x11nt4
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GeForce 6800 Ultra, and some strange SLI config problems? - 2008/04/21 17:36
Hello everyone. I sure hope someone might be able to shed some light on my current predicament. I have an ABIT KN8 SLI nForce4 motherboard running an AMD Athlon X2 4200 and 2GB of Crucial Tracer DDR500 memory and Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. I purchased two GeForce 6800 Ultra video cards from eBay recently to run in this computer as SLI config. These cards turned out to be Gateway 2000 OEM cards with the oversized heatsink that covered all expansion slots.
I replaced these heatsinks with Arctic Cooling VGA coolers from Newegg and installed the SLI link connector. The motherboard has LED's to indicate when the cards are installed to run in an SLI setup. Before I go into detail of my problems, please let me assure you, I have run SLI in this computer with Windows Vista before, however, at that time I had one bad card so when the SLI was enabled, it crashed the computer, but the drivers detected it and said they met the SLI requirement and enabled the choice in the control panel.
So my problem is, both of these cards are detected by the system as GeForce 6800 Ultra. Both cards have identical BIOS images. Both cards from what I can tell are exactly the same, both are GeForce 6800 ultra, both have 256MB of GDDR3 memory, both are the exact same layout, both have the exact same BIOS, both run at the same clock speeds, and both are the same manufacturer, but the drivers refuse to see these cards as being SLI ready. I have the choice to enable the mixed GPU acceleration mode, but that is it.
I have loaded GPU-Z to verify that these cards are identical, not just a visual inspection. So my first question is, could SLI physically be disabled on these video cards or in the BIOS of these cards? Has anyone run into this problem before? Second, I have tried several times to flash a different GeForce 6800 Ultra BIOS's with nvFlash and only get a no match found error. I have used nvFlash v5.13 up to v5.63 with no luck.
If I try to reflash the backup image file, it flashes without a problem. I have also tried the WFFlash without any luck either. Has anyone run into this kind of problem with their cards? I am thinking Gateway did something to these cards to remove the SLI abilities. Any idea's would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
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EVGA 9600GT (SC) PCIe 512MB - Rev 01
