SLI problems

[aznxk3vi17]

I have the system in my sig. At first, it worked great. I installed Windows 7, and everything worked fantastically.

Then about 3 weeks ago, whenever I started any game, a few seconds into the 3D accelerated portion, my computer would freeze up hard. No reboot, no blue screen - just a frozen screen and looped audio.

I thought I isolated the problem to a single card. I RMA'd it, and received a new card. The problem remained. Disabling SLI makes the system work fine. I tried enabling SLI and removing the SLI bridge. The system worked fine, albeit no benefit from SLI obviously.

Since SLI used to work, I am trying to isolate the problem to either the motherboard, power supply, or the actual SLI bridge. Does anybody have experience with this kind of problem?

 

[alcoholbob]

This may sound obvious but since you didn't explicitly mention it...

Does this problem persist on other Operating Systems?

 

[aznxk3vi17]

The first thing I thought when the issues began was that Windows 7 was the issue. However, during the transition of working to broken, I changed no drivers, hardware, or even Windows Updates. I am reluctant to go back to Vista because of the time needed, but if you think that is where the issue lies, I guess I'll have to.

I just don't think it's Windows, considering how it worked before and after Windows 7.

 

[alcoholbob]

I always run dual boot for all my systems to troubleshoot problems in order to discern if its a hardware or driver issue. It's helped me a lot over the years. Now I run tri-boot (XP, Vista x86, Vista x64). I've noticed each OS has its own idiosyncracies.

Trouble shooting issues is always a checklist to eliminate possible causes in order to move into the real problem. There are so many hardware/software conflicts these days its hard to tell if you actually have defective hardware, or a zillion other things.

 

[aka1nas]

I've read about lots of instances with the Win7 beta starting to have stability issues after a week or two.