Second SLi card not displaying

[hipocritus]

I recently purchased a M9700 Alienware laptop. It has two 512mb Nvidia 7900 GS vid cards. I was tired of not having SLi support for it, so I installed the most recent drivers from LaptopVideo2Go, which are the 163.44 ones. The install went through without a hitch, but the problem is that when I finish enabling SLi multi gpu support and run a game, the screen flickers. When I force in Nvidia control panel to use the Split Frame rendering, the entire bottom half of the screen is missing. I would imagine for some reason the damned thing isn't using the second card, and I have no idea why. Can anyone please help?

Basic info so far:

Both cards have the same driver info, so they both were installed fine

Nvidia control panel's System Information is showing both cards in the Components section

Physically checked and ensured the SLi bridge is installed and the SLi cable between the cards is plugged in

I have checked to see that both card are actually functioning

Installed and tested several other versions of SLi capable driver sets, none cure the problem

Edited September 3, 2007 by hipocritus

[hipocritus]

A brief update. I was curious to see if the second video card was just broken, so I popped open the laptop and swapped one for the other and it is still doing the same thing. This tells me that both cards are working fine, so some other issue is happening.

On a side note, when I first put the laptop back together, I neglected to reattach the SLi cable between both cards. The SLi bridge remained intact, but the cable was left out. When I booted up my machine and began testing again, it seemed as though everything was working perfectly. When I played a game, both top and bottom of the images were being rendered. However, after I noticed my mistake, I thought that perhaps only one card was working at the time. What exactly does the SLi cable do if the SLi bridge is the core component for both cards to work together? In any case, I reattached the cable and its doing the same old thing.

Besides that, I'm back to square one. Does anyone know if there is any additional configuration that goes into enabling SLi? I installed the drivers, everything went great, I enabled SLi mode in the NVidia control panel, everything went great, and then I started a game and only one card seems to be actually doing its job. Please help me.

Edited September 3, 2007 by hipocritus