Asus A8N SLI DLX with 2 EVGA 6600GT

[dng29]

I hope everyone on this awesome board can help me out. This thread might be a bit long. I've been following this board since the day the A8N SLI came out. I bought this board in january. btw, i'm a big fan of Asus. I had 4 boards from them from nforce2 to P4C800 dlx. Ok, here's the problem I'm having. I started it out with 1 EVGA 6600GT when i got the board. The system ran fine from the beginning even with overclocking. I also updated the bios to 1003 final. A few weeks later, i bought another EVGA 6600GT, from the same vendor even. With bios 1003 final, I couldn't get SLI to work with 2 cards. I did the usual stuffs like clearing cmos, switching selector, unplugging the cable for EZ plug, all the good stuffs. The next thing i tried was took out the second card, cleared cmos, changed selector to single card, unplugged cable for ez plug, the usual. Then i updated to bios 1003.7. The updated was fine and I booted into windows xp. Then i shutdown the pc, cleared cmos again, installed the second card, plug in cable for ez plug, switch selector to dual card. booted into windows and right away xp recognizs 2 vid cards and tells me to enable sli and reboot. I was happy to get sli working . so I had the system running in sli with bios 1003.7 for a few weeks. Recently, newer bioses came out so i thought i gave it a try. Now here's what I might be doing wrong or I'm assuming the obvious. Before I updated bios 1003.7 to 1004 final, i went into the bios settings and changed to default so nothing is overclocked. Then i updated to bios 1004 using a cd with awdflash. I did this update while having 2 cards installed. I figured updating bios should be obvious and not require you to do anything special. if it's not obvious then Asus needs to address that. Anyhow, booted into windows with 1004 final and I lost SLI. btw i'm using forceware 67.99 and only 1 card is recognized. So i shutdown once again and clear cmos, unplug this and that and put everything back in place. booted into windows and again, no SLI . So i tried several things, went back to original bios 1002, then updated to 1003(still couldn't get SLI), then updated to 1004 final(no SLI), and finally went back to 1003.7. Back to 1003.7 and SLI is back to normal. to make a long story short, no matter what bios i update to besides 1003.7, I can't SLI. Either I'm doing something wrong or missing something, i can't get SLI. I'm going bald pulling my hair out trying to make this work. Please provide your suggestions or findings. I had already sent an email to asus tech support about this problem. I wonder if it's the bios chip that's bad or just the board itself is finnicky. I hate to rma this board since I had to rma my first A8N SLI. I would also hate to switch to DFI or MSI. Thank you for reading thru this and for your help.

sorry this long post and no system specs .

a64 3000+
ocz pc3200 plat. rev. 2
antec 400W psu
1 WD ide drive and 1 Seagate SATA drive
2 EVGA 6600gt pcie

 

[MrVeedo]

i had similar problems and it turns out i misunderstood the sli selector card position, sli will work with the card flipped the wrong way, it just wont work right lol. the manual is somewhat unclear, but it indeed goes in the obvious way, sli arrow pointing to the insertion slot. just an idea, good luck

 

[dng29]

I think i did try the selector card in both directions. it's also firmly inserted. i'll give it another try. also something interesting, eventhough i mentioned the bios update was fine, there were 2 blocks that indicated no update while flashing. i hope everyone knows what i'm talking about. another thing is that after the update, i go into the bios settings and in SLI configuration, i only see the EZ plug option and the SLI option is gone. I have a feeling the bios chip is bad or part of it doesn't get flashed properly. If that's the case, it's either pay for a new bios chip or rma the board. i miss the days when you can ask for bios chip for free . Please folks more advice. Thanks.

 

[dng29]

c'mon guys. i know you all are geniuses. please give me some clues. this problem is giving me a headache. right now, i unplug everything and even took all the battery to clear the cmos for good. i'm going to leave the board like this for a whole day until i get home from work to work on it again. so please let me know if there's a solution to this problem. the board is rev. 1.02.

 

[Solutions]

I would install one 6600GT at a time and verify that they are both running the same version video BIOS. If not you should flash the newest/same BIOS to both cards.

I would also suggest that you reflash your mobo to the newest BIOS (with only one video card installed just to be safe). Remove your 66.9x drivers and try out a 7x.xx driver package. Be sure to use a Detenator Destroyer type program to remove all the left over driver crap before installing the 7x.xx drivers.

 

[dng29]

Thanks for the advice solutions . i got this bios editor called xbios. I'm a bit paranoid about messing with the bios on the vid card, but i guess i have no choice. Now that you mentioned it, i notice something strange when i boot up each vid card seperately. 1 card will show the bios number and info and the other one doesn't show anything. The one that doesn't show bios info works fine though. anyway, tell me if this is the way to do it. i'll boot up with the card that shows bios info and copy the bios to the hd and then boot up the one which doesn't show anything and flash the bios from the other. Make sense? I hope this works. Thanks again for the help.