The Angry Bunny Posted September 8, 2012 Share Posted September 8, 2012 I am at my wits end with this problem. Hopefully someone here will be able to help Before I go any further, here are my system specs: i5 2500k stock Asus p8p67 Pro 16 Gig G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3 1600 MSI GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II/OC Golden Edition (Link Here) MSI GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr III HAWK (Link Here) Corsair TX750W Power supply Windows 7 Professional So I originally bought the Golden Edition card, and have ran it with no problems for close to a year now. My friend bought the HAWK around the same time and ran it no problems as well. He recently upgraded to a GTX 670 and sold me his old card for $50. I immediately pop it in, use the SLI bridge that came with my motherboard, and load up Team Fortress 2 to try it out. The game loads up fine, but when it gets to the main screen the screen starts flickering really badly. I figure the bridge is loose or something, so I turned off the computer, removed the bridge completely, flip it around, and reinstall. Boot up and it does it again. I figure it may be driver related, so I use a drive sweeper to clean off all existing drivers from my pc, reboot, and install the latest Beta drivers. Issue still persists. Wanting to test each card individually, I pop out the HAWK, leaving the golden edition solo in the top slot, and load up TF2. No screen flicker. I then take the golden edition out of the top slot and put it in the second slot, load up TF2 and no flicker. I then proceed to do this with the HAWK card (Top and Bottom slot) and it runs no problem. At this point I figure it's the SLI bridge itself, so I hop on amazon and order a second bridge. It comes in a few days later, and when I pop it on the screen still flickers. I decide to reformat my system and see if that fixes it (it's been around a year and a half since a format anyway). Get everything installed and fire up TF2 and the screen STILL flickers. Wondering if it's driver related, I proceed to test it with every single nVidia driver that supports the GTX 560 Ti, and the issue persists with each one. Now I'm debating on just RMA'ing each card to see if that fixes things. I'm hoping, however, that someone here will be able to help me. All the searches I've done so far haven't been helpful, and I'm at my wits end with the whole ordeal... I really want this SLI to work. Any suggestions? TL:DR - Got a 2nd 560 Ti and tried to SLI, but the screen flickers really badly when in fullscreen. Windowed mode doesn't flicker, but don't want to play windowed mode. Tried 3 different SLI bridges, reversing cards, rolling back drivers, and nothing has worked. Also tried each card individually in each slot and worked fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+PeterUK MVC Posted September 8, 2012 MVC Share Posted September 8, 2012 Could be a game SLi issue try FurMark as a test in full screen as it supports and tests SLi. http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/fur You can also try changing in the BIOS "PCI Express X16_3 slot (black) bandwidth" to "X1 mode". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Angry Bunny Posted September 9, 2012 Author Share Posted September 9, 2012 Just changed the 3rd PCI-E slot to "X1" mode, and downloaded Furmark and ran fullscreen no problem. Loaded up TF2 again as a test, and while it has gotten better, the issue is still there. Now when everything is still on main screen it doesn't flicker, but starts to when I move the mouse around, but only near the cursor. In the actual game it runs fine though. I'm still at a loss as to what's going on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vice Posted September 9, 2012 Share Posted September 9, 2012 Does it happen in any other source based games? Looking at your first post you tried everything I would have tried. I too would have suspected the SLI bridge and drivers. I'm currently running two GTX 480's in SLI and TF2 runs perfect so I know at-least that it isn't an NVIDIA SLI profile issue or an incompatibility everything should be working I bring this up only to help you rule that out. Have you tried removing the SLI bridge entirely and activating SLI? It should still turn on without the bridge but with reduced performance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Angry Bunny Posted September 9, 2012 Author Share Posted September 9, 2012 Does it happen in any other source based games? Looking at your first post you tried everything I would have tried. I too would have suspected the SLI bridge and drivers. I'm currently running two GTX 480's in SLI and TF2 runs perfect so I know at-least that it isn't an NVIDIA SLI profile issue or an incompatibility everything should be working I bring this up only to help you rule that out. Have you tried removing the SLI bridge entirely and activating SLI? It should still turn on without the bridge but with reduced performance. It happens in every game I run, with the exception of WoW. I have not tried activating without the SLI bridge, I was not aware that you could... I always thought the bridge was required. I'll give that a try. