9800 GTX not showing up

[nashntth]

Hi. I have a SLI gaming/media rig with 2 PNY nVidia 9800GTX+'s on Vista 64. I just updated my drivers for the cards at SLIzone. When I went into device manager to ensure that both cards were updated properly, only one card is showing up. The other one is not listed as "recognized but there's a problem", my system is not seeing it.

I pulled the card, rebooted, checked for hardware changes, reinstalled the card, rebooted, checked for hardware changes, uninstalled all graphics drivers and booted into safe mode, installed the old drivers, and tried system restore. None of this has brought the card into view.

I just rebuilt my system 2 months ago with a seperate OS hard disk, and both cards were working then. The light is on inside the card and the fan spins. Any ideas?

specs:
vista 64
evga 750i sli
(2) 9800 gtx+
intel 3.0 wolfdale
ultra x3 1000 watt
creative x-fi extreme gamer
(1) 160g seagate for the OS
(3) 500g seagate for programs, backups, and acronis
8 gbs ocz 800 mhz ram
lg dvd

Thanks,
nashntth

 

[MDA400]

Did you try to see if you could at least enable SLI in the Nvidia Control Panel before you checked the device manager?

The reason why it may say "device cannot start. please reinstall hardware" is because its not even being used by the system or not even plugged in to a monitor.

until you enable SLI which TRANSFERS the driver from the 1st and primary gpu, to the secondary gpu and clones both (kind of like Nvidia's network teaming) to show up as one logical gpu (but with 2x the processing power).

Or plug a secondary monitor into the secondary gpu (only with SLI disabled) is how you will see both work independantly AND MAKE SURE YOU USE THE LATEST AND CERTIFIED DRIVERS.