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Asus 6800 Dual Sli Problems

A

Am7985

Member
I have been reading in the forums a lot the last few hours about every ones problems with their video cards and I ran into one myself. First off my computer specs are as follows:

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Mobo
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Processor
2x ASUS EN6800 sli Video cards
1GB TWINX1024-4000PT Memory
300Gb SATA HDD
Enermax 550W Power Supply
Few other drives not neccesary to list.

Well everything is fine in windows and everything. I had installed the newest drivers from the asus website and I tried two different games as well as 3dMark 2k5. First 3dMark gave me a rating of 3300 or somewhere near there on the first run. Thought that was extremely low so I tested again and got 6000's on the second run. Although in both runs I noticed lines jutting through all the text and once in awhile in the scenes. Then I went on to try half life 2. As soon as the game loaded and I had the options to choose new or load game it was like a strobe in the backround. Not so much different colors but more of the lines going through certain things like the text and some images. Then I tried LOTR:Battle for Middle Earth. I loaded it up and at the opening screen I saw about a 3 inch scan line not completely black go through a little over half the screen constantly. Now very fustrated I reverted back to the drivers that came on the asus disk that was provided. Needless to say same thing happened in everything but LOTR. That game seemed to work flawless except for minor things that didn't bother me as much. I also tried to plug in another 450Watt power supply just to the video cards to see if it was a power issue but it ended up being the same. So now I am stuck and don't know what to do. I noticed that the second VGA card is suppose to be completely black but I get a blinking picture when I plug in the bottom VGA. I have switched the cards, switched the sli connector and just about every other possible thing I could. Any information you could provide me with would be greatly appreciated. I will try to post some screens later on.
 
So I did some more testing this morning and came up with this. I can play LOTR:BFME whn I get into a game start playing it and then alt-tab out and go back in. It will run flawless. I am not sure why though. Half life will not do anything different if I alt-tab. I am getting really mad now. Any help would be great.
 
What BIOS? I've been, looking at getting a similar setup and they seem to like a specific beta version (Sorry, I don't remember off the top of my head which one). I hope this helps piont you in the right direction.
 
People want to help you but Im afraid a very small population of the forum has SLI yet. Ever heard of the "bleeding edge"? One thing I would do is completely test each card independently. Remove one, and run 3dmark continuously overnight in single mode. Then if all goes well, do the same thing again on the other individually. Make sure each card doesn't have issues independently. Then try ASUS support. You have their mainboard and their video cards, I would think they should help you or have some advice. Be sure to let us know how you progress.
 
I am helping him with his pc at my store. One card works fine 100% of the time. Now for the weird part we can run both cards in America's army fine however in LOTRBFME in order to stop the screen from flashing and going crazy we have to alt tab then go back in the game. After we do that it works wonderful. However HL2 will partially work but goes crazy when looking at some of the brighter oarts of the game, dark scenes seem alot less problematic. Every 3dmark does the same thing, the dark parts are mostly fine but the light and brighter parts have like a vertical sync problem and some flashing whitish bars. We have tried swapping cards, diffrent drivers, diffrent power supplies and currently have an open ticket with Asus to see if their any help. What I cant understand is why the setup works fine in some games but not in others. Could this be because of the newer games T&L support?


Thanks for any help you can give us.
 
I would suggest a BIOS flash as well. There are a number of beta BIOSes on Asus' website, the latest is A8N-SLI Deluxe Beta BIOS 1003.005, which is dated Dec 30. They have five beta BIOSes from December alone, so it looks like they are doing a lot of work on the BIOS files. All of the release BIOSes are from Nov.

Edit: btw.. nice rig and good luck. Let us know the outcome of this, please.
 
Asus laughed when we told them the card wasnt on the list. They stated the cards are indeed sli compliate and should be work fine. I'm scared to flash the bios to the 1003.005 because so many people are having problems with that bios. We are still waiting for our call back from Asus on the issue. Someone from CA from the bios department is supposed to get in touch with us. Perhaps the video cards need an updated bios or something.


Starfighter: which video cards are you using? We are using plain Asus 6800 PCI-X cards and also using the 1002 bios for the A8N.


Thanks for the help.

 
I was using MSI 6800GTos, tried every bios that has been released so far including all the Betas and more nvidia drivers than I care to remember.

I'm not sure I'd bother with the mobo BIOS - I've tried them inc 1003.005 - it works ok for me (occasional problem booting) but it had no effect on the video issues.

Description on problem I was having:

@ 1024 * 768 In SLi mode, the bottom half of the screen, especially the left hand side would have graphical glitches in the form of horizontal lines of distortion that were kind of 'fuzzyish'.

At higher resolutions the graphical defects became more prevalent and numerous. It would then change into a slightly different effect, more of a colour distortion across either the whole bottom half of the screen (FarCry) or in bands that scrolled up and down the screen (HL2) e.g. FarCry

Updating the video card bios was something I didnt try - because there didnt seem to be any available - no one could point me at one for my cards and I couldnt actually get in touch with MSI to see if they recommended this.



 
Originally posted by: Last Starfighter

At higher resolutions the graphical defects became more prevalent and numerous. It would then change into a slightly different effect, more of a colour distortion across either the whole bottom half of the screen (FarCry) or in bands that scrolled up and down the screen (HL2) e.g. FarCry
Click to expand...

Does anyone else think that that makes it look like one video card is bad? Not sure of the technical terms, but unless I'm mistaken, Farcry uses the split screen load balancing in SLI and HL2 uses the alternating band balancing?

[EDIT]: Hmmm, Split Frame Rendering and Alternating Frame Rendering is what it uses, my mistake. But it still seems like one of the cards is having problems or at least the transfer of data from one of the cards is bad...Maybe some of the SLI bridges are broken?
 
It doesnt seem like one of the cards are bad. We stress tested each seperately with no artifacts or anomalies. We even tried swapping the bottom card to the top to see if that made anything change but it didnt.
 
Originally posted by: AiponGkooja
Originally posted by: Last Starfighter

At higher resolutions the graphical defects became more prevalent and numerous. It would then change into a slightly different effect, more of a colour distortion across either the whole bottom half of the screen (FarCry) or in bands that scrolled up and down the screen (HL2) e.g. FarCry
Click to expand...

Does anyone else think that that makes it look like one video card is bad? Not sure of the technical terms, but unless I'm mistaken, Farcry uses the split screen load balancing in SLI and HL2 uses the alternating band balancing?

[EDIT]: Hmmm, Split Frame Rendering and Alternating Frame Rendering is what it uses, my mistake. But it still seems like one of the cards is having problems or at least the transfer of data from one of the cards is bad...Maybe some of the SLI bridges are broken?
Click to expand...


That's what I thought - but I went down to the store and tried multiple replacements of cards, bridges etc. The only time it went away was with a different model of card (namely and XFX 6800GT, which is on the certified list)
 
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