New Build Issue

[Jthe7th]

First off, just wanted to thank everyone here on PCM for the assistance in putting together my first build. Not sure if I would have been able to do it without this site.

Now on to an issue I have been having. I recently slapped another 7800GT into the rig for SLI. The trouble seemed to start when I upgraded to the 81.98 driver. Despite doing a "clean" install, I ran into all sorts of difficulties. First, I was stuck in the infinite loop trying to boot the computer. I got nothing but the three dancing blips of death over and over again. I had to go into Safe Mode to uninstall/reinstall, etc. the driver and finally get back to a working computer. Then, I learned I had lost my internet connectivity.

A clean install of nforce4 6.70 and 84.12 has worked great. I gave up on 81.98 because I could not for the life of me get the system to work with it. I would have gone back to 77.xx, but I have GPUs from different manufactures and needed Release 80 to get them to work together in SLI.

With regard to the nforce drivers, once I got rid of all remnants of the Nvidia network access manager (or at least did not opt to have it install) I got the internet back and everything seemed to work properly. I made sure that the modem was not connected as I installed the drivers because that seemed to be one aspect of the problem with the nforce driver install.

Now, when starting the computer, I get the "Other PCI Bridge Device" notification when I boot the computer. When I use the dialogue box to attempt a driver install, the drivers cannot be found. I think the device in question is the SM Bus Enumerator because that is what loads when I use the mobo driver disk to install the drivers. However, once I install the drivers, the original problem happens all over again. I've resorted to ingnoring the driver install dialogue and uninstalling the question-marked device in device manager.

Everything "seems" to work properly without installing the "Other PCI Bridge Device" drivers. Should I need to worry about this? And if I don't need to worry about it, what can I do to prevent the computer from attempting to find the drivers for the "Other PCI Bridge Device" every time I start the computer?

Hope this hasn't been too confusing.

Thanks for any input.

[Jthe7th]

Could this be an SLI connector issue?

[ror_b211]

From that, it looks to me like your computer isnt working in SLI whatsoever and the "Other PCI Bridge Device" is your second video card, you may have not noticed because you probably wont notice any difference between one and two 7800GT's with current game graphics (since they're top-end cards). It looks like you need the 81.98 driver for them to work, I suggest you check the hardware is installed properly and try again. If that doesn't work I would probably contact nvidia about it, although someone may come up with the answer here!

[Jthe7th]

Thanks for the response. Actually, from all indications, SLI is working just fine. The SLI load balancing indicator shows activity from both cards. Is there a more reliable way to test whether SLI is working properly? I see a marked difference in the games I'm playing from one GPU to SLI, so initially, it seems to be working fine.

I'll try some other sleuthing to determine what is going on with my system.