Splitting Sli GPUs up - Main and daughter cards

At some point I will get a new laptop and sell the one in my sig. After doing the math (taking into account the age and condition of the laptop) it may be better to take it apart and sell the components separately to get the most cash back from it.

My question concerns splitting up the Sli GPUs. The way I understand it is there is a main GPU card and a daughter GPU, which have different vBIOs. Is it possible to sell these cards separately, i.e. can the daughter card be used as a main card by someone else? Or would I have to sell them together? Or could I flash the daughter with the main card vBIOs.

I do have the main card vBIOs as an .iso already. This was sent to me by a Sagar support guy ages ago when I had a problem that was thought to be GPU related, which I then used to update the vBIOS of the main card.

Also, is there a way to tell which card is which when I open her up?

Cheers for any help.

 

The denomination is quite confusing: the main card (in the corner of the laptop) is the one called the daughter card (in BIOS) and the secondary card is the one called parent card.
I am not sure if they have different vbios-es like the MXM 2.1 ATI dual setups such as the M17 CF HD3870.
If you are not sure flash them both with the master vbios you have and sell them separately.

 

Yep the card designations seem quite confusing.

When I look at my vBIOS in the Nvidia control panel, it shows that each card has a different version. I didn't check the vBIOS before the Sagar support guy got me to flash the parent card(?) in 2007, but afterwards I noticed they were both different. I did point this out to the support guy, but he said that it was fine.

Do you know if the daughter card would have to be flashed with the parent vBIOS for sure, or can it be used as a sole parent card itself without a flash?

Cheers

 

My understanding is that the "daugther" card is the main card that drives the laptop even without the "parent" card. Could you check in BIOS if the daugther card has the .iso master bios?
I would run GPU-Z and save both cards' vBIOS-es before doing anything.
After that you may try to flash both cards to the Sager's .iso vBios and see if there is any difference; if there are problems you can always revert the vbios with a SLI laptop as long as you have a working card.

 

Thanks for the advice That sounds like a good strategy. I'll have to check the BIOS when I get home.

 

Actually, before doing anything you could try using the laptop with each of the GPUs in single setup. If each of the GPUs alone in a single setup drive the laptop fine then you don't need to do anything.

 

Yeah I was guessing that I would have to do that. Unfortunately the vBIOS version isn't showing up on the BIOS page, so when I decide to sell the cards I'll mess about with them then. Even if I knew which card was which, I would have to test them both singularly before selling them to make sure they could both could work as a master card (with or without the flash). Cheers