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EVGAs don't SLI with all cards, what can i do?

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fosk

Member
Joined
Dec 2, 2009
So a long story short i had a 970 Asus Strix my brother a EVGA FTW 780, so his card **** itself after 18 months and they gave him a 970 SSC which at the time was a big deal and "lucky". We have been waiting all this time for the new series and spent another 3 months waiting for the Gigabyte 1080 Xtreme for highest clocks.

In very short EVGA did something to a few of 970s making them incompatible to SLI with other cards entirely with no word of this or knowing, now that i dig deep enough i can see this is a common problem (only to EVGA SSC and a few others) but i went with the whole notion of any card can SLI within the same series as each other eg. 970

Is there anything i might be able to try and do? Like different bios or something.

Im sitting here in luxury with my 1080 while my brother is saddened with two 970s that are useless.

Thanks!
 
Best thing you can do is ask EVGA if they have any models that can SLI with the Strix. I know it had to do with PCB revision on some of their cards.
 
Best thing you can do is ask EVGA if they have any models that can SLI with the Strix. I know it had to do with PCB revision on some of their cards.

Thanks for the help, called support and started to tell them a detailed account of everything and the basic tier support guy started to get rude and condescending the second Asus was mentioned and tried to say its obviously it's fault without fully understanding or listening to the issue. After a bit we got a support email to email and someone else would look at it. The very basis of the reply was that they don't care about any issues related to there card if you mention any other brand.

It's fine I was already never going to buy from EVGA again and this just sealed the deal, although the best option if they manage to help us in any way is to buy a refurbished EVGA SSC 970 to SLI then sell the Strix.

I endorsed EVGA after my 900 dollars 295 was faithful for near 4 years, since then my brothers just died after 18 months and more recently my friends 980ti just died within 2 months of purchase.

Im lucky the Strix has over a year of warranty left and won silicon lottery for a max OC that benchmarks on par with average 980, so i will check out the classified second on a few forums and start to plan the next move while i wait for a response from EVGA on refburished cards.

Thanks all
 
That is strange that you got that response from EVGA customer service. Normally they are very good and quite helpful.

Have you considered selling both 970s and picking up a 1070 or 1080 instead.
 
So let me get this straight. Your brother had bought a 780 FTW and it died prematurely. EVGA went out of their way and upgraded him to the 970 SSC and now a few months later your upset with EVGA because it doesn't SLI with an ASUS 970 Strix and you're bitter at EVGA?

I could understand getting upset if you had spent the money for a 970 but you bought a 780 FTW. If they had replaced it card for card you would be in the same boat. Actually I'll take that back. You'd be happy they replaced it and would be looking for a way to upgrade you brother with a lesser card to sell.

I can't see how EVGA did anything wrong and how your not happy that you have a better card to unload to help him out.

Maybe I'm not reading it right though.
 
So let me get this straight. Your brother had bought a 780 FTW and it died prematurely. EVGA went out of their way and upgraded him to the 970 SSC and now a few months later your upset with EVGA because it doesn't SLI with an ASUS 970 Strix and you're bitter at EVGA?

I could understand getting upset if you had spent the money for a 970 but you bought a 780 FTW. If they had replaced it card for card you would be in the same boat. Actually I'll take that back. You'd be happy they replaced it and would be looking for a way to upgrade you brother with a lesser card to sell.

I can't see how EVGA did anything wrong and how your not happy that you have a better card to unload to help him out.

Maybe I'm not reading it right though.

Well the 780 was a 600 dollar card that could SLI with the intention to SLI which has never had an issue with inter brand SLI and the 970s are sold as SLI ready without release knowledge of the SLI problems, I'm upset that I am unable to provide my brother with an extra GPU that would make his experience better and that i didn't take the time to personally do all the research on EVGA specific and that i went with the general consensus of that same series and same vram were always fully capable of SLI.

The fault is entirely my own, i am however upset with the customer support received at EVGA.

I really don't get how you are painting EVGA as good guys going out of their way to honor their warranty agreement, it's not like we had any control on the RMA process. From what I understand the issue is very specific to a couple of 970s they modified the bios/pcb on and not the entire selection of cards.

If i am right or wrong it doesn't matter i am entitled to feel a certain way about something going wrong, hopefully that much you will be able to understand.
 
SLI compatibility has always been iffy between brands. That's why it's always been recommended that two identical cards be used. Just like dual channel ram.
 
Well the 780 was a 600 dollar card that could SLI with the intention to SLI which has never had an issue with inter brand SLI and the 970s are sold as SLI ready without release knowledge of the SLI problems, I'm upset that I am unable to provide my brother with an extra GPU that would make his experience better and that i didn't take the time to personally do all the research on EVGA specific and that i went with the general consensus of that same series and same vram were always fully capable of SLI.

The fault is entirely my own, i am however upset with the customer support received at EVGA.

