[Grey728]

http://forum.noteboo...ad.php?t=185060

I thought I'd post in here as well since the instructions are buried in a thread. This might help more people. I've used this workaround and it's worked fo

r all the latest drivers released from Laptopvideo2go so far. This might work for other configurations as well as the premise should be the same. Good luck!



Hey guys, I don't know if this is posted anywhere else, but after struggling through installing new drivers onto my SLI laptop, I did it!

Here are some quick steps (Though Chaz has a good instructions already):

1. Download desired driver from www.laptopvideo2go.com (go into the forums for the absolute latest)
2. Download .inf file that comes with driver.
3. Uninstall your current driver and reboot.
4. Unzip driver into a folder.
5. Move .inf file into driver folder. This WILL overwrite a file. (Good thing)
6. Install by selecting 'Setup'

Next step is important! as this caused me MANY black screens with no output!!
7. Install 1 card only. When the driver asked you to install and you click 'Continue Anyway' Do this only once!
8. Cancel install for second card. This cancels out install process
9. Reboot
10. GO to Devicde Manager, and select 2nd card that didn't install. (Most likely called 3D Hardware and not recognized as a video card, I can't remember exact name)
11. Update driver and select folder you unpacked in step 4.
12. When the driver installs, click "Continue Anyway"
13. Reboot and done!

The second card process was killing me as every time I would try and install it at the same time as the first I'd get a blank display screen. Windows would work properly but I couldn't see anything. I kept having to uninstall the new drivers in safe mode to use my laptop again. I hope this helps anyone who might be runing into the same issue I did.

3dMark Score of 8727 using 169.04 drivers ^^

[Guyver1]

this will need to be verified by other SLI users and across various driver versions.

due to the n100 chip on intel 945/965 based laptop motherboards the actual driver code is different to normal forceware drivers. If this 'hack' can be verified to work everytime across multiple laptops on multiplae driver versions then nVidia's driver team are incredibly sloppy.

If its inconsistent and works occasionally and only for some people, or some driver versions then again nvidia are being sloppy in their coding work

[Grey728]

I really wouldn't call this a hack as it really doesn't require anyone to do anything special. Basically, install one card first, reboot, then install the other.

I had a pair of desktop 7800 GTs that I put in SLi and while I can't find the proof just yet, I had read somewhere either in the motherboard or XFX user manual that it was recommended to install one graphics card at a time to reduce the risk of driver conflicts. I just put that advice into practice when installing the laptop driver.

For those who want to search for the advice I read, I was using an XFX 7800 GT and Asus A8N32-SLI delux board. One or the other talks about installing one card at a time.

Since it wouldn't be practical for laptop users to physically uninstall one Graphics chip from our system, by simply NOT installing the driver for is effectively not installing it and thus reducing the potential conflict. In my case, MANY blank screens of death after the second card installed.

I urge everyone with an SLi laptop to try this out. The worse that can happen is what? Reinstalling your old driver?

Drivers I've tested the install process thus far:

169.04
169.01
163.76
163.71

Out of the 4 tested, 163.71 gave me the lowest 3dmark score of 5600 (expected 8500ish) and I suspect SLi wasn't working right, but 163.76 seems rock solid so far. No crysis or UT3 SLi boosts though.

[Guyver1]

your missing the key issue here.

your A8N32-SLI has a genuine nVidia nForce SLI chipset on the motherboard, this means that any driver would have given you SLI however you installed those drivers. SLI on desktops with an nforce chipset will always work 100% correctly.

laptops dont work like that. I've tried installing drivers by installing each card seperately through Device Manager and only once i ever got SLI enabled, and then the performance was shockingly bad. laptops that use a non nforce chipset require an nvidia n100 chip to enable SLI code and SLI features, they also need unique driver code supplied by nvidia to the laptop vendors via a Driver Development Kit (DDK).

IF this work around can get SLI working on non nforce chipset laptops then its down to sloppy coding, because the n100 chip requires unique unlocked drivers to work properly.

out of about 30 attempts to install drivers in various different manners only once did SLI work, but it didnt work properly and the laptop performance was halved, making me think it didnt work correctly even tho it was shown as being enabled.

[Grey728]

Please, If you own an SLi Laptop with an Intel chip, please list out your specs and let us know if this driver method works or not. There are at least 4 people I know that say this works and the more the merrier. If not it doesn't work for you, please still include your system specs.

[Grey728]

Guyver1, on Nov 9 2007, 03:17 AM, said:

your missing the key issue here.

your A8N32-SLI has a genuine nVidia nForce SLI chipset on the motherboard, this means that any driver would have given you SLI however you installed those drivers. SLI on desktops with an nforce chipset will always work 100% correctly.

laptops dont work like that. I've tried installing drivers by installing each card seperately through Device Manager and only once i ever got SLI enabled, and then the performance was shockingly bad. laptops that use a non nforce chipset require an nvidia n100 chip to enable SLI code and SLI features, they also need unique driver code supplied by nvidia to the laptop vendors via a Driver Development Kit (DDK).

