Games 'crashing' with SLI

[alextwst]

Hey guys,

I just built my new gaming rig (with some older parts included) and have begun having an issue with it. When I first put the rig together and I would play games (Prototype in particular), after a couple hours of playing, the screen would be basically a few pixel that stretched over the entire screen (in Prototype I could see the red and black changing, meaning it wasn't a freeze and when I got off the menu, the colors changed) I would have to hard kill it with task manager (which I had to pull up 4 or 5 times before it would stop instantly going back to the game).

The more I've been playing, the less time it takes for this to happen (I originally thought it was an overheating issue, but now its doing it within 2 minutes of a fresh start (completely cooled)). I thought that it might be my game, but after this happens, I started up GTA IV and it did the exact same thing right from boot. I made sure that I installed all the newest drivers, disabled the IGP and nothing seemed to work. I disabled SLI and as of yet, it hasn't happened again.

By disabling it, I of course lose performance, but luckily Prototype isn't that graphic-intensive of a game. If you guys know of anything that could be causing it, let me know how to fix it because I'd really like to have my SLI back

For reference:
AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz
MSI nForce 750 G55
4 GB A-DATA DDR3 1600
1 TB Samsung Spinpoint f3
Antec Earthwatts 850
Xclio A380 (2x 10" fans) case
2x EVGA nVidia Geforce 9800 GTX+ SLI
Windows 7 Enterprise x64

 

[jmack5864]

First of all, I don't think the GTA IV performs very well with an SLI setup. Second, have you tried completely removing all nVidia software from your HDD (This includes nTune, etc.). If not, try that and reinstall the newest drivers again.

If that doesn't work, one of your 9800 GTX cards could be failing. Try taking one out and running your games with a single card. Do this for both cards. If one fails, there is your answer.

This is all that I can think of other than possibly flashing your mobo.

Hope it helps.

 

[alextwst]

All I had done (I haven't even connected it to the internet yet) is install the newest drivers for my cards, the problem started happening so I installed nTune yesterday to monitor everything in case it was an overheating issue.

Right now my system is running off of one of the cards (SLI disabled) and it seems to be working. I'll try doing the same with the other card and if the problem persists then I have figured it out. If it doesn't though, it might just be something inherent in SLI with these games? (Prototype and GTA IV) I even tried reinstalling DirectX to see if that was the issue, but no dice.

I'll give the rest of this a try tonight and see if it works, but otherwise I might just resign myself that I either have to limit my gameplay to a certain amount of time and save often (that would SUCK) or I could just use one card...limiting my game choice...lets just hope one of these works...

Thanks for your help though and hopefully I can get this solved soon

 

[Mousemonkey]

Uninstall nTune and use Rivatuner instead, I would always get a BSOD at some point on every machine that nTune has been tried on and that has always been the culprit.

 

[alextwst]

Best answer selected by alextwst.