Crossfire on Nforce board Success

[cnoffsin]

Ok i may get flamed for this but i did a lot of research before i tried this and no one that I found had succeeded so here goes.

I have made my powercolor 3850s crossfire successfully on my p5n-e SLI which has an nforce 650i chipset that is not an approved crossfire board.

it took some driver manipulation but no bios hacks what soever and i have the latests nforce drivers on my system.

its vista ultimate 32 bit.

i downloaded the DNA 8.9 catalysts. installed them (with the opengl 7.11 hack enabled) now i know this is an old driver. i have not tried new ones yet.

rebooted. the control center still said my second adapter was disabled.

in my resarch i had heard that the dell xps 730 h2c was specially hacked to have 2 3870x2s on a 680i nvidia board.

so all i did was go to device manager and force one of my cards to take the 3870x2 driver from the dell driver from their support site R190847.exe is the file.

when i rebooted the system the catalyst control center had crossfire now enabled!

i then changed the driver back to the dna driver on that card from the 3870x2 and rebooted. the crossfire is still enabled!

i have played just cause 2 in 1366x768 and it runs great. i have not had time to do a real benchmark yet.

i then updated the drivers for the cards in the device manager manually to the newest 10.4 drivers then installed the catalyst control center manually and i still have crossfire enabled. it says the cards are linked.

so i don't know if this is any big deal. maybe i got lucky and i have a very similar set up to the xps. i had read that dell refused to release a 64 bit version of this hacked radeon driver but i found it on the site and will try this when i get more ram on the 64 bit system.

but what i think i have accomplished is that contrary to what i saw a dell rep say it is NOT a bios limitation keeping crossfire off of nvidia boards. its just the ati driver. i have the latest nforce drivers so that isn't limiting it.

so i have access to nicer cards. i was going to see if maybe now for some reason i would be able to run 2 5700 or 5800 series cards now.

so maybe someone smarter than me with my system as a petree dish would like to tell me how i could make this into some sort of hacked catalyst driver that would work on other nvidia boards.

thanks for reading

 

[cnoffsin]

what i will do is start with a clean fully up to date install on monday with 2 5750s and then try the hacks in the same order. i think that the driver Inf can just be modified to make it accept all cards. i will run a compare on the infs to see if there is some sort of special difference in them.

i will then try and release a packaged driver with the hacks built in. i just dont think the catalyst package it self can be installed because it will remove all old traces

i think after you use the old dell inf and activate crossfire you can then manually update the driver for the displays in device manager with the new 10.4 driver then install the catalyst package unchecking everything except the catalyst control center.

there has to be a way to release a nice easy automated install but i don't know how to script it. if anyone has an ideas i would be open to it if anyone else has any interest in a driver package that could make crossfire work on boards that aren't technically supported.

 

[Valset]

have you tested this? tried actually using it? pretty neat use of older hardware if it does work

 

[cnoffsin]

actually yeah i played all night last night just cause 2, borderlands, mass effect with no crashes.

its just that i did a lot of research while i was trying to do it and it looked like a lot of guys wanted to do it but the reply was always "its not possible on an sli-only nvidia board"

so i wanted to put it out there that if i can find out the secret in that 3870x2 driver from dell it could work on any board that crossfire is not enabled on.

thanks for the reply