• Black screen when turning on SLI - Insufficient power?
    2 replies, posted
Ok, so I'm running two 8800GT Alpha Dog XXX cards. I have them set up on my motherboard just fine. Earlier this month when I had one, I had no problems with games such as Age of Empires III and the such. When I stuck in the other card a week ago. Age of Empires III couldn't play anymore, a few minutes in the screen would wig out and I'd need to reboot. Anyways, zip forward to now. I've noticed an okay increase on performance, but I know this certainly isn't the performance I should be getting. I decide to update my drivers, well the screen goes black about 1/5 through (I expect this to be normal since it always does this) except for the fact it sits black for 15 minutes. I decide to reboot. Upon booting up, everything seems fine, but I'm a little unsure. I go to my nvidia control panel and my SLI isn't enabled anymore and when I enable it, my screen turns black just like when I was installing the drivers and I need to reboot. I keeps putting SLI to off. From what I hear, the 8800GT cards don't require a lot of power for the performance it offers. But now I'm a little uneasy. I'm running a 550 Watt PSU. So I'm wondering if this is a PSU issue and it can't power both cards at once. Mind you, before the drivers, I had SLI enabled and it worked (except for AoE) and after the drivers SLI makes my screen go black. Or do you folks think it's a drivers issue and I should just roll-back and wait for another version to come out. I think I covered everything. [editline]09:02PM[/editline] Just to clarify, my computer does still see two 8800GT cards, and nvidia and windows says that my video drivers are up-to-date. [editline]09:10PM[/editline] Okay, well I checked up on the XFX website (manufacturer for the GPU) and it looks like I'll need a new PSU to power my cards. Although I can't seem to find a replica of my issue, a new PSU seems to be the solution to most of my problems. I don't have money for a new one right now (genius me decided to get a new monitor instead) so I'll probably switch out a card for now or roll-back my drivers since they worked then.
Can you post your exact PSU type and do you have the SLI bridge connected?
If it's a low quality PSU, it could only be producing as low as 50% of the wattage it's supposed to, and then it won't be enough to power the computer and the graphics at once, so it chooses to cut the power for the more powerhungry graphic cards.
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