Ahh, what's going on with my system?!?

[groovyash]

Ok, so I have about a two to three year old system. Still running XP. It's an ibuypower special with an ASUS M2N-ESLI motherboard. I have two Nvidia GeForce8500 512mb video cards set up for a single monitor ouput.

So fast forward to yesterday an I notice all of a sudden my screen very slowly updates when i scroll up or down. I check the device manager and find one of the two cards is can't start all of a sudden. Also I notice the Nvidia control panel is nowhere to be found on my system now and is apparently not launching at startup.

Fair enough I'll try a system restore. No luck

Alright, I'll update the driver, it's an older version...No can do, once I install the newest version of the driver the system won't boot and forces me to go into safe mode until I roll back the driver. What's more is that I noticed while doing this that for some reason the BIOS is very odd, EG most of the ASCI letters are wrong for the words they are supposed to spell just odd like the BIOS is now corrupted somehow.

I've also tried reinstalling the Nvidia control panel which will not load either.

Lastly, the resolution which comes up under my display settings obviously doesn't match the output. Right now it's telling me my display is 640 by 480 with 8bit color but It's pretty obviously 1280 x 768 full color.

I'm at a loss and way over my head... any thoughts?

[GIockGuy24]

Windows Update sometimes offers Nvidia drivers for update. These are often not the correct ones for the video card or updating without a complete and clean uninstall of the old drivers and a restart can cause problems. Do you have or know what version the original video drivers were? A video driver uninstall program is sometimes needed to cleanly uninstall the video drivers. Reboot the computer after that and before installing the video drivers.

[kc8ykd]

well, considering even the bios output to the screen is corrupted, i'd suspect that you've got a problem with one or both of your video cards and not a driver issue since it's not just having problems in windows.

the card that was missing suddenly from windows' system inventory is the one i'd suspect as going/being bad.

i've never dealt with an sli system, but i imagine you can remove one of the cards to see if it fixes the problem. if it doesn't, remove the other card.

also, check that their airflow is good and the fans are working and the cooling fins on the heat sink are free of dust and debris.

if none of that works, it's possible your motherboard is going bad, but i'd check out the video cards first since they're easy to troubleshoot at this point.

[The Habit]

As suggested, pull each video card out, one at a time, and see if the problem follows a particular video card. Do the 8500's use a bridge connector to connect the cards? I have two 6600s in SLI in one of my old machines and the bridge connector went bad after a few years.

[mr.scott]

Sounds like a bad card.
Go out and buy a GT 240 with 1GB GDDR5 ram for less than a $100 aand ditch both of those 8500's.

[groovyash]

Thanks guys, I did indeed have a dead card after doing some switching around. I'll give the GT240 a try, it's on its way now. Probably be overkill as the motherboard is only PCIE 1.1 anyways but we will see.

Thanks Again!

[kc8ykd]

cool


well, cool in the aspect that you got it figured out what the problem is and have a fix on the way.