Putting together my Asus SLI tonight

[nitro28]

I am putting together my A8N-SLI tonight with the following hardware:

3200+ Winchester
Kingston Hyper X 512x2
Zalman 7000
Seagate 120 SATA
2 BFG 6600GT OC (got tired of waiting for 6800GT's)
Fortron Blue 500Watt PSU ATX 2.0

I was hoping one of you that built this already could just give me a short list of which bios to use and any drivers that work better than others.

Also if there is anything I should look out for when initially setting this up that would be great to. THanks for all your help.

 

[nitro28]

Guitar Daddy? I know after reading your posts on this board you seem to know all of the in's and outs.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

I'm using the 1003.05 beta bios. It seems to be better than previous ones for overclocking. I haven't tried the 1003.06 or 1003.08 which was posted on the boards tonight.

To get SLI to work. I updated the the nVidia drivers to the latest release from nVidia website.
Their is one tricky setting you need to set for SLI to work correctly. On the same screen where you enable "Multi GPU", click on "Performance and Quality Settings", click the advanced tab, scroll all the way to the bottom, and there is a setting for "SLI rendering mode", click on that and change from single to dual.

The DDR settings are badly mislabeled they "DO NOT" limit your ram to the speed listed.
Avoid the DDR settings over DDR400, they are useless

DDR400 = ram 1:1
DDR333 = ram 5:6 ie.. 166 on older mobos
DDR266 = ram 2:3 ie.. 133

The board seems to limit ram speed to 240mhz with 1T, over 240mhz you must use 2T
Hopefully this will be fixed with a future bios.

 

[nitro28]

Thanks guitar daddy, that is just the kind of stuff I was looking for. Glad you are on this forum.

 

[mrscintilla]

Hmm.. what about CPU voltage. Mine is auto set at 1.4v for 3000+. Is that low?

 

[BigGreenMat]

One thing. Don't install the nVidia IDE driver or any of the other driver other than the ethernet. IDE driver causes problems.

 

[CraigRT]

That's an awesome system, I'd choose almost exact same components for a good "budget" SLI system.
and I do agree with BigGreetMat, don't install the NV IDE drivers.

 

[Cardioversion]

ya i did that and that hosed my system !!! had to reformt and reinstall...

 

[dworley]

I saw the option for SLI Rendering mode under the advanced tab, but did not change it - since I was not having any issues.

What does this setting do - excatly? Did you notice anything different after changing it?

 

[Trente]

Originally posted by: BigGreenMat
One thing. Don't install the nVidia IDE driver or any of the other driver other than the ethernet. IDE driver causes problems.

Does this apply to any NF4 board out there?

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Originally posted by: dworley
I saw the option for SLI Rendering mode under the advanced tab, but did not change it - since I was not having any issues.

What does this setting do - excatly? Did you notice anything different after changing it?

Better performance, more FPS, higher 3dmark score

 

[bap4201]

Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy

Originally posted by: dworley
I saw the option for SLI Rendering mode under the advanced tab, but did not change it - since I was not having any issues.

What does this setting do - excatly? Did you notice anything different after changing it?

Better performance, more FPS, higher 3dmark score

I believe that if you are use 2 sli cards, you should set this to "multi gpu rendering" . that's what I've always done and have had no probs and excellent performance.

This fixed a guys prob over at abxzone who was getting only 3000 3dmarks in 05. I told him to change it to the above setting and he was a happy camper!

 

[nitro28]

Got everything together easily except for my ethernet, but I finally got that resolved. Runs very fast. Now to install HL2 and Far Cry.