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Dual 8800GT Problem

tkam

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - Dec. 2012
Joined
Dec 18, 2007
Messages
436
So I installed a 2nd 9800gtx in my main box last night and that is working perfectly fine. So I come into work today and start putting together this dual 8800gt box. The one client is working great but the 2nd one no matter what I did EUE's immediately with the infamous "UNSTABLE_MACHINE" error. Any ideas?
 
Make sure you also installed the driver for the 2nd card. Sometime, it doesn't install automatically.
 
Yep you need to right click on your desktop select properties, select extend my desktop to the 2nd monitor. If you can plug it physically into a monitor, KVM or VGA dummy plug(see tiger's guide) Then it should be happy.

A full guide is coming out soon on this.

What you are seeing is the classic inactive card syndrome. You must make it think it is active in order to fold on it.



 
It's already hooked up to a KVM but that doesn't seem to be working. Time to drag an old 17" crt out of storage :).
 
Tkam,

Some cards are picky... you can fake it by swapping it out on your current monitor one time and start the client and if you unplug it should still work. Just thinks you turned off the power.

I did that to my 8800GTX's to get them working! Now I only have 1 hooked to a monitor.

 
Yep that worked, the 17" crt is now back in storage :). Kinda strange that it didn't work with the KVM though, I guess the KVM isn't keeping the vga signal engaged unless I'm using that particular output.

Both 8800gt's are doing about 5k ppd at their stock speeds (700 core 1700 shader).

 
I'm gonna have to keep an eye on this dual 8800gt box looks like it restarted itself sometime yesterday. Nothing in the event log(s) points to anything useful.
 
Weird! Keep us posted. I had my 8800GTX box reboot out of the blue yesterday.. .temps were at 52c... so not sure what that was about.



 
Yeah no temp issue here either, both of the 8800gt's run at about 70C or so running the gpu2 client and I have a side case fan right above the cards blowing air straight out of the case.

I updated the bios on the motherboard today and all nvidia chipset drivers I could find so hopefully that fixes it.

 
I did have both oc'd though, I'm going to leave them at stock for a day or two and see if it reboots again.
 
I wouldn't think a failed GPU OC would cause the box to reboot. It might cause the GPU client to EUE or crash otherwise but cause a box reboot? OTOH a CPU OC that's on the edge of stability would.

Just a thought.

 
The cpu isn't oc'd at all, at this point my best guess is probably the motherboard, it was just a spare that was laying around at the office so I really have no idea if it's ever been fully stable or not.


 
Sounds reasonable. Maybe even a bad stick of ram.


 
Yeah it rebooted a couple more times yesterday and last night, I'll run memtest on each stick but I'm fairly confident that the issue is the motherboard. Whats the current recommendation for the cheapest mobo w/ at least two 16x pci-e slots? This needs to be an intel board btw.


 
Yep that worked, the 17" crt is now back in storage :). Kinda strange that it didn't work with the KVM though, I guess the KVM isn't keeping the vga signal engaged unless I'm using that particular output.

Both 8800gt's are doing about 5k ppd at their stock speeds (700 core 1700 shader).


Yepo, it depends on the KVM. I had an acient KVM lying around, but it mechanically broke the connection to the monitor with a HUGE switchknob and didn't work. However, it did work using Sunin's elegant tip. Fire it up, switch and fire up the first. ;)

Yeah it rebooted a couple more times yesterday and last night, I'll run memtest on each stick but I'm fairly confident that the issue is the motherboard. Whats the current recommendation for the cheapest mobo w/ at least two 16x pci-e slots? This needs to be an intel board btw.



Probably a bad stick.. how much mem you got on the box?

ECS NF650iSLIT-A (V1.0) LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail 49.99 AR

Foxconn P9657AB-8EKRS2H LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail 59.99 AR
 
Only has two gigs of ram in it, didn't get a chance to run memtest on it yet though. It's still rebooting but at least now i have it set to auto-login and startup the gpu clients so I'm not missing out on that many ppd ;).

 
Ok so the RAM checks out, making this pretty much definitely a motherboard issue. I'll try to replace it in the next week or two.

Maybe I should turn this into a quad 8800gt box. Not sure the case is going to be big enough to deal with all the heat though, right now it's just a regular mid-tower case.

 
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