Quake3World

This is a copy of the post I made at the ASUS forums. Since noone has responded, I thought I'd try to increase the odds and post it here too.

Specs...
A8N32-SLi Deluxe
4x512 Corsair PC4400 DDR RAM
Opteron 175
2x BFG 6800 Ultra O/C 265mb
ATi Radeon 7000 64mb


As everyone knows, when you enable SLi you lose the ability to run dual monitors. To resolve this issue I bought a 3rd video card. I recently purchased the A8N32-SLi Deluxe as an upgrade to my A8N-SLi Deluxe and found out that unlike the A8N, the A8N32 does not like the 3 video cards running at the same time.

I have the latest drivers for both card types, all of the cards work independently of each other and the Nvidia cards work in SLi. But when I put all of them in the PC at the same time I get a ! next to the ATi card in the device manager along with a CODE 10 error. Neither the ATi or Nvidia control panels give you options to select the ATi card to enable it, turn it on, assign it to a monitor or anything.

I've got the dedicate IRQ to PCI enabled in the BIOS and I've tried several different ways of installing and uninstalling the card to get them to work. So far no luck.

Does anyone know of a way to make this work?

I think it's a mother board issue.

I've installed windows and all the drivers without the Nvidia cards installed.

First I installed windows. Then I installed the ATi drivers and control panel. Next I installed all the motherboard drivers. During all of this the ATi card is working fine. It's being identified by windows and the ATi control panel as working properly. It's being assigned an IRQ and everything.(Though it does look like the BIOS is having to look twice at start-up to identify which display type it's going to use, because it takes a couple more seconds to turn on the PCI display). But when I plug in the PCIE Nvidia cards and boot into windows, the ATi card is no longer active. It has a CODE 10 error and no longer has an IRQ. It's like the motherboard turns off all other display adaptors (possibly all other PCI slots) when SLi is enabled.

ASUS said to RMA the board. I don't think the board is bad. I think it's working fine and needs a BIOS update to fix this issue.

I'm just hoping that someone else has some other ideas.

Maybe it's because you have ati and nvidia drivers installed at the same time? Do you have an nvidia card you can throw in there and test? That way one install of the nvidia drivers should take care of all 3 cards no?

dzjepp wrote:Maybe it's because you have ati and nvidia drivers installed at the same time? Do you have an nvidia card you can throw in there and test? That way one install of the nvidia drivers should take care of all 3 cards no?

The set-up has and does work well, for me and many other people.

From what I understand, you need to use an ATI card for the 3rd card because another Nvidia card would conflict with the Nvidia cards in SLi.

So it's not a driver conflit, it's got to be a hardware issue.

I assume the ATI card is a normal PCI? Have you tried plugging it into different PCI slots?

I can't.....

My Nvidia Cards take up two slots each and the way this mobo is laid out, there is only one slot left when they're both installed.

I know... The someone who designed this board didn't think it through.