How To: Enable SLI on pre-i7/i5 hardware

[Francko79]

Hi Anatolymik!

First of all, I wanna give you a big THX for such an amazing job, I´ve been using your patches since I bought a Rampage Extreme and they´ve been flawless, got them working with 263.09 on 2x480 GTX SLI, and OC´d my E8700 to almost 4,72 Prime stable.

Just wanted to write to once again thank you and tell you that, the new quadros 265.90 on Windows 7 ultimate 64bit are having some problems, I think NVIDIA is working on something new to avoid us from SLI´ing.
I tried before all betas, quadros, and never a problem, but these new 265.90 when u try to activate SLI, the display goes blank, I get an error message that the NVidia CP crashed, then if u right click again, the NVIDIA properties dissapear from the menu and if u restart, same thing.
I think they are doing something new same as happened with 258 and up till u showed us the light again.

Count me in for any testing!

Franco

 

[anatolymik]

Hi Anatolymik!

First of all, I wanna give you a big THX for such an amazing job, I´ve been using your patches since I bought a Rampage Extreme and they´ve been flawless, got them working with 263.09 on 2x480 GTX SLI, and OC´d my E8700 to almost 4,72 Prime stable.

Just wanted to write to once again thank you and tell you that, the new quadros 265.90 on Windows 7 ultimate 64bit are having some problems, I think NVIDIA is working on something new to avoid us from SLI´ing.
I tried before all betas, quadros, and never a problem, but these new 265.90 when u try to activate SLI, the display goes blank, I get an error message that the NVidia CP crashed, then if u right click again, the NVIDIA properties dissapear from the menu and if u restart, same thing.
I think they are doing something new same as happened with 258 and up till u showed us the light again.

Count me in for any testing!

Franco

I have to wait drivers for GeForce cards. Only after drivers came out i could take a look

 

[Triton.se]

same here with 265.90 drivers, once enabling SLI from nvcpl, the exe crashes.

reason I wanted 265.90 is 3DMark 11 uses SLI, 263.00 and 260.99 used only one card.

GTX460 1GB SLI today.

 

[Triton.se]

same here with 265.90 drivers, once enabling SLI from nvcpl, the exe crashes.

reason I wanted 265.90 is 3DMark 11 uses SLI, 263.00 and 260.99 used only one card.

GTX460 1GB SLI today.

Could have been the 3DMark11 install that messed things up..big time. I went back to 263.00 and tested Vantage...it showed so much corrupt graphics I got scared my cards were faulty ! Changing drivers or uninstalling both 3Dmark11 and Vantage (and re-installing Vantage again) didn't help ! Got the same corrupt graphics ! A System Restore was needed, and then Vantage ran OK.

So, I might test installing 265.90 again when I feel brave !

I suggest nobody installs 3DMark11 now... read more http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?&m=727030&mpage=1

 

[Lethalrise750]

Figured I'd throw this here as a TEMPORARY fix for SLi.

http://www.overclock.net/nvidia/884394-3dmark-11-sli-possible-fix.html

 

[YukonCornelius]

Figured I'd throw this here as a TEMPORARY fix for SLi.

http://www.overclock.net/nvidia/884394-3dmark-11-sli-possible-fix.html

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, no-go with the 580's

 

[csscmaster3]

So I just got a second Gtx 470 for my rig. I applied the SLIPatch v0.9b, and everything was looking good. I was able to enable SLI, and Heaven and BFBC2 showed it was working. I then go on to enable 3d Vision. I get threw the install, and begin the walkthrough setup. I get right before the point where the setup asks you to turn on the glasses and out them on. My screen goes black, the mouse becomes laggy, and the the pc looks up. I reboot, and see that 3d vision is now enabled anyway. I try to test it out. With every game I launch the same blank screen, laggy mouse, pc lookup occurs.

If I go into the Nvidia control panel and disable 3d vision I no longer have problems. If I disable SLI and enable 3d vision I don't have problems.

I have tried the 260.99 and 258.96 drivers, no change. I have removed and tested both cards individually and there are no problems there. The issue does not occur in Heaven 2.1, unless I press ctrl + T to turn on 3d vision.

Forget to mention, did a fresh windows install before doing all this. Also MSI Afterburner is displaying "APP" instead of DX11 in the On Screen Display (The framerate counter usually shows which directx, its showing "APP" instead of that"

tl;dr 3d vision is crashing with sli enabled.


Edit: It seems my psu might not be up to the task, I am picking up another tonight and will see if that fixes it.

Edit 2: Apparently ACPI was disabled in my bios, I am going to enable that and reinstall windows

Edit 3: Changed psu, and reinstalled windows....still having problems.

 

[K.S.]

Having same issue as others with new quadro drivers and SLI, real shame as I've heard they perform really well, 263.09 works great though.

