When SLI is enabled, games freeze

Hi,
I was wondering if anyone could provide insight into the issue I'm having. I can play games fine with SLI disabled, and they don't crash or have issues. When I enable SLI the newer games freeze withing seconds of loading. In the Empire: Total War demo, for example, when I load the battle, it will show 5 - 10 seconds of graphics, and the freeze, but the sound continues, and I have to do a hard reset. I've searched on google for the same problem but everytime I see it asked, no-one knows the answer (It could be I'm not good at searching though). I'm wondering if it's caused by two slightly different cards, but its the same basic model, just different clock speeds.

My system specs:
EVGA 780i FTW Motherboard
E8500
BFG 8800 GTX OC2 Core 626
BFG 8800 GTX OC1 Core 600
Creative X-fi Soundcard
4 GB Ram
Coolit Systems Quad drive bay liquid cooling
Thermaltake toughpower 1200w power supply
Vista 64 Bit

I don't think it's being caused by overheating since my video cards get as low as 26c Idle, and I have a large enough power supply, so it's probably not caused by a power issue.

Any help would be much appreciated

 

try to reinstall the driver

 

I have, done driver cleaner, reinstalled vista, multiple driver versions, nothing seems to work

 

Check if the sli bridge it's connected right, some edges must look down, i had it once this problem and was because of that

 

And see if the problem persists with just one card.

 

Well I believe I said that in my original post, It's only when sli is enabled, so being disabled would mean there was only one card running, and with one card it's fine.

Should I also try a different bridge? I could put the tri-sli bridge on to try, its double wide so I wonder if that would make any difference

 

they both OC different, could that be the problem?

 

It seems to happen even at the same clock speed, in addition to using the control panel, I've tried flashing the bios of the cards to default clock, tried using the same bios, and nothing seems to work.

 

I get hard lockups with a lot of the 18x.xx drivers when SLI is enabled and so does a friend who has an XFX 780i and 3 x 8800GTX's.

I have found that only 3 drivers seem to not lockup with SLI enabled, 180.48 WHQL, 180.22 Beta and 182.05 Beta (also on Vista 64-bit)

None of the 17x.xx drivers have this issue.

All I can suggest is to try as many drivers as possible and stick with the best one.

 

I did a temperature monitor with nvidia system monitor and when I'm playing empire: total war with setting maxed with one card the temperature never goes above 42c, so I can assume it would be the same for the other card, and rule out overheating. I tried all 3 of my sli connectors, including my tri sli one, and none of them made a difference. I don't think I've ever been able to use my cards in sli if I'm remembering correctly, so I'm pretty sure it's not a driver issue, since I've tried a whole bunch. Neither of the cards seem defective though, as I started with only the OC1 card, and it worked fine, before making it my secondary card after getting the OC2 a few months later.

 

Odd, for me, its the 181.20 that are safe...mostly (not enough to warrent any major concern, once a week, maybe).

Something is amiss with SLI. Not sure what it is, but its definatly driver related...Try 178.24 for now, as those are mostly safe for use...

 

Damn thats a pain, I flashed the bios's of the cards to the BFG OC2 650 MHz card, and now SLi works in all games, except Empire: Total War, but at least everything else works. I wonder if my cards could go 700 Mhz, but editing the bios to raise the voltage doesnt seem to work.

 

this happen to me with ME2:TW had to reinstall vista and put the latest driver and its working like a charm.

 

I get lock ups in Empire: Total War after a while with sli on too, I think the demo is just buggy or the current drivers don't support it properly.

 

Thats a relief, I hope the full game is fixed at launch

 

I just got the full game and the most recent drivers and it still happens.

 

yep 181.22 sli seems to work but then got glitches. atm trying to see if i cant force sli with nhancer. so far no luck.

 

Whats really wierd is since it wasn't released here until the 4th, I got a shady copy of the game to hold me over until this morning. The "shady" copy worked fine, but when i installed my offical steam copy today, it crashed. I'm wondering if it has somthing to do with the steam protection, since it was disabled in the other version.

 

the 182.06s made this hapen to me but the 182.08's are great still get a fuzzy top half of my screen when sli is enabled at bood then have to enable a disable to get rid of it :/

any one got any ideya's y my screen goes a bit fuzzy on the top half ?

 

Huh, i have 182.08 installed, that's so weird that the official copy of the game wont work, but the "shady" copy will.