Activating SLI on Vista or XP
Q: I got the MSI P7N (750i) SLI motherboard today. I have been trying to set up SLI with my two nvidia 8600 GT (OC 512 MB). I do not get the option to enable SLI either when I start windows or in the nvidia control panel. I have tried with vista 64 bit and with xp 32 bit, nothing works. Also tried different drivers like 169.21, 169.25, 169.38, 178.24 and many more.
Both ista and XP detects the two graphic cards, driver installation also goes on fine, I just d not get the option which says your system is SLI ready or enable SLI.
System Spec’s:
1. MSI P7N 3-slot motherboard.
2. 3 GB DDR2 800 Mhz RAM
3. Nvidia 8600 GT * 2
4. 600 Watt Power Supply
5. 1.8 Core 2 Duo Processor
A: One of my cards was from MSI and the other from XFX. MSI Card had a higher firmware. So I took both cards out, deleted drivers, then just added the XFX card, put in the driver and then upgraded the BIOS for XFX card. Then added the MSI card and again updated the MSI BIOS. Checked back, but still the BIOS versions for the two did not match. Anyways, when I restarted the comp again, it started showing the SLI option. So all good now.
Remember, A defective bridge isn’t going to stop the SLI option from being there, or from being enabled, in fact you don’t even need the bridge to take advantage of SLI…without the bridge the 2 cards communicate via the PCIe bus, it is slower than the direct link of the bridge, but it’s still possible to use SLI without it.