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SLI No longer works.

SLI No longer works.

Postby Wakeboy1337 » Thu Oct 21, 2010 11:36 pm

I have a Dell XPS m1730 laptop and it has dual 8700m GT's with SLI. That's a total of 512megs of ram for the video cards. I just did a ram and hard drive upgrade, installed seven 64 bit and all of my drivers and I notice that windows only sees one video card and only 256 megs of ram for that card. I look through all of the nvidia menus to look for the "enable sli" button but it wasnt there. So I rebooted and went into the bios and I noticed that it only saw 256 megs of ram and only 1 card as well. There is no option to turn on the second card. It's like my laptop only has one video card now. Could one of them have failed? Wouldn't the whole thing fail at once? That's what I would have expected.

Anyone run into this issue before?
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Re: SLI No longer works.

Postby Grav!ty » Fri Oct 22, 2010 3:25 am

I think check the physical settings of the two cards. Is the SLI bridge in place across the top of the cards? Maybe it was dislodged during the RAM upgrade.

Also, did you upgrade with identical RAM and does the increase in RAM show in your BIOS?

Is there a BIOS setting to set the shared video RAM or a setting called "video RAM aperture size" or something along those lines?
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Re: SLI No longer works.

Postby Wakeboy1337 » Fri Oct 22, 2010 3:04 pm

There is no SLI bride like a desktop has. The two cards are on one board. The upgraded ram does show in the bios and I even went back to the old ram to see if the ram was somehow an issue. There is no shared video ram setting since this laptop has it's own dedicated video cards and even on battery it will not use the cpu as a rendering device, it will clock down the cards instead.
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Re: SLI No longer works.

Postby Grav!ty » Fri Oct 22, 2010 3:10 pm

It's probably a good idea to talk to Dell about this. If you fitted the new RAM yourself you may have voided your warranty if it was still valid.
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Re: SLI No longer works.

Postby Wakeboy1337 » Fri Oct 22, 2010 4:09 pm

The warrenty was already up on it.
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Re: SLI No longer works.

Postby Grav!ty » Fri Oct 22, 2010 4:35 pm

Sorry wakeboy, but I don't think anyone here is going to be able to help you with this problem. You seem to have covered all possible trouble shooting options. Your best bet is probably to go to someone who specializes in laptops and particularly Dell systems.
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