I really don't get how you are painting EVGA as good guys going out of their way to honor their warranty agreement, it's not like we had any control on the RMA process. From what I understand the issue is very specific to a couple of 970s they modified the bios/pcb on and not the entire selection of cards.

If i am right or wrong it doesn't matter i am entitled to feel a certain way about something going wrong, hopefully that much you will be able to understand.

Thanks for the clarification and you are right you are certainly entitled to your opinions. What I was trying to say was IMO EVGA went out of their way to provide you with an upgrade is all. No company ever wants to do an RMA but most understand it's just a part of doing business. I've never had to RMA through them personally but everything I've read is that they are among the top manufacturers both for quality and support. I'm in the market right now as a matter of fact and was looking at the EVGA 1060 gamer for a friend and the 1070 FTW for myself which is why this thread caught my eye.

I hope everything gets worked out in the end Fosk. Good luck.
 
SLI compatibility has always been iffy between brands. That's why it's always been recommended that two identical cards be used. Just like dual channel ram.
Has it though? This is the first I have heard of such thing honestly... :confused:

Advice for 'generations' (of cards) has been same 'card' and memory config on the NVIDIA side and it would work 9/10 or more. People used to mix and match brands all the time.
 
I had weird issues trying to get two gtx 580s to SLI properly and have had the same problem on AMD's side as well. It's the reason why I've sworn off of multi-gpu setups so I don't have to deal with it.
 
I have read where people needed to flash BIOS to get two cards to work together before. I do realize most time it works if memory is the same size but there are also issues if memory is different brand. IIRC 680's and 780's they were having some problems . No time to look ATM heading out. In the end it was still recommended having identical cards
 
I can't blame EVGA not helping you with another brand. What did you want EVGA to do?
 
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I'd sooner sell off the cards then try that...I dont like rigged things either.

No experience with it.
 
This is the first I've heard of different branded cards from the same series (670, 680, 760, 770, 780, 970, 980, etc) not working together in SLI.

I've SLI'd an Evga with a Zotac (GTX 680's), Evga with an Asus (8800 GTX's), Asus with BFG (8800 GTX's), BFG with Reference card from nVidia (8800 GTX's), and Asus with a Reference card from nVidia (8800 GTX's). Even did Triple-SLI with three cards from Evga (GTX 260), that were three different models (or different model lines in the same GPU family). The only issue I've ever run into was on the Reference card from nVidia, one of it's SLI connectors didn't work, seemed as though it was crippled or deactivated in some way, either through the card's BIOS or physically disabled on the PCB.

Have you tried to SLI the Evga with another Evga card, or SLI the Asus with another Asus card? It could be that one or both of them are non-functional in some way, and it might be that the problem isn't because you're using two different brands of cards.

As far as Evga's customer service, I couldn't be more pleased with my experiences with them so far. I RMA'd a GTX 295 and they sent me back a GTX 660Ti a couple of years back. Another time I RMA'd a motherboard with no argument or dispute from their customer service/customer support staff. I'm surprised they were unwilling to help you, even if you were using cards from two different brands.

Perhaps you should call Asus and see if they would be willing or able to help you?


I've heard of it and tried it once, couldn't get it to work with my motherboard though. (Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R)

Never tried it with any other cards or motherboards though.
 
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There were a number of 970's that couldn't sli within the EVGA brand itself, much less other brands.
Here is a list of which of these cards can sli with which.

BTW....I am running an EVGA 1070 FTW sli with an MSI 1070 Aero nicely.
 
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There were a number of 970's that couldn't sli within the EVGA brand itself, much less other brands.
Here is a list of which of these cards can sli with which.

BTW....I am running an EVGA 1070 FTW sli with an MSI 1070 Aero nicely.


Cheers thanks for this post! I was about to update and post this too.

After failing to do the DifferentSLI fix a few times we ended up trying every little adjustment or line someone had posted to edit in the fix. Eventually worked and my brothers 970 SLI scored on 3dmark firestrike/timespy was right under my Gigabyte 1080 extreme which has a out of the box clock of 2060mhz max which is 120mhz higher then advertised. His score easily beat 1070s and is now very happy we managed to work this out.

Let this serve as a do your research post cause this could happen anytime in any GPU series most likely.
 
Please Check the Part number at the back of your card(s), for example "EVGA GTX 970" or ASUS GTX 970"..., If your Part Number or P/N is like 04G-P4-2***(e.g. 04G-P4-2123) and your New card is 04G-P4-3*** (e.g. 04G-P4-3123) then you SLI WON'T WORK, Guaranteed! it's not EVGA or MSI or ASUS... problem or Fault.

Solution: Call the GFX card company like EVGA, MSI, ASUS... what ever you have, they'll ask you to ship ur current(OLD) GFX CARD and they will send you the NEW updated GFX the the most recent Part number or P/N which will be compatible with ALL GFX card of that driver and SLI.
 
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