I cannot disable SLI! Help!!

In late February I upgraded my video driver from 179.85 to 186.64. Everything seemed to go smoothily until I noticed that while playing WoW the frame rates had dropped significantly from 60 to 19, consistently in all realms! When I realized that SLI was enabled when I upgraded the driver I decided to disable it as that may be the problem. So I went into Nvidia control panel but the disable SLI is greyed out! I cannot disable it. I can disable PhysX, but not SLI.

Oh I also cannot roll back my driver as that is greyed out as well

So what should I do? Should I disable one of my video cards from device manager? Should I manually reinstall the 179.85 drivers, if I can locate them? Should I upgrade to the newer 19X.XX drivers?

Please help as I play WoW allot and in raids and WG I almost have lag and this computer has never had that problem since I owned it. Heat is not an issue. The only reason that I upgraded this video driver was because Star Trek Online wouldn't work with the old one.

Thanks

 

You can't disable SLI completely when you have Hybrid Graphics/Hybrid SLI enabled, as SLI is used to have your integrated and dedicated video cards available at the same time to switch from one to the other on the fly.

You are likely running on your integrated card. Try pressing FN+F7 to switch to the dedicated video cards.
You may also be in Stealth Mode, which is a power saving mode that also disables the dedicated video cards and switches to the integrated video card to save power. You should be able to check your stealth mode status with the Stealth Indicator Utility.
Hit the stealth mode button on your touch strip and make sure that stealth mode is disabled.
The M17x-R1 also has the annoying feature that it will automatically switch of Hybrid Graphics and enable only the integrated video card when you boot from the battery. It could very well be that it disabled your dedicated video cards on bootup when you forgot to have your power supply plugged in.

You could also try to disable integrated graphics altogether if you don't need the 9400M at all. To do this, reboot your M17x and press F2 to enter the BIOS. Go to Advanced -> Graphics Setting and set both Hybrid Graphics and Integrated Graphics to Disabled (setting Hybrid Graphics to Enabled will enable both the integrated and the dedicated video cards, setting Hybrid Graphics to Disabled and Integrated Graphics to Enabled will disable the dedicated video cards and enable the integrated video card only, by the way).
This will disable Hybrid SLI and your integrated video card (9400M) and only keep your dedicated video cards (in your case, the two GeForce GTX 260M cards) active. You'll also be able to disable SLI from the drivers if you abolutely must do so for your dedicated video cards. Be aware, however, that you'll have to re-enable it before you turn Hybrid Graphics back on in the BIOS as you might have issues otherwise.
Also note that you won't be able to switch to your integrated 9400M on the fly to save power while Hybrid Graphics is disabled in the BIOS.

For more about SLI, you might also want to read the SLI Guide.

 

Thanks for the response, Gizmo. However I have done as you directed before, as I had problems with the integrated graphics taking over when I was unplugged and getting back to the discrete graphics. It worked then (disabling in bios), but this time it is of no help.

I will tweak WoW ot see if it is an issue with WoW (addons and such). I may even disable one of the GTX260M's and see if that helps. If this doesn't work I will either upgrade to a newer driver or try and find the old one...

Do you know if I can still use the respawn file now that I have upgraded to Windows7? I was thinking of doing that if all else fails.

 

Even if you disabled the integrated in BIOS before, any time you boot on battery would auto-enable it again, so check it again. Plus, if you updated your BIOS since then it would probably be enabled as well.
Gizmo is right, it should be either the stealth mode or hybrid ON.
If not - re-install the video driver.


>>>Using the respawn now will install Vista.

 

I downloaded a SLI profile that somehow enabled me to disable SLI in the Nvidia control panel.

Still the same frame rate in WoW. Even when I change WoW to the ultimate graphics still no change.

Just gonna keep working at it. How does Nhancer work?

 

What's your CPU clock? It might be worthy of OC'ing the CPU for WOW.

 

Oh yes and the other question I had about upgrading my bios driver, it says urgent on Dell's driver website, for my computer, so should I do it?

 

Yes, I'd do the BIOS update. Just make sure it's the correct one for your machine.