Getting SLI to work on the P5W-DH ... HELP!

I jumped on the 975X bandwagon with my new E6600 Conroe and a pair of 7900GTX's. I purchased a flexible SLI bridge on eBay. Now after I put everything together and WinXP Pro SP2 installed, I fired up the Hacked SLI Driver (85.96_mod.exe).

The installation seemed to have finished fine with no errors. After the required reboot, I went into the SLI configuration on the Nvidia Display Properties and it doesn't give me the SLI feature even though both cards are in and the flexible SLI bridge attached! I double checked to make sure both SLI power connectors are in and both fans are spinning. It all checks out and I am stumped! I even went as far as using the SLI bridge that came with my old DFI NF4 Expert mobo (which is a perfect fit by the way with the P5W DH), but to no avail.

I did notice that the second card's fan doesn't quiet up like the first card after installing the drivers. We all know that when you install the proper Nvidia drivers for any GF card that has the stock HSF, the fan quiets down. This was true for my first card, but the second card has not quiet down! This is clueing me that the system is either not detecting the second card properly or something isn't configured right.

I have not OC'd my system yet and all components are running stock speeds. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Try installing the normal NForce drivers and see if it sees both cards. Obviously SLI won't work but if both cards are available for use it means the drivers are probably the issue.

Thanks Moto, I will try that tonight.

That is a no go. I even tried swapping the cards and it still detects only one video card. Am I supposed to do anything in the BIOS prior to this?

SLI is no go on intel chip sets as of yet but Nvidia will soon be releasing Official drivers that will support SLI on Intel chipset boards ... (they have to now that AMD bought ATI)

nd4spdbh2 said:

SLI is no go on intel chip sets as of yet but Nvidia will soon be releasing Official drivers that will support SLI on Intel chipset boards ... (they have to now that AMD bought ATI)

Click to expand...

I thought it was well known that you can enable SLI on Intel 975x boards using the hacked drivers. I've seen on this and other forums of people saying that it worked ... not to mention screenshots of CPUID and high 3DMark results.

With that said, I realized that if I have the card running on the second PCI-E slot (the black one) ONLY, there is nothing on display though the video card fan spins (still rather loud, too). I've tried it with both cards on that one PCI-E slot and none of them shows display. However if I use the first PCI-E slot (the orange one), each card works with no problem (hence it can't be my video cards). Is that the nature of the second PCI-E slot to not work alone, or do you guys think I may have a defective board?

This is killing me! AAARRGGGHHH!

Any help would again be appreciated.

OK ... now I'm ****ed!

I just picked up another P5W-DH mobo in hopes that it may have been the second PCI-E slot ... but NO ... same symptoms apply for the new mobo as well. I upped the BIOS to 1201 ... but it made no difference! I used both the hacked driver and the latest non-hacked version.

Can anybody verify that in "Device Manager". should I see two devices under "Display Adapters" if the hacked driver have been installed? TIA

OK. I narrowed down the problem and I don't like it. One of my 7900GTX has died. I got nothing on screen yet the HSF on it is still spinning. I tried it on a new board and it, too, got just a blank screen. Lucky EVGA has lifetime warranty. I am RMAing it as we speak.

On a side note, I realized that my working 7900GTX still shows no display when sitting on the black PCI-E slot. I then removed the card and inserted an old 6600GT card into the black slot and lo and behold ... I got a display! The 7900GTX still works on the orange slot, though. What is even more strange is that if I put my 7900GTX on one slot and a 6600GT on the other (no SLi bridge installed ... of course), I get nothing on screen yet the computer still boots up. Has anyone else experience this?