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vice Posted September 9, 2012 Share Posted September 9, 2012 Actually I just looked it up and it would appear that since around January 2011 the SLI bridge has been required on all high end cards from around the GTX 260 and above. In the past you could activate SLI without a bridge but with greatly diminished performance, it appears the option is now gone from the control panel if a bridge isn't present at boot up. It is very peculiar that you have this issue in all your games. Which drivers are you using? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Angry Bunny Posted September 9, 2012 Author Share Posted September 9, 2012 Right now I'm on the 306.02 Beta, but I've tried with every driver below it that supports the 560 Ti, beta and WHQL, and got the same results. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vice Posted September 9, 2012 Share Posted September 9, 2012 I was just thinking I had an issue a while ago where when I activated NVIDIA Surround (which by itself requires SLI on my series of card, thus SLI was activated too) I would get a crash as soon as I opened a game. If I deactivated NVIDIA Surround no crash. It turned out that although the display drivers were being upgraded when I installed newer drivers, there were NVIDIA system files left behind (in the same folder as the NVIDIA Control Panel) that weren't being updated but were being used when games launched. The age of these files made them incompatible with the newer display drivers causing a conflict. I didn't know this at the time, I reinstalled the entire driver package several times, I did a "clean install" of the drivers by ticking NVIDIA's little check box and that didn't work either. I also tried a driver sweeping program but that too failed to pick up the issue. In the end the way I solved it was just by first uninstalling the NVIDIA drivers using the official NVIDIA uninstaller and then going to the control panel folder manually and erasing all the NVIDIA files that were there (and there was quite a lot!). After I did that I reinstalled with the latest drivers and the problem was completely gone. This could be a similar issue to what you're having. I believe at the time I upgraded from a 295.xx driver to a 301.xx driver and it was during that transition that this problem occurred for me. It's a long shot but worth investigating! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Angry Bunny Posted September 9, 2012 Author Share Posted September 9, 2012 I just reformatted, so I don't think thats it. Good thought though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Angry Bunny Posted September 9, 2012 Author Share Posted September 9, 2012 So this is interesting. Earlier when I first downloaded and ran FurMark it ran fine with no glitching, and I was able to start TF2 with no glitches either. I went away from the computer for a bit, and came back and TF2 glitched again upon starting it up. I ran FurMark again and it started glitching at first, but about midway through cleaned up and works fine. Now I can open TF2 not problems again. What is going on? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vice Posted September 9, 2012 Share Posted September 9, 2012 Very strange. I'd like to say this is a hardware fault with the cards but I can't say which one or what specifically is the failing part, it could just be a damaged SLI finger or a severed connection on the board or anything really, it could even be the motherboard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+PeterUK MVC Posted September 9, 2012 MVC Share Posted September 9, 2012 In the games settings do you have Vsync on? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Angry Bunny Posted September 9, 2012 Author Share Posted September 9, 2012 Very strange. I'd like to say this is a hardware fault with the cards but I can't say which one or what specifically is the failing part, it could just be a damaged SLI finger or a severed connection on the board or anything really, it could even be the motherboard. At this point that's what I'm thinking. I'm gonna RMA the cards one at a time (so I still have something to use) and see if that fixes it. In the games settings do you have Vsync on? I have tried with Vsync toggled both ways in both the games themselves and the nVidia control panel. Issue still persists. EDIT: Forgot to add that I downclocked both cards to reference 560 TI clocks to see if the factory overclocks were unstable, and the issue is still there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Angry Bunny Posted September 11, 2012 Author Share Posted September 11, 2012 Just thought I'd update. I ended up RMA'ing both cards yesterday. Will hopefully only take around 2 weeks, but I'm expecting around a month from what I've heard about MSI's support. I'm now using a pair of 8600 GT's in SLI. It sucks pretty bad, but at least with this config working I know it was the cards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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