Hi Guys,

Have a little bit of a problem, wondering if anyone has experienced something similar or can lend a hand diagnosing the issue here. I don't seem to have the SLI option appearing the NVIDIA control panel and when I run any games or benchmarks the 2nd card just idles at 324MHz / 32c
 
Rig

• Asrock Extreme-3 990FX
• Patriot Viper 1866MHz 8GB
• 2x GTX670 2GB FTW
• AMD FX-8320 CPU
• Coolermaster Thunder 700W PSU
• Windows 7 x64
• Nvidia Drivers 331.58

Have already tried

1. Firmware on the video cards are both 80.04.5C.00.70
2. Updated motherboard bios to latest available on the ASRock website
3. Tried swapping the cards around in the PCI-e slots
4. Tried 3 different SLI bridges
5. Tried a clean install of the Nvidia drivers
6. Made sure all motherboard chipset drivers where installed
7. Unplugging and replugging in the 6 pin power connectors
8. Reseating both cards and the SLI bridges
9. Adding the Nvidia CoolBits reg hack (Did nothing? Or couldn't get it to work?)
10. Tried running a single display only to see if it made any difference
11. Tried both the left and right hand SLI connectors on the cards
12. Flipped the sli bridge over
13. Checked the bios for any mention of any setting that might effect the PCI-E bus at all, doesnt seem to be any.

Notes

Yes the cards plugged in to the correct PCI slots
Yes both cards appear in device manager / nvidia control panel
Yes the motherboard supports SLI
Yes all the power cables are plugged in
Yes I have tested both cards individually
Yes have submitted a support ticket about 24 hours and have yet to hear anything back
 
Have been googling around which has lead me to all the tricks above, alas none have been successful. Could this be a faulty card? or a faulty motherboard? or some sort of software / driver screw up? Would be greatful for any / all suggestions / help,
 

Yep, which ever card is in the 2nd slot sits idle.
 
Cards are in the slots specified in the motherboard manual which happen to be PCIE2 and PCIE3. (The two PCI-E 16X slots closest to the top of the board).
 

Yep, both cards when tested by themselves in the pcie3 socket run at full clocks =[ so the motherboard socket is probably fine, and the cards themselves seem to be fine.

Only leaves software / driver issue or bad sli bridge connector on one of the cards?

Based on that, it does sound like it.  I find it unlikely that you would have 2 bad SLI connectors on one of your cards, but I guess it's possible.
When you did the clean driver install, did you do a custom install only installing the graphics & physx portions??  Leaving all the rest out of the install??  If not, give that a try.  Sometimes the Geforce experience can screw things up.

Hi guys, thanks for all the tips, tried 2 different bridges on the second set of connectors, no luck with that.

Running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit oem edition if that makes any difference.

Will try another clean install of the drivers and only install the bare minimums, one component at a time to see of that helps.

The hold contact points on the cards seem fine, no damage or discoloration.

Unfortunately I don't know anyone with an SLI ready motherboard to test the cards, might be able to take it back to the shop and see of if they can try it. Will give them a call and ask.

Hi Isocyanate,
 
Thanks for the tip, didn't work but was worth a shot.

samarlian
I take it you have enabled maximize 3d performance in control panel
 

This option doesn't even appear

 
Hunted high and low in the MB Bios and theres nothing there i can find that sounds like it has anything do with the PCI-E lanes or SLI

what nvidia driver is that
 

samarlian
some times its on the motherboard ie like this image

thanks but nothing like that on the extreme-3 990fx

  argh what card is your monitor plugged in
 
 As it should be the top card ie card 1 not card two as per your image
 
If monitor plugged in to card two ie bottom card it then becomes that the primary card sli wont work
 
so do it as per above image
 

Hi guys, thanks again for the suggestions, have tried this trick, both plugging in to the top or the bottom or even one of each male no difference when it comes to not having an SLI option to enable in the control panel.

The only reason that I can think of that would not allow you to enable SLI is if the RAM was different sizes on the video boards. Can you use GPU-Z to double check each board for memory size?
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/sysinfo/gpu-z/
 
 

Tyraele
Looking at the top card, it would appear as though you are using some type of bridge connector to plug the 6-pin into the second power slot.  Is that true?  If so, try doing it so that it has it's own power connector and see if that helps.  If not, you may need a slightly beefier power supply.  The only thing I could think of outside of Zuhl's suggestion is that the cards are not getting enough power.

No extra bridge added, just how the power supply came. According to every power supply calculator I could find the TDP max only comes to 575-590W. I'm no expert but shouldn't a 700W psu suffice (providing its not faulty or anything right?)
 
I think I might have found some sort of issue here, GPU-Z is saying the 2nd card is running at @8x while the first is running @16x in the PCI-E sockets. Everything else is identical as far as I can see. Could this be the issue?
 
CARD ONE

CARD TWO

 
Any one know how to force set the pci-e lanes to 8x 8x or 16x 16x? If thats even the issue... this all pretty new to me.

Have you tried pulling it out and plugging it in?  :)  I am just kidding.  You could try performing a clean install of the drivers WITH the cards in the board.  See if that does it.  Also, the only reason I can really think of (barring all other solutions you have tried) is one of three things:
 
1) The SLI connectors are bad (50%)
2) You are trying to use a Crossfirex adapter
3) The SLI contacts are dirty/corroded/bad (50%)
 

A couple things here:
 
No need to worry about one GPU showing x16 and the other x8.  Thats is most likely how your mobo is layed out.  A board can have several x16 slots but it doesn't mean they will run at 16x speed.  If your board has 2 x16 slots, and one runs at 16, the other at 8, when you're running a game in SLI, you're running both at 8x speed anyway.  All slots will run at the slowest lane speed.
 
Also, keep in mind that your PSU is 700w, however, it won't run at 700w continuously.  Most likely it will provide you about 80% of 700w which is 560w give or take for continuous use.  It's possible your pretty borderline on power.