Alright. Everything on my new setup is running nicely but my Detected Hardware only shows one video card. Since it's running in SLI will it only show one card or is something jacked? FYI: ASUS M2N SLI board 2GB RAM XFX 8600GT in SLI AMD 5200+ proc. Vista Ultimate Those are the applicable stats.
Do you have more than one installed? Is there an SLI link cable connecting the two? Are you trying to do more than one monitor? More than two? BTW: You went and did all that and only have 2gb of memory? XP limits memory to 4gb including video card memory. But Vista (supposedly) can handle waaaaaay more than that.
Other news: I am able to run Half Life 2 with all the settings maxed. Including Anti-Aliasing at 6x. These are all with my current setup. I need to run a full Benchmark program (after I play some TF2 I'll download the 100mb files for that) but my guess is that Vista is seeing SLI as one card and calling it as such. My only question is why is Riva Tuner doing the same? Riva says I have 1GB of memory on a single vid card. My cards have 1GB of memory apiece so... maybe HL2 is able to run full bore on a single 8600GT. Help?
My point is I didn't want a 64-bit OS. I've got the max I can handle on this mobo. Help me solve this problem.
Open up the nVidia control panel and hit the little "System Information" button in the lower left. In the "Display" tab that comes up does it show both video cards in the "Components" window? 3.xxxxxGB RAM limitation is a 32-bit limitation. Both XP64 and Vista64 can address a lot more (Windows server platforms up to 128GB lately?). YMMV with 64-bit Windows but I don't trust the software support just yet. I'm surprised with how many drivers are current and available for them though. What would you do with all the memory anyway?
Isn't there something on the motherboard that has to be swapped around to have the vid cards work in SLi mode? Not just the little connector on the top, but I thought I read somewhere that there is a jumper of sorts on the mobo that tells the motherboard to open the PCI-e Bus for two cards.
Total Available Graphics: 1791MB Dedicated Video Memory: 1024MB System Memory: 0MB Shared System Memory: 767MB Bus: PCI Express 8 It does NOT show both cards in the component window. Why am I running in PCIe 8? Shouldn't it be 16x? I think I've got both running since it shows over 1GB of vid RAM. Plus, it's SUPER smooth.
Unless you have the PCI-e 2.0, I don't believe you can run both PCI-e slots at 16x. When you put two cards in, it scales them back to 8x/8x.
If it shows all your vid ram, it is likely working, since you can't just **POOF** make ram appear where there is none.
Try installing the latest nvidia video card drivers, whats version do you have? Anything higher then 174.70 might work, also, are you running service pack 1 on vista?
Looked up the specs on your mobo and it does revert to x8 signal on SLi. Nothing to worry about, there aren't any cards on the market that are really pushing the x8 bandwidth yet anyway. In that nVidia window you should have two instances of your card showing up, for instance there should be two 8600GTs listed on the left. Do each of your cards have 1GB of VRAM or 512MB each? BTW SLi doesn't support dual-displays, but at least nVidia made it easier to disable SLi without having to reboot the machine. That was the main reason I ended up settling for a board with two x16 Gen 2 slots that didn't support SLi since I run dual (and now more) displays most of the time, even when gaming.
You can run up to 128GB of RAM on 32-bit Microsoft Server systems (via PAE) and up to 2TB on 64-bit depending on the OS version. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx
Call Larry at Computer Renaisance in EP, he builds all our PCs, I use this same motherboard and have run SLI with Vista. We stoped using Vista because it doesn't work with our wheel and pedal system. www.compren.com 8260 Commonwealth Dr Eden Prairie, MN 55344 (952) 345-3248
Servers enable PAE so no one application will see more than 4GB but servers are generally running several processes that can handle it. XP and Vista have a 4GB physical limit for 32-bit versions for compatibility reasons but I think you can still enable PAE for similar addressing to the server variants. Who wants to mess with PAE on a desktop system? 128GB is the greatest I've seen on the dual-socket platforms I've been looking at. I'm sure there are 4-socket systems that have risers for more memory banks but I don't do much research on them. Keeping in mind the memory limit is also limited by the hardware, not just the software. EDIT: why are there 12 logical CPUs on that task manager? Shouldn't there be 16?
Because there were 12 physical processors. Unisys ES7000 boxen, hyperthreading turned off since it didn't play nice with MSSQL. I use to have a tm pic with it turned on but I can't find it. Impressive with 24 proc boxes or not, depends on what you are into.
Ah, anything beyond dual-socket platforms are foreign and scary to me I don't enable HT on my 5410s either, 8 "boxes" is enough for me to manage right now. Besides HT doesn't help with encoders and only slows the system down for certain non-SMP applications that rely on clock speed.
This is the reason we had to go to dual quad-core Xeon machines with 64GB running on 64bit XP. We have 3 of these just to do data analysis on test measurements. Man, can they churn out the data!
To completely thread jack...64 bit is the way to go for professional apps that support it in the relatively closed system hardware like Unisys with Windows or Unix. I am reluctant to venture into it with commidity based personal computing because of the lack of driver and application support.
Threads here go off-topic so quickly these days anyway... I just built a new workstation on the Tyan 5396 but went Vista32 because Adobe apps still have some issues with 64-bit Windows flavors. I was actually surprised that most of my drivers are available for Vista64. But if ever I want to update to that I have 4 empty DIMM slots to double my 4GB. Little worried about heat with these FB-DIMMs crammed in tight like that though.
I double checked all the connections, swapped the direction of the SLI strap and reset my BIOS to read my PCIe in Auto mode instead of forcing it to identify 2 cards. Nothing has changed. Computer Renaissance went straight to voice mail so I'll call them back in a bit. Any other hints?
Apparently I lost a post. I know I wrote all of this up this morning but... stupid internet. I have 2x1GB 8600GT cards. Total of 2GB of memory. I fixed it. It took a BIOS update and suddenly (after a brief moment when the computer wouldn't even POST. I reset the jumpers and all was well) everything was perfect. I booted up the computer and it immediately identified the 2nd card and now I have an "Enable SLI Graphics" tab. Time to fire up my most kick-ass graphics game and unleash the fury. Thanks for all the help
that is what your rockets are for, BOOM! one shot kill! I didn't die in ep1. The part that made me the angriest was having to push all those cars into the pits so the antlions couldn't get in... while trying to find my way out of the collapsed parking garage.
Yes, that part was lame. As was the end, with those damn civilians needing to be escorted through the fire fight. Tedious and repetitive? You bet.
