Laptop SLI no longer working.

[Wakeboy1337]

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?

[Warsaw]

Laptop graphics cards such as that are actually similar to desktop cards. They are discrete and can be removed by you. Therefore, if one fails, you will only see one card as opposed to the whole thing shutting down.

On the flip side, the GoForce 8700M GT was created before nVidia's Verde program, meaning you probably need proprietary drivers from the company (Dell) to get SLI working. That's actually the case with many laptop graphics cards.

[Cortexian]

Yea, uninstall any Nvidia drivers you did and install the ones from Dell. Go to their support site and punch in your service number and it should be pretty easy to find them, at least it is for my M15x (though that's irrelevant since my GPU takes Verde drivers).

If that doesn't work, take 'er apart and reseat both the GPU's. Make sure the SLI bridge is connected, etc.

[Wakeboy1337]

They don't need proprietary drivers. I had sli working on my last two installations and I already took the GPUs out and looked them over and put it together again.

Without or with drivers the bios should show two cards always

[Warsaw]

Point there. Try putting only one in at a time. If it doesn't work with one of them, then you know that you have a fried GPU on your hands.

[RedBaron]

I helped my friend solve a similar problem for his Alienware M17. Same as you, the control panel only recognized one video card and the other one was labeled somewhere along the lines as 'VGA compatible device'. He upgraded from vista x64 to 7 x32 and was stumped as to why he would have this problem. In this case, it was obvious that the drivers only supported x64 OS's, not to mention his total physical memory with ram, video, and sound already exceeded 3.2 gb. We all got university copies of windows, so I just upgraded his OS and got the drivers from the AMD website (he is on HD3750 crossfire I believe).

Make sure that when you upgraded to W7, it is the same version that you were using for vista (or xp). And when you try new driver installs, make sure you use driver sweeper to remove your old versions. I also suggest you download the files before hand then disconnect your computer from the internet to prevent W7 from ninja-ing it's own drivers in.

[Wakeboy1337]

Point there. Try putting only one in at a time. If it doesn't work with one of them, then you know that you have a fried GPU on your hands.

The two GPUs share one board.

This is what I have. 2 8700 GT's with 256 megs of ram each.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y143/abc7896321045/Other/8700x2.jpg
This is from the same laptop but with only 8700 GT
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y143/abc7896321045/Other/8700.jpg


I helped my friend solve a similar problem for his Alienware M17. Same as you, the control panel only recognized one video card and the other one was labeled somewhere along the lines as 'VGA compatible device'. He upgraded from vista x64 to 7 x32 and was stumped as to why he would have this problem. In this case, it was obvious that the drivers only supported x64 OS's, not to mention his total physical memory with ram, video, and sound already exceeded 3.2 gb. We all got university copies of windows, so I just upgraded his OS and got the drivers from the AMD website (he is on HD3750 crossfire I believe).

Make sure that when you upgraded to W7, it is the same version that you were using for vista (or xp). And when you try new driver installs, make sure you use driver sweeper to remove your old versions. I also suggest you download the files before hand then disconnect your computer from the internet to prevent W7 from ninja-ing it's own drivers in.

It's not a driver issue I promise you. I've been seven on here since it came out. Everything was working even after I did my ram and HDD upgrade. Then I didn't use the laptop for a week or so and poof! no SLI.

When I open the bios up I dont see two cards like I used to, and there is no menu for enabling the second gpu like I used to see.

[Warsaw]

That is one strange setup...

I don't know what to tell you then, dude. If it's all one piece, it's really hard to trouble shoot.