Corrupt Driver or bad 2nd video card

[Xenon808]

Currently I have a 2.6 quad with 4G RAM and 2 Nvidia 8800GTX in SLI running Windows 7 64bit. I started a game up yesterday and the game locked up. I had to turn the computer off and back on. I got a blue screen and even though it disappeared quickly and I didn't understand all of it, from what I saw it looked like the video driver had failed and could not be recovered. It did this a couple more times.

I was able to boot into safe mode, download the latest Nvidia driver and install. Before I did this, I uninstalled "Nvidia driver" showing up in control panel. When I tried to install the new driver, it said that there was something that needed to reboot to finish installing and to try the install upon reboot.

Long story short, I was only able to boot into safe mode, installed the driver and was finally able to boot into Windows normally, although the first time it took about 5-7 minutes. Now when I go into the Nvidia control panel, the option to enable/disable SLI is gone.

My games seem to run ok. I tried reinstalling the driver thinking it didn't get everything installed from safe mode. About 1/2 way through, the monitor went into power save and I could get nothing to work except turning it off and back on. Does anyone have a suggestion on what to do to try and get SLI re-enabled or tell if my card is going bad? I really have a lot of stuff on here and don't want to do a fresh install of Windows unless everything stops working. Should I get a new video card that is non-SLI and if so, what model. I prefer Nvidia but am open to ATI?

 

[jryan388]

Did this just start happening after it had been working fine? Or is the card new?

 

[Xenon808]

Just started happening. Before that, I've had a stable system since Windows 7 came out. After each new driver update, I've always had to go in and re-enable SLI, but that was on XP, Vista, and 7. There don't appear to be any temperature problems either.

 

[Xenon808]

Another note. I just tried to reinstall newly downloaded drivers. Monitor went into power save...no HD activity. Tried to roll back to previous drivers. Monitor went dark. HDD kept running intermittently, but for too long. Did a system restore and back to square 1. Everything comes up, but no SLI and no 2nd video card recognized. Any idea what causes the install to hang. I know I will take abuse, but for 3 years, I've never uninstalled any old drivers, just installed new ones. Since current machine has a new install since 7 came out this only applies since then, but never any problems before now with SLI.