 30 times to finally get to the windows screen and quickly checked my devices to where only one card was listed tried to scan for new hardware but the computer restarts (I have about 5mins time before the computer restarts and goes back into the loop even if I do nothing)

2. Found out which card was causing the problem so took that out and computer is now running on one card it does play games but sometimes struggles where as in the past with both of them I could go full blast and not have a single problem playing any game

3. I did update my computer to windows 8 pro but this problem arose about a month before

What I'm after is a fix or answers to weather to buy a single 8800gtx off of eBay to add to my older one and if it would solve the problem obviously cost wise I would love it if someone could find me a fix to the problem


Any details needed give me a shout

Danny

P.s please excuse my punctuation as typing this on my iPhone I know no excuse buts it's mine

 

[iam2thecrowe]

well since you have diagnosed a card to be faulty, then you either need to get a new one if you can get one cheap, or maybe just buy a new card. I would say something like a gtx660 would probably offer similar performance to dual 8800gtx.....except that you would have more vram which most new games will take advantage of, and dx11 which many games will start to require. If it were my pc, id sell the 8800gtx that is working, and get a new card.

 

[Longknights]

Thanks for the quick reply

I just looked at the gtx660 that you mentioned and it says its a DDR5 wouldn't I need a DDR3 the same as my 8800gtx?

 

[iam2thecrowe]

Thanks for the quick reply

I just looked at the gtx660 that you mentioned and it says its a DDR5 wouldn't I need a DDR3 the same as my 8800gtx?

no, the memory is on the video card, it is not a requirement that you match the same memory, just the slot. all pcie slot versions are backward compatible so your fine.