IF this work around can get SLI working on non nforce chipset laptops then its down to sloppy coding, because the n100 chip requires unique unlocked drivers to work properly.

out of about 30 attempts to install drivers in various different manners only once did SLI work, but it didnt work properly and the laptop performance was halved, making me think it didnt work correctly even tho it was shown as being enabled.

Actually, I think you're a little too focused on this nv100 chip as the sole cause of not being able to use SLi. I'm sorry I don't mean to sound like a know it all because you've obviously done a lot to try and solve this problem, but from I can see is that when you use pretty much ANY driver from laptopvideo2go, your screen goes black after the second card install and this is more indicative of a driver conflict than anything else. Now it LOOKS like your computer hanged with a black screen but in reality it did not. What you probably haven't noticed was that actually, the driver did install but was having a monitor output issue. I could shut down the system and hear that windows was functioning properly by pressing the windows key, up arrow, and enter would make the laptop shutdown (try it and see it happen visually). While you couldn't see the laptop shutting down, you would at least hear it happen.

More than anything, I think it was the "Display Monitor" installing between the cards that caused the driver conflict. After the second card installs, the display monitor is again detected but the screen goes black because of this driver conflict. Rebooting in between card driver installations resolves the issue.

This post has been edited by Grey728: 10 November 2007 - 03:01 PM

[Guyver1]

of around 30 differernt attempts, both by standard installation of clicking on the setup.exe and alternative of installing each card seperately through device manager over about 10 different driver versions i've only ever had one instance where SLI was actually enabled throught the control panel. only on the latest 169.xx did i ever get the balck screen and that was only after the second card installed, on reboot the screen was normal and i could use windows just fine but SLI was never an option inthe control panel, it was either not there or i got the message as shown in the image below:



the n100 chip is the crucial element in this whole mess, SLI on anything other than authentic nForce SLI chipsets requires specially coded drivers written by nVidia. buy a SLI desktop motherboard and SLI installs everytime via the normal driver installation process. Buy a laptop with a genuine nforce chipset and SLI install correctly everytime via the normal driver installation process. try installing SLI on a mobile intel chipset and your pretty much screwed except for the odd occasion or workaround (which doesnt work for everyone) and is probably down to sloppy nvidia coding. Yes i have done alot or work on this, but tbh I really sholdnt have had to. After paying £2300 for the 'ultimate' gaming laptop i expect to be able to install normal forceware drivers normally like every other nvidia user and not be force to used hacks/workarounds or wait for some half assed driver support team to update 9 month old drivers via a DDK lisence agreement

[Grey728]

Since we both have the same laptops simliarly configured, I wonder if your system is in some way physically different than mine. I recently purchased mine and recieved it Nov. 2nd. You've had yours for a few months now. Hmm.. out of all the driver installations I've tried, I ran accross this multi-GPU once and that was while trying to install the drivers normally. Afterwhich, I kept getting black screens of death. I will try the normal install method on sub 169 drivers and see if I can replicate your issue.

Also, I think I'll download this NERD thing and compare your system with mine. I'll check back in a few hours and post an update. So far, I have indeed verified that I have SLi enabled on my system and have run benchmarks and have compared sli enabled and disabled.

[Guyver1]

I also used the latest Intel chipset drivers from Intel.com and not the drivers on the supplied Master CD that came with the lappy.

God help us if the intel drivers are also 'special'

[Guyver1]

best way i've found to uninstall drivers without a driver cleaner issimply to boot into safe mode, then unistall the drivers while in safe mode, then reboot and then install your new drivers

[Grey728]

Guyver1,

I'm sorry, I had a very busy weekend and didn't have much time to experiment with other drivers. I started with 163.51 and I was having trouble getting those installed properly without black screens with any method. After a lengthy and buggy installation, I finally did manage to get SLi working but performance was really poor.

I'll keep trying with more drivers and try to find out at what point did Sli start working reasonably well.

[surdanis]

I'm curious about this workaround. I seem to have gotten SLI to work on my M590KE with dual Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX's, but, alas, I'm not so sure. You mentioned that your cards have different bios numbers. When I check out the specs on mine via the Nvidia Control Panel, I do not see that. However, there is an option to enable SLI, and, yes, I've gotten the green bar to appear. However, I wonder if the whole system is working properly.

I am running Vista, and I wonder if your method will not work on Vista. Any thoughts?

Regards,

J

[Grey728]

You can test if SLi is working by running test software with and without it on. CHeck your framerate using a free program called Fraps.

ALso, SLi works best with at least 6 month old software. The new stuff like CoD 4, UT3, Crysis are still too new to show much improvement. Wait for drivers to mature for these newer titles.