 

[Thiesi]

now do next. go to windows\system32 and look for ntoskrnl.exe file. copy it to different folder, rename to ntoskrnp.exe and copy it to windows\system32 with replacement. try to boot. if you boot ok you'll not have sli works. i just have to know you get your system boot or not.

I tried that, and my system boots up normally with the patch option selected when ntoskrnp.exe is the same as the original ntoskrnl.exe. Let me know if there's anything else I can do.

Bye, K&K,
T-Zee

 

[anatolymik]

I tried that, and my system boots up normally with the patch option selected when ntoskrnp.exe is the same as the original ntoskrnl.exe. Let me know if there's anything else I can do.

Bye, K&K,
T-Zee

send me your ntoskrnp.exe file

 

[iori57]

Hi, i tried the patch and it says patched successfully without any problems, after a restart and boot on Windows 7 with SLI enabled option, i doesn't see anything different in the Nvidia control panel.. there's no 'Set SLI configuration' under 3d settings, it is still the same 'Set PhysX configuration' only.. does that mean that it is not working?

just want to make sure it's working for my mobo before grabbing my second geforce 470 gtx
does it need to have 2 graphics card installed to see the SLI configuration above?
any other way to see that it works? (with only one graphics card as of now)

Thanks for giving me hope! I'm using MSI 870A-G54 which is a crossfire motherboard

PS: I'm using 260.99 driver.. and read in some post that the guy need to roll back to 258.96 to get the options to show up.. is it true?

Thanks!

 

[soundood]

Hi, i tried the patch and it says patched successfully without any problems, after a restart and boot on Windows 7 with SLI enabled option, i doesn't see anything different in the Nvidia control panel.. there's no 'Set SLI configuration' under 3d settings, it is still the same 'Set PhysX configuration' only.. does that mean that it is not working?

just want to make sure it's working for my mobo before grabbing my second geforce 470 gtx
does it need to have 2 graphics card installed to see the SLI configuration above?
any other way to see that it works? (with only one graphics card as of now)

Thanks for giving me hope! I'm using MSI 870A-G54 which is a crossfire motherboard

PS: I'm using 260.99 driver.. and read in some post that the guy need to roll back to 258.96 to get the options to show up.. is it true?

Thanks!

you will need two cards for the sli option to show up, and no need to double check, this patch will work easily with your board

 

[aXeL_UK]

Having observed this thread with interest I'd thought I'd feedback on my experiences (currently it's working). I recently put 2x EVGA GTX 480s in my Asus Formula X48 (Win7 64) and installed drivers 260.99. I then installed v0.9 of the SLI patch using Administrator mode (Not the normal 'I think I'm an administrator account' but the real one which has to be enabled through 'net user administrator /active:yes' - that one).

For the next week I ran SLI without any issues on a number of games and playing with the various settings on my drivers. Then I started getting the crashes and BSODs people refer to. After much faff with driver sweeper, all the various nVidia drivers people have mentioned and clocking my system back to stop, I had given up, removed the last patch I tried (v0.91) and reinstalled NV 260.99 with the 2nd card set as dedicated PhysX. All was back to normal but without SLI. After going through my notes I had noticed an oddity of behaviour. Like other's I had often experienced the computer crashing while just sitting on the desktop doing nothing if the SLI patch was installed (didn't matter if I was booting into it or not when SLI was enabled) or crashing on Windows startup. The odd part with this scenario was that if I logged into the REAL Administrator account, rather than my admin enabled user account, with SLI enabled, the machine wouldn't crash at all. It would sit there for hours happily (This is with NV 260.99 and SLI patch 0.91). So - I logged out of the Administrator account and logged in as my normal account.... still working so far. Then I played Oblivion for a few hours without any issues at all. Was pleasantly surprised since that game was dying instantly after loading a savegame with SLI enabled. Thought it was maybe a fluke so I logged out and logged back in as Administrator and then rebooted and went through the process again. So far so good, still working and played Oblivion again for a few hours without any hiccups. When I next shutdown I went through the process of logging off as me and logging back in as Administrator before I shutdown and still no issues. Going to keep running like this to see if the behaviour is consistent.

One issue I did observe was that if I rebooted and left the PC on the login screen with SLI enabled from before, it would still BSOD after a few minutes. However if I just logged in as Administrator and then leave it alone - it's fine. Will keep this behaviour up over the week to see if it remains consistent for Oblivion. If so I'll test a few other games this way.

 

[iori57]

you will need two cards for the sli option to show up, and no need to double check, this patch will work easily with your board

Cool.. nice to hear that!!

one more thing though.. does sli give good performance boost for nvidia 3d vision purpose? the main reason i'm trying sli is because when it runs in 3d mode, the framerate gets cut by half and i have to use low quality graphic settings to make the game 'smoother'.. will sli make it smooth in 3d mode like how one card did for normal 2d mode?

