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not exact SLI?

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undeadsac

Limp Gawd
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Mar 3, 2005
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What would happen if you plugged in two companies 6600GT cards in a SLI setup, would it work are is the architecture varied enough to cause it to fail?
 
undeadsac said:
What would happen if you plugged in two companies 6600GT cards in a SLI setup, would it work are is the architecture varied enough to cause it to fail?
Click to expand...

no go

same maker
same card
same model or no SLI
 
I think it's listed as an "unsupported configuration" but, since most companies don't really vary from the reference design, it'd probably work. You're probably better off getting 2 identical cards, tho - if it doesn't work, you can actually get support without having them say "It's not my problem, go ask your mother",
 
ameoba said:
I think it's listed as an "unsupported configuration" but, since most companies don't really vary from the reference design, it'd probably work. You're probably better off getting 2 identical cards, tho - if it doesn't work, you can actually get support without having them say "It's not my problem, go ask your mother",
Click to expand...

im idiot
 
undeadsac said:
IT WORKS Scored approx 8k in 3dMark03

no problem at all with a Gigabyte 6600GT and a EVGA 6600GT w/ an asus board. A8N Sli Deluxe
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couldn't you score 8k in 3dMark03 with 1 6600GT? :p

As long as the BIOS revisions are the same (flashyflash), and it's the same PCB layout and design, I don't see what the problem could be...

Heh, that doesn't mean I have the balls to try it myself
 
Zinn said:
couldn't you score 8k in 3dMark03 with 1 6600GT? :p

As long as the BIOS revisions are the same (flashyflash), and it's the same PCB layout and design, I don't see what the problem could be...

Heh, that doesn't mean I have the balls to try it myself
Click to expand...


How do i flash the vid cards?
I dont have a floppy
 
I do it without a floppy by burning the bios file and flash utility to a cd-rw, then I boot off my old windows 98 cd and have it boot to a dos prompt with cd-rom support. Pop in the cd-rw and I'm good to go.
 
I ordered two 6600gt's that wouldnt run in SLI mode. Both were ASUS, same model, same ram PCB etc. Problem was each card had a diff. bios from a diff. date, so i had to flash one. Now it works.
 
my system recognizes both cards and everything is going along smoothly, but when the driver puts SLI configuration in place the screen gets all wonky and I have to reboot, I still need to update the bios on the card so that I can at least have that identical, the cards appear identical, the pcbs etc. look like carbon copies of one another.
 
With the new drivers, you can mix different mfg's cards, of the same !model! and it should work... if you're really worried about stbility, you can always flash the bios from one card to the other and things should work fine... granted, some cards have higher/lower default clocks, like BFG and XFX, so you will want to make sure both your cards run @ the same speeds hapily and independently, before pairing them in SLI. :)

crap.. I can't find the article now... but it's out there... somewhere... the 77.72 drivers allow this I believe. :)
 
revenant said:
With the new drivers, you can mix different mfg's cards, of the same !model! and it should work... if you're really worried about stbility, you can always flash the bios from one card to the other and things should work fine... granted, some cards have higher/lower default clocks, like BFG and XFX, so you will want to make sure both your cards run @ the same speeds hapily and independently, before pairing them in SLI. :)

crap.. I can't find the article now... but it's out there... somewhere... the 77.72 drivers allow this I believe. :)
Click to expand...

Got linkage? I wanna see proof of this...
 
guru3d already has some 80.** drivers, dl now, will let everyone know how installation works.
 
Has anyone tried the 80.40 betas with a mis-matched mfg card pair?
 
revenant said:
Has anyone tried the 80.40 betas with a mis-matched mfg card pair?
Click to expand...


I installed the drivers, but havent had the opportunity to do anything yet. I'll check tonight to see if it works or not though.
 
undeadsac said:
I installed the drivers, but havent had the opportunity to do anything yet. I'll check tonight to see if it works or not though.
Click to expand...


with the 7x.xx drivers it would detect if your system was setup to allow sli, but with this driver, it doesnt give you a pop up or anything asking if you want SLI to be activated and I'm a dumbass so I dont know of any way to make SLI active otherwise. little help?
 
Hmmmm... Are you sure your motherboard is in SLI mode? with the little SLI selector card between the PCI-E slots? Wait, did you try going to the "advanced" section of the video properties, and the Nvidia tab... that's where all the goodies are... :)
 
revenant said:
Hmmmm... Are you sure your motherboard is in SLI mode? with the little SLI selector card between the PCI-E slots? Wait, did you try going to the "advanced" section of the video properties, and the Nvidia tab... that's where all the goodies are... :)
Click to expand...


