Perplexed -- Upgraded to Opteron 180 from 4000+ Help pls.

h2oman

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Jan 8, 2006
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Thanks - Here's the deal. I upgraded to and Opty 180 from a 4000+ everything seemed to go fine. Started up computer hardware recognized new CPU and everyplace showed two cores. Went ahead and installed AMD optimizer and chip bios and the Windows hot fix and REG EDIT. So making sure everything was working well went into Quake 4 to see if I could notice any dual core difference. Game seemed good maybe could see it being a bit smoother. Played no problems. But then going to multi player online I couldn't load the game. Selected sever and then it would start loading and then just hang. Would have to open task manager to quit the application. Sometimes wouldn't quite and screen would flash rapidly. Ok so figured I would go ahead and reinstall windows and give it a go as well as reinstalling quake4. No go same problem only when loading online server games. Tried different drivers seemed to progress further into the load but then just hang. So I decided to disable SLI and sure enough that did it. So what is the deal no problem with single core but dual core and SLI no go. Anyone have any suggestions for me...Please... :?:
 

h2oman

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Not sure i follow you here. By setting core affinity... to use 1 core? Quake has been optimized to use 2 cores. It should work with 2. Are you saying test with one to see if that works?
 

h2oman

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Yes installed all the latest patches and mods. Again it works without SLI enabled. But I cant help but think it is something with the combination of this cpu and sli. It feels like a driver issue. I guess I'll try some of the later ones too.
 

h2oman

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:D Solved - It was a driver issue. Actually I am using a year old driver from Nvidia 84.21. Just a note to all - these drivers can make good hardware look bad, and we all tend to start our trouble shooting from a Hardware side. Probably because at least we can. But Nvidia is doing a great disservice with horrific driver releases. Their latest Beta release has so many problems I'm currently in disbelief. The control panel is missing half of the options it used to have. No Temp monitoring? Selecting SLI crashes the panel software. The list goes on. And Bandwidth, You are kidding me right, you are a computer company of sorts aren't you? Invest a few dollars in support please. Luckly there are some sites which host these drivers otherwise it would have taken me days to get some of the older drivers from Nvidia's site. I do love their products but they can quickly become useless if the driver support doesn't follow. I know I will be taking a harder look at support channels when purchasing future components.