New
#1
P6T Deluxe SLI Win7, won't boot
Hi All,
New to the forums, I have searched around many places, especially within these boards (thanks for all the great posts by the way, tonne of good resources on here) but to no avail! Forgive me if this is in completely the wrong place and I should be posting elsewhere.
Specs:
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium (32bit)
CPU: Intel Core i7 920 'Bloomfield'
Mobo: Asus P6T Deluxe
RAM: Corsair 3GB DDR3 1GB sticks
GPU: 2x Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX+ (1GB) - SLI
HDD: Intel X25-M SSD 80GB SATA-II, WD VeliciRaptor 150GB, 2x WD 250GB
PSU: Antec Truepower Quattro 1000w ATX
Case: Coolermaster HAF 932
Monitor: Samsung SyncMaster T240HD
Problem: Blue screen after freeze at "Starting Windows" (this is very hard to catch as it only occurs at completely random times and is there and gone quite fast), freeze at "Starting Windows", freeze at "Welcome", freeze after getting to the desktop. ONLY when nVidia Control Panel has "Enable SLI" set (all nvidia drivers WHQL and Beta), IF I shut down the system with sli disabled, it will start up without any worries and does appear to run both cards in SLI perfectly while in operation.
After changing settings the system may boot up normally once but after left for a while will go back to doing these AGAIN...
I think this is related to the drivers, but I am not entirely sure and at a complete loss as what else to try, all hardware/software/drivers has worked perfectly in XP, and runs perfectly on the old stock Gigabyte drivers (back from early 2009). Using these is what I have done for the past few months, and is definitely not ideal. Running relatively new games such as Borderlands, Battlefield Bad Company 2, etc has extremely terrible particle issues and blows coloured polygons all over the screen, and extreme lag, so much so as to make these games extremely unplayable 90% of the time.
I've seen a few posts of people with similar problems, here is what I have tried (and for me what is not a fix). Uninstalling video card drivers (driver sweeper to remove left overs); Removing both cards physically and installing one followed by the other; letting windows install their drivers for the cards, and adversely using the nvidia drivers; changing bios settings to overlock (system is not overclocked normally, and set it back again); forcing PCI-E selector in BIOS into 16x1 mode; rolling back network drivers (Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet Driver v11.10.5.3), I see some people have reported Realtek driver issues associated with this problem, I have also uninstalled the drivers to see if that caused the problem.
So basically the Gigabyte drivers (GV-N98XPZL-1GH - GIGABYTE - Support&Download - Graphics Accelerator - Driver) work with 'enable SLI' perfectly, whereas the nvidia drivers do not... Any ideas?
Cheers guys.
ps: BIOS update for Mobo is another option... but if I don't have to I'd really prefer not to...