[Guyver1]

Grey728, on Jan 1 2008, 10:27 AM, said:

ALso, SLi works best with at least 6 month old software. The new stuff like CoD 4, UT3, Crysis are still too new to show much improvement. Wait for drivers to mature for these newer titles.

not 'technically' true. Sli works best when the development team specifically works and tests with SLI as part of their engine/game design/development and Q&A process. In conjunction with the game engine itself being designed and optimised with multiple GPU's as well as a single GPU, the dev team must also have regular communication with nvidia to ensure nvidia is aware of any issues so they can release fixes via beta releases.

Also most people who buy 2 GFX cards just dont realise HOW Sli works and end up running SLI in 1280x1024 and then dont understand why they arent seeing this awesome performance jump. they also dont understand that their rig will be CPU bottlenecked BEFORE it becomes GPU bottlenecked.

[Grey728]

Guyver1, on Jan 2 2008, 06:22 AM, said:

not 'technically' true. Sli works best when the development team specifically works and tests with SLI as part of their engine/game design/development and Q&A process. In conjunction with the game engine itself being designed and optimized with multiple GPU's as well as a single GPU, the dev team must also have regular communication with nvidia to ensure nvidia is aware of any issues so they can release fixes via beta releases.

False: No developer save maybe Cryotek, wrote any code specific to SLi. All a developer cares about is if their game can run reasonably well on an average spec'd system and throw in extra eye candy for those with higher than average systems and possibly for their game to age well. Games like Doom 3, Unreal 2k4, Half Life 2, Oblivion, Bioshock, UT3, etc are NOT SLi hardcoded and no, it doesn't go into some special QA process nor is there a dedicated team of programmers and engineers slaving away trying to get the most out of SLi or Crossfire for that matter. The SLi and Crossfire performance rests solely in the hands of nVidia and Ati as it's them that stand to gain from it and the performance improvements come from their driver implementation. These game developers aren't in the business of trying to sell extra video cards. They're trying to sell a game and make it enjoyable and accessible to as many people as possible. To think they expect people to use SLi an in turn optimize for it in order to run their game is naive.

Now, if there is ANY development team working on improving Sli performance, it's behind the doors of nVidia who *might* be working with a game developer. In that respect, yes, there is a team of programmers working on performance gains, but those gains are realized only through driver implementation. That takes time and hence ~6 months would be a reasonable time assumption. The whole point and promise of using an SLi rig is that you will get up to twice the performance without thinking about it and YES, you will see performance gains in an SLi rig without installing individual game patches that better utilize the code. Take a look at a few release patches from game developers and tell me if you find any SLi specific optimizations. I'll bet you'll be hard pressed to find any. Then take a look at Nvidia's release notes on WHQL certified drivers. See a difference?

I'm not saying SLi IS twice the performance as real world testing has proven otherwise but there should at least be some performance gains. 60%-75% seems to be the norm.

Guyver1, on Jan 2 2008, 06:22 AM, said:

...they also dont understand that their rig will be CPU bottlenecked BEFORE it becomes GPU bottlenecked.

I don't think you give people enough credit. Hell even in simple terms, it's much cheaper to purchase a higher clocked CPU than it is to get another video card. I would also find it hard to believe that ANYONE would drop such a large amount of coin without first doing some research. Besides, this is more of a desktop issue than a laptop issue and may change when the 8800m GTX come out and people seriously consider SLI. If you're running a 2.0 Ghz dual core machine or more, the bottleneck will still be the GPU even with a single 8800GTX installed. Since you have two ultras, you are now being limited by your CPU hence, a 3gHz machine or Quad-core would be more beneficial. I use your single 8800 Ultra card as an example because a 7950m GTX in SLi does not even meet the performance of a single 8800 Ultra card.

To test for CPU bottleneck, lower all visual quality settings to Low and start with a resolution of 1024x768. Use fraps to check your average frame rate and document each resolution setpoint. Then increase your resolution until you hit your native resolution or you reach an unacceptable framerate. This pushes your cpu while easing the load on your GPU and limiting it primarily to fill rate speeds.

Repeat the test again starting at 1024x768 with maximum eye-candy and record your average FPS with fraps. Compare each set of trend data and compare it's slope. If the slope takes a nose dive at the higher resolutions, it's your GPU. If the slope is essentially the same, then it's your CPU that's bottlenecking your system.

A fine reference for this information would be from www.hardocp.com. Please do a search on it on their website for real world testing, benchmarks, and conclusions.

This post has been edited by Grey728: 03 January 2008 - 12:43 AM

[Grey728]

Actually, upon thinking about your reply some more Guyver, you're right. SLi is best when developers program their games with SLi in mind and build those optimizations into the engine itself. However, while this is true, in the real world this is not the case. Both developers and video card makers adhere to standards like DirectX and OpenGL. Video card makers do their best to optimize their video cards to those standards and game developers use their given platform, be it DirectX or OpenGL to program their games in.