6800GT SLI on 182.08 XP 32 bit: Multimonitor question!

Hello all!

I've been working on a secondary rig for my mom to play some games and watch some videos on. It consists of the following parts:

Mobo: Asus A8N-SLI
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice core
RAM: 1 GB DDR-400 (2x 512)
Video: 2x 6800GT 256 MB
450W OCZ PSU
2 HDD drives

I was wondering if the multimonitor support on the newer 182.08 drivers should work for this system. I want to connect the PC to a standard 17" LCD screen and a TV as a secondary screen. I know this was not possible with the older drivers (had the PC turned off for over 5 months so the drivers are from the pre-180 releases) but it should be possible now, right?

 

When you want SLI and two displays, you need Vista. XP doesn't support it. Sorry. :frown:

 

Okay, well, that's all I needed to know really. I'll just use it on the TV then, don't have the money to buy Vista right now Thanks for the trouble Cybermancer

 

I've been thinking about this some more... Will Fedora or Windows 7 change anything about this? Because I have Fedora Core 10 running on the machine and I do have a beta key for Windows 7...

 

Vista and 7 both support this feature. Fedora I don't know. :frown:

 

Windows7 supports it until you play a game then the 2nd monitor loses it's signal.. at least that's what kept happening to me..

 

Hmm, well, that's not really a big problem because I don't really play any games on that rig anymore. Just wanted to use it to watch some movies on my TV and try out the new Windows 7 beta. Don't want to lose the XP partition though, made a thread in the Operating Systems part of the forums.... If anyone has any tips on that, just post in that section http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?p=3080332#post3080332

 

Well, here's a bump up from the past... Go the rig running under Windows 7 64-bit with the newest Nvidia drivers, but I can't find any SLI options in there... 6800GT's too old to work? :S

 

You need to enable it via the nVidia control panel.. so that means installing the drivers from nVidia and not the WDDM drivers from Microsoft..

 

Ehm, that's what I said, I installed the latest Nvidia drivers but the option is not available in Windows 7. SLI worked fine in Windows Xp though, what's that?

 

Bump!

 

Your cards are on the supported list so that shouldn't be an issue.. the cards are seated properly..?

 

Yep, they worked fine in XP, but in 7 there's just no option listed... It's weird, maybe I should try taking them out again?

Edit: Well, I'm stupid I guess... I didn't think of installing any Nforce chipset drivers on the rig, because everything seemed to work right out of the box in Windows 7. I can't find any Nforce drivers for the Nforce 4 chipset (A8N-SLI motherboard), they don't seem to make them anymore. Guess I'll have to say goodbye to SLI?

 

Windows 7 usually installs all the drivers for you already, so that shouldn't be a problem.

In case you want to try it out though, you can just use the latest ones for Vista. 64-Bit, I guess?

32-Bit:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_nf4a_winVista_15.01.html

64-Bit:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_nf4a_winVista64_15.01.html

nForce4 driver archive:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_nf4_archive.html

 

My previous mobo was a DFI SLi-DR.. it installed the drivers just fine..
I'm not sure anymore if they installed straight from the setup or after a Windows update though..

 

I will try that then. It's the only thing I can think of, the Nvidia display drivers are installed properly but I can't get SLI to work. Thanks, will let you guys know how it worked out

 

Well, it didn't work at all... Not sure what I should do now, it should be supported :S

 

It's quite possible that NVIDIA did not add multi-display support for NV40 SLI. "Legacy product"

I think I remember seeing somewhere that NVIDIA mentioned in the driver release notes that only GeForce 8, 9, GTX 200 cards support Dual-monitor SLI.

#EDIT:
Yep, I was right, Look:

Source: NVIDIA SLI ZONE

 

Good catch, king-dubs!

 

Thanks for that info king-dubs Can't get SLI to work on that rig though... I thought it would work on Windows 7, but it won't...