Yep, I tried this last night with the 77.** drivers and it gives me the option to enable SLI, when I do and reboot the computer gets all the way to the WINXP load screen and when windows would normally show the logon screen the monitor just goes black and refuses to do anything.

When I followed the same proc. using 8*.** drivers it says something like "you must first remove any not SLI compatible cards" it doesnt say which card is not allowing SLI, but both cards had SLI compatible on their boxes/instructions. They are eVGA and a Gigabyte cards. The cards look exactly alike physically. Its just frustrating.
 
undeadsac said:
Yep, I tried this last night with the 77.** drivers and it gives me the option to enable SLI, when I do and reboot the computer gets all the way to the WINXP load screen and when windows would normally show the logon screen the monitor just goes black and refuses to do anything.

When I followed the same proc. using 8*.** drivers it says something like "you must first remove any not SLI compatible cards" it doesnt say which card is not allowing SLI, but both cards had SLI compatible on their boxes/instructions. They are eVGA and a Gigabyte cards. The cards look exactly alike physically. Its just frustrating.
Click to expand...
They should probably ahve the same bios in order to work in SLI.
 
eno-on said:
They should probably ahve the same bios in order to work in SLI.
Click to expand...


that's what the 8x.** Drivers are supposed to correct, so that you can mix unmatched pairs of cards and still have functional SLI.

not working so far.
 
Well - they are /beta/ after all... Thanks for trying!! :)
 
Ruffy said:
no go

same maker
same card
same model or no SLI
Click to expand...

Not quite.

You need the same BIOS version on both cards. You can flash the BIOS of one of the cards, if they're not compatible.
 
how would one go about flashing a video card with an updated bios?

Has anyone gotten two unmatched cards to actually run in SLI???? plz someone plz.
 
You grab NVfllash and boot to a very basic DOS type shell (get boot images here) from a floppy, or USB drive, what-have-you and have your updated bios file (you can find those here) and NVflash.exe on the boot device... then type nvflash.exe to see the command options. It's fairly easy... but, only flash your video card bios if you need to... it can be very dangerous... if something goes wrong you can kill your video card... in an SLi setup recovery ffrom that can be easier because you can use your good video card to flash the other one with... some of the new video cards are also coming with dual bios features so you can switch between bioses easily... which will kick ass! :) anyways... I know that Shamino guy got two mismatched brand 6800GTs running in SLi... but that's all I have heard so far...
 
WIth the official 81.25 drivers from NVidia's website they run perfectly with no modification to the bios etc. I scored ~14000 in Futuremark 05 last night with no tweaking or anything to the system.
 
yeah - the new drivers run mix mfgs cards very well from what I hear... good things!
 
Ruffy said:
no go

same maker
same card
same model or no SLI
Click to expand...

Acculay your wrong there, the new drivers support different manufacturers for for the sam card.. the 8x.xx drivers...
 
Well there is something wrong with everyones judgement about the 2nd post and so on, He posted 05-31-2005, That was about 6 months ago, and the 8x.xx drivers were not even released i believe.
 
lockheed2266 said:
Well there is something wrong with everyones judgement about the 2nd post and so on, He posted 05-31-2005, That was about 6 months ago, and the 8x.xx drivers were not even released i believe.
Click to expand...


OK heres what happened. You could download Beta driver for the 8*.** release on Guru3d months ago, I had heard that those should work, but they didnt. Last night just as I was giving up on the idea of running the current setup in SLI I went to NVIDIA.COM and d/l the newest driver set, something like 81.89 or something, anyhow, with these drivers the two cards work flawlessly in SLI

one card is Gigabyte 6600GT

one card is eVGA 6600GT

they dont have the same bios or anything, these are stock cards out of the box into the system. The newest official drivers WORK!!!!!! WOOOOHOOOOOO!!!!!
 
yes - this thread was started back before the 8x.xx drivers worked well for mixing mfgs cards... diff models & memory sizes still cannot be mixed...
 
lockheed2266 said:
Acculay your wrong there, the new drivers support different manufacturers for for the sam card.. the 8x.xx drivers...
Click to expand...

when he wrote that they didn't

read the date posted
 
This thread is out of date and not relevant anymore. All ForceWare 80 series drivers support mixed brands of cards in SLI. So as not to cause any more confusion I'm closing this thread.

You can download the latest ForceWare drivers and mix/match brands in SLI, even framebuffers and clock speeds.
 
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