Thanks again

 

[dam0]

Asus P7P55D-E

Hi Anatolymik,

First of all - awesome work

I was wondering whether you'd be able to help me ...

I have made a bit of a mistake. I have just bought an upgrade bundle which includes a Asus P7P55D-E. I had 2 x GTX 275s that I'd hoped to transplant into the new setup. Of course I didn't realise until too late that the "-E" doesn't support SLI.

I have tried the 2 patches and still can't get any joy.

I am running Windows 7 x64.

Can anyone help ? * sobs *

 

[anatolymik]

Hi Anatolymik,

First of all - awesome work

I was wondering whether you'd be able to help me ...

I have made a bit of a mistake. I have just bought an upgrade bundle which includes a Asus P7P55D-E. I had 2 x GTX 275s that I'd hoped to transplant into the new setup. Of course I didn't realise until too late that the "-E" doesn't support SLI.

I have tried the 2 patches and still can't get any joy.

I am running Windows 7 x64.

Can anyone help ? * sobs *

See PM

 

[Francko79]

See PM

Hi Anatolymik!

I checked my PM and I didn´t find anything, can u re send it to me?
When I saw your post, I felt like a kid on xmas!

Thx a lot!


Franco

 

[soundood]

Hi Anatolymik,

First of all - awesome work

I was wondering whether you'd be able to help me ...

I have made a bit of a mistake. I have just bought an upgrade bundle which includes a Asus P7P55D-E. I had 2 x GTX 275s that I'd hoped to transplant into the new setup. Of course I didn't realise until too late that the "-E" doesn't support SLI.

I have tried the 2 patches and still can't get any joy.

I am running Windows 7 x64.

Can anyone help ? * sobs *

See PM

Hi Anatolymik!

I checked my PM and I didn´t find anything, can u re send it to me?
When I saw your post, I felt like a kid on xmas!

Thx a lot!


Franco

probaly because he sent the PM to dam0

 

[Francko79]

probaly because he sent the PM to dam0


http://religiopoliticaltalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/DoubleFacePalm.jpg

Yep, already edited.

 

[aXeL_UK]

Played Oblivion for another couple of hours tonight. Still proving stable with my 'Administrator account approach' to the SLI patch. I have noticed however that when booting up I do need to leave the Administrator account logged in for a couple of minutes before logging out and switching to my normal user account. If I don't wait then the crashes still occur, otherwise it's gone back to being stable on 260.99 drivers, even after ramping up the driver and game quality settings.

 

[aXeL_UK]

Ok, that's three nights in a row whereby booting into the real admin account and then logging off and into my normal user account and gaming has remained stable. Of course, it could just be an amazing coincidence but if it works........

 

[RiC@RDOC]

Hi guys,

First of all a very big THANK YOU to the developers of the sli patch, it works like a dream

I have some questions maybe you guys can help:
Do i need to uninstall the sli patch to install a different driver?
Is there a way to know if the sli bridge is working?
Why the 265.90 mod inf quadro drivers don't work, do you guys think nvidia made a new protection?

Btw i'm running sli patch in a P5Q Pro Turbo mobo with 2 GTX 460 1Gb.
Thanks again

 

[johnspack]

Yes, drivers above 260.99 seem to be not working. To test the bridge, take it off, run Vantage, put it back on and run Vantage again. You'll see the increase. No you don't need to uninstall or reinstall the patch if you change drivers.

 

[buttkick]

can you reinstall your system? i had same problem but only in crysis

Hi Anatolymik!
I reinstalled my system... twice...

First with all my drivers, games and apps and sli patch. Still the same - freezing with 260.99 and Windowed Mode with Quad SLI enabled. If I disable SLI - no problem, even with Patch boot! This ...BUG... only happens with SLI and more than 2 GPUs.

Then I installed again, only the 260.99 drivers, patch and Serious Sam HD First Encounter, everything else windows default.
Result: freeeeeeeeeze with quad sli and starting windowed

I don´t know much about Nvidia drivers, but this was interesting. I knew there are profiles including SLI Settings for so much games provided by nvidia. So I decided to delete the "Serious SAM HD" Profile from the list. I used nvidiaIspector for that.
Now it starts in windowed mode!
Is SLI now disabled completely for the game? I think so, but I hope this is of some help for you to hunt this down.

I will again go back to 257.21 Lucky me, made a full backup with all my apps and games

Greetings from bavaria!

 

[johnspack]

Odd, maybe a glitch with quad sli? I have also run Serious Sam HD in sli, it works perfect for me. Try setting it down to dual sli, (if you can, I only have 2 cards, so I don't know what quad does) the game really doesn't need more than that.