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SLi Nightmare

F

Fuzzb

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 21, 2004
Messages
94
Howdy folks.

I managed to pick up the Gigabyte nForce 4 SLi motherboard over Xmas along with a couple of Leadtek 6800 GT PCIe cards. This whole build has been a nightmare and nothing has gone right so far :(

Problem #1

One of the cards came with a PCIe power adapter, but the other one didn't. I can order another one, but it would cost me £8 inc. postage which is more than I would like to pay for a cable. I found a guide to making one at Spode's Abode so I will do that tomorrow.

Problem #2

The heatsinks on the Leadtek 6800GT's are massive chunks of copper with a large slab of copper also on the reverse side of the core, and the Gigabyte board only has a single slot space inbetween the PCIe 16x slots. Hence only one of the Leadtek's will fit with the regular heatsink. I swapped out the heatsink on one of them for a 6800 Ultra heatsink that I had lying around and they now fit into the system, albeit it's a tight squeeze.

Originally I was looking to watercool both 6800GTs, but there isn't enough room inbetween even with a 90 degree elbow joint.

Does anyone know if the Arctic Cooling NV4 silencers for the 6800 series would work in parallel with only 1 slot inbetween?

Problem #3

When I booted the system with both cards installed, configured for SLi, there were purple lines all over the BIOS screen - not a good thing I thought. The one with the original heatsink was in slot #1 and the one with the Ultra heatsink in slot#2.

I removed each card and tested each one on its own and made sure that the SLi mini-card was correctly installed for single mode. The card where I swapped the heatsink out worked fine, but when I tried the Leadtek with the original heatsink there was no output from the DVI port at all. The system still booted and there were no beeps to suggest that anything was wrong.

When I tried putting the cards in reverse order (i.e. the one with the original heatsink in slot #2 and the one with the Ultra heatsink in slot#1) the system booted fine and installed Windows ok. I haven't tried out SLi yet but I will post an update when I do.

Does this mean that the DVI port on the card is busted?

Has anyone else had any similar problems with their SLi setup? Any help or advice would be VERY appreciated :)
 
Brent_Justice said:
i don't know about those other problems

but one issue i discovered on the ASUS A8N-SLI was with the little SLI bridge connector that you use to connect both video cards together

it only worked in one direction as you can see in the picture here: http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTEwMTE2NjQxOFVLcTZHRGVYNGNfMV8xMl9sLmpwZw== flipping it around gave me weird problems in windows even without SLI enabled
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip. Unlike the Asus SLI interconnect, the Gigabyte board comes with both ends labelled SLI_1 and SLI_2 so I connected that with no problems.

After installing the latest driver Windows XP now refuses to load with both cards in the system and just constantly reboots so it looks like the card is fubared :(

I guess I can manage with just 1 card for now - no need to be greedy :)
 
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