"Oboy oboy oboy oboy! Its here!"
*Rips open boxes.*
"Jesus the cards a bigger than my torso!"
"Ok lets get these puppies installed. Better be careful though, wouldn't want any screw ups."
"Hmmm, new hard drive too, should I delay backing up my main drive to my new drive? Yeah! What could go wrong? I'm only gutting my computer and putting it back again. Easy!"
*Unscrew, unscrew, unscrew.... unplug, unplug, unpl.... * "hmmmm" *wiggle, wiggle, wiggle* "
@#$#!$" *WIGGLE, WIGGLE, WIGGLE*. -pop- "Aha!"
*unscrew, unscrew....*
"Ok, now the new stuff.... hey this new PSU is kinda big... hmmmm."
*Squeeeeze.* "Hmmmm." *SQUEEEEZE.* "
@#%%@"
*PRY, SHOVE, SLAM*
"No problem!"
*Grabs cards.*
"Yes my precious! Uh, 4 slots huh? Well I don't really use the A drive anyway." *unplug, toss* "Extra cooling fans gotta go too. That'll be ok right?" *unplug, toss*
"Ok."
*Slot, click, screw.* "That was easy, now the other one."
*Slo....*
"
@#$@!#$"
*SHOVE*
"Kinda crooked. Ah well.*
*Plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug* "Oh yeah." *plug*
"That looks right. Everything matches the way it was. Time to add the peripherals and fire it up!"
*Plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug*
"Lets do eet! Main screen turn on!"
*Lights dim, nothing happens.*
"Thats not good."
*click*
*Lights dim, high pitched whine.*
"I've got a bad feeling about this."
"Well
@#$@."
A period of sulking and wondering if 2k worth of electronics just went poof follows.
(Roommate)
"Hey ____, what did you do, the lights are working now!" (An entire circuit of the house is not working, not my fault!)
"The he!!?"
"Oh wait, their out again."
"Ok, maybe that means the breakers out, but I didn't do anything to that circuit!
...
I think."
Hmmmm.
"Maybe the breakers bad I can scrounge one out of my car.*
*Scrounge, find breaker, repla... curse several times, get a pry bar, replace breaker.*
"Ok, try it!"
"Nothing."
"Well... $#!&"
"Lemme look at the wiring."
*Scrounge in attic, get attacked by racoons, find nothing.*
( Roommate) "Ok, sucks, sorry about the insulation burns, night! Zzzzzz"
"Your welcome."
*change cloths*
*Unplug, unplug, unplug... ect....*
"Ok, its just like it was. Please, please, please, please..."
*click*
...
*Whirrrrr! Beep!*
"What are you doing Dave?"
"Wooo! It works! Now to try again!"
"What the hell are you doing Dave?"
*click*
"Will I dreammmmm....?* -beep-
{deleted for berevity}
"Right, so anyway those Zulu warriors were tough. Last one did give me the advice to just try one card though before I ran him through. Lets give it a go!"
*click*
-beep-
"IT'S ALIIIIIIIIVVEEEEEEE!"
...
"Open the pod bay doors Hal! Open the
@#%$@#$ pod bay doors!"
"Thppppt!"
"I had twinkies in there..." *sniff*
Posts
#1. take one of them back
#2. take the other back
#3. get 2 8800gt's or gts 512's put them in sli and save a few hundred dollars
#4. your motherboard should have come with the sli bridge.
#5. does that old mobo even support quad sli? why isn't your mobo bios already up to date? do you know what you're doing at all or just have a lot of money and not a lot of sense?
#6. seriously, quad sli is straight up stoopid
didn't Quad SLI with the 7900GX2 offer literally no performance increase in all but a handful of specially-coded games?
9800 GX2s
Jesus fuck how much money do you have fuck.
#7. Spend that money you saved on some smarts.
Way to go, you spend $1200 on a 30% performance increase!
Cause it'd be funny if you spent $1200 and skimped on the power supply.
I was actually thinking this even before I read the post.
clearly it doesn't even work, after all
All the reviews I've seen have had it work on a 790i Ultra SLI motherboard, but those boards haven't been out for a week yet.
I strongly reccomend that you return your cards, and get two 8800GTX cards. Still expensive, but fabbed in G80 and known to work with your system. And given that you're using an A8N-SLI (and your utterly useless description of events and lack of SLI bridge), I'm going out on a limb to say you haven't upgraded your previous parts (Processor/Memory/Power Supply) so lets start there. Hell, what kind of cards were you using before? Do you even have a power supply with a PCI Rail, let alone two of them?! Do me/us a favor and less flavor stories, and more facts.
To those who gave helpful advice, thank you and here is an update.
I cracked the bios and checked the SLI configurations which where not correct. This got the computer to start. Right now its rejecting the drivers. This is possibly due to the SLI lack of drivers, which I was trying to compensate for by not having them run SLI. But it's still freaking out so I'll pull a card and go back. Halflife was sweet on one card. The reason to get TWO is multimonitor setups. I could go for a splitter, which would cost 4/6ths of an entire card, so I decided to go ahead and just get another card.
Yes. The power supply is adequate. Yes it would be funny if it wasn't. It takes up 2/3rds of an ENTIRE circuit for the house. It better be.
caffron said: "and cat pee is not a laughing matter"
(and shit, if it was just for multi-monitor and you're already made of money, get a nVidia QuadroMVS 440 or ATi FireMV 2400; those cards can drive four monitors from a single card).
Furthermore, I don't care how much you've planned or spent, you're already gimped: on nForce4 boards, you can either run 1 PCI-E channel at 16x... or two at 8X. So if you're going SLI, you're not getting the full potential out of them. Also, I'm not so sure this supports PCI-E 2.x requirements, either... but that pretains to my previous post.
Seriously, do yourself a favor, and either A) return one of the cards because you're never going to unleash them with your current MCP and driver support at this point is spotty at best, or upgrade your MCP and processor. You're still going to run up against a brick wall on performance based on your older parts anyhow, even if you do get it running.
And for the record, I'm tickled as shit that you were able to get on the bleeding edge. I'd be lying if I told you I wasn't jealous, as would most of the people here. But clearly, you're wasting precious money here. And I've made my share of questionable purchases to learn the hard way after-the-fact.
And one last thing: you do realize (as I didn't either, until it was too late) that when SLI is enabled... you can't have multiple displays, right?
For the money dual 9800 GX2s cost, you could hire a hooker to learn source code and write you a graphics engine. :P