M9750 SLI - Freaking SLI!

Ok folks hold onto your hats, this is gonna be a good one! For the past couple of days I've been experiencing some really bad video performance to the point where the system seems like it's going to freeze any minute. During my troubleshooting process, I found that the SLI option was not enabled (M9750 w/2x 7950 GTX) so I enabled it. Now I know from past experiences that when you enable it, the screen should go blank for a few secs and then it should return to the Nvidia control panel. This was not the case for me. After hitting enable, the screen went blank, then seemed to refresh (no display), blank, refresh and so on for what it seeemed like years. Finally after about 5mins of this, I hit the powerbutton to shut down the machine. When it came back up - No display!

Figuring it was the display drivers, I booted into safe mode and uninstalled the drivers. After uninstalling I used Driver Sweeper to get rid of any lingering video drivers and CCleaner to clean up the reg's. Once that was done I reinstalled the video drivers (just as an FYI, I've been using the drivers suggested by AW_Warner on the AW forums for my laptop - 179.13). After reinstalling the drivers and making a restore point, I tried to enable SLI. Sure enough same results as mentioned above.

Totally getting frustrated, I opened the back of the laptop and reset the SLI cable that goes from both boards (BTW I checked to see if the video cards where set into their slots and they where) rinse and repeated the steps above with the same results - no SLI!

So I ask you techies out there if you've ran into this problem before and if so, how did you resolve it? I'd hate to think that after 2+yrs that the laptop is at the end of it's life cycle. We've had such good times together that I'd hate to take it in the woods and blow a hole in it. Thanks and sorry for the long post...

 

Although I'm not an expert, it sounds to me like you might have a dying/defective slave card.

I hope for your sake you still have a warranty or you're most likely screwed.

 

@ Evil - At the time of sale, I only had enough left over for a 1yr warrenty ... But if I'm not mistaken, I can run this guy on 1 video card? If not its off to see if I can buy a couple of 3870's (which seems impossible to find)

 

You could try removing the slave card, yes. See if it works. If not then something's either wrong with your mobo itself or the master card. Pray to God that it isn't the mobo otherwise you're stuffed. (Might also be a faulty SLi cable possibly)

 

Yeah I planed on doing that this weekend when I have more time..