"Enable SLI" not showing in Vista 64

[THERESONATOR]

Hello

Current setup:

Gigabyte EX58-UD5
Core i7 920 (oh wow... this thing is amazing!!!!!!) @2.67ghz
Corsair 3x1gb XMS DDR3 1600mhz @ 9-9-9-24
2x BFG 256mb 7800GTX OC

I hoped that with a change of hardware this issue would be gone. Alas not! I was running a 2 year old DFI Lanparty SLI-DR Expert and AMD 64 X2 3800+ but decided to get myself a rather good Christmas present! It wasn't working on the old setup with Vista 64 either. But it worked in Windows XP. I initially thought it was a problem with the OS because its DirectX 10 and the 7 series is DirectX 9, but apparently Vista 64 supports SLI. I don't know if that includes the 7 series. I did read an article which said that nVidia excluded support for the 7 series in Vista 64 in their drivers. OT: Why did everywhere stop selling 7800GTXs back in the day and could I only find 7900s and above? That was a weird phenomenon which I recently saw also happen to the Asus X48 P5E3 Premium motherboard - fabled as a beast of a board - now near impossible to buy online.

The problem is not the detection of the cards - its showing up as 2 cards just fine. I've got power connected to both and downloaded the latest WHQL drivers for the 7 series for Vista 64. But SLI no worky. Its not showing up in the nVidia Control Panel you see. I remember the time when it showed up in XP32... when I first got the second card... oh wow. An amazing feeling to see that balloon popup in your system tray after hours of desperately trying to get it to work! I'm not getting that amazing balloon.

This was the install process of the drivers by the way:
-Installed fresh copy of Vista
-Vista used default 7800GTX drivers that come with Windows
-Did Windows Update for everything
-Then DL'd latest Vista 64 nVidia 7 series drivers
-Installed
-No SLI

Of course the easy way out is to buy a new graphics card and that is the desired goal. But seeing as I just shelled out £550 on my debit card to buy this latest rig, I don't have £400 lying around to buy the ATI 4870X2 (sorry guys, its clearly better than the 280 GTX). Its gonna be a few months yet. For now I will settle with what I have.

I think the problem is the drivers and the key difference here between when it worked in XP32 and how it doesnt now work in Vista 64 is that I was using different drivers for a 32 bit system.

Please help! TIA.

 

[THERESONATOR]

Its OK now, please lock thread.

Resolution:

The nVidia drivers were not sufficient and I decided to use a 3rd party modified driver. You can get said drivers at TweakForce. I got version 181.00, and upon restart was presented with the "Your system can support SLi" bubble in the system tray. Magnificent.

 

[JPB]

Im surprised that you spent so much money on Nehalem, but running 7800GTX SLI.

 

[JPB]

(sorry guys, its clearly better than the 280 GTX)

If it will be a few more months, why not at least consider a GTX295 ? Or maybe even the higher clocked GTX285 ?

Choices choices.

 

[Extelleron]

Originally posted by: THERESONATOR
Its OK now, please lock thread.

Resolution:

The nVidia drivers were not sufficient and I decided to use a 3rd party modified driver. You can get said drivers at TweakForce. I got version 181.00, and upon restart was presented with the "Your system can support SLi" bubble in the system tray. Magnificent.

I'm having the same problem that you are having (except with GTX 260 SLI here), I wonder if trying the 181.00 drivers will help. Right now I'm using 180.48 and there is no SLI option.

 

[cbns]

I am also having this problem (with GTX 260s)

tried aboslutely everything. several reinstalls with safemode driver cleaning
swapping out the cards etc, trying different driver version
bios updates.. you name it

I cannot get SLI to run.. I just bought a second card and its useless. This cannot be!
SLI did work the 1st time I installed the card, but after the next reboot I get error code 43 device driver failed to load, after which I have to reinstall the drivers and then after that there is no SLI.
very weird, very annoying