Vedeyn: Firebird 802 Graphic Drivers..

[Fieldy510]

Ive played WoW and a LOT of other mmo's as well as tons of Steam games like Team Fortess 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Battlefield Bad Company 2 etc.  BF3 beta is the first time ive ever had any issue with since i bought my Firbird in july of 2009. 

Nvidia just needs to show us some love and add an sli profile that actually works

[Newcombc7]

Hi, I'm new to this site, but you all seem to be Firebird fans and playing games on them fairly well. I've had my Firebird 802 for almost 2 years now, and it has been a great PC, however in the past week I had to reformat my drives as I got a nasty virus. In doing so I figured why not go ahead and upgrade to Windows 7. I did a full wipe and installed Win7 64 bit. However, I have not been able to find graphics drivers ANYWHERE for the Firebird. HP's support site drivers did not work, up to date NVIDIA drivers did not work (280.26), deleting all drivers and starting from scratch didn't work, and I literally spent 12 hours straight trying different combinations of drivers and/or "fixes" around the internet sites. No luck. 

My two 9800 s' are listed in the device manager as up to date, as well as the 760i . I can open NVIDIA control panel and I see the option to enable SLI, but it it greyed out and I cannot activate it. No controls in NVIDIA control panel can activate SLI either. My power supply is good, and I checked to make sure everything was working. 

I'm completely stumped, and if anyone has come across something like this I would appreciate any help. Thanks.

[EnzoMatrix]

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?cc=us&lc=en&docname=c01778879

There is the url for a great article about upgrading HP products to Win7. Yes, I have heard about this happening, before. The times I remember reading about this happening it was from a clean upgrade. Did you make the restore disc set? My suggestion; format your drives again, restore your system to original state with restore discs or with the 'D' drive. Restoring the system will help eliminate any hardware conflicts and remove any corrupt .inf.  

[Newcombc7]

Yes, I've seen that before, but I don't have any Vista disc, the Firebird never came with any, just a partition, which I had formatted over in the process of installing a clean Windows 7. I found some drivers last night that work for making SLI active, NIVIDIA's 257.21 update. Every update after that does not work with the Firebird system up to 280.26. I made some progress, but now have hit another wall. Drivers that work BUT don't support a game release in the past year and change. 

[EnzoMatrix]

I am using 266.35 and play many new games. Glad you found a driver that brought SLI back. Many times there is a problem wig a conflicting inf file. What games are you having a problem running, and what problems do to experience?

[Newcombc7]

I tried out 266.35, and it installed correctly, but it cancelled out the SLI again. I'm able to set it to "Maximum 3d Performance" but SLI remains disabled. What version of chipset do you have for the 760i SLI? Maybe that is interfering. I'm not sure. As for games I'm trying to play, at the moment it's mostly League of Legends and the Old Republic beta, Red Orchestra 2, and Oblivion. Mostly trying to get this in working order though for when Skyrim comes out in November and the Old Republic in December. I got plenty of time, but it's a weird issue.

[EnzoMatrix]

Yes, it sounds like a corrupted inf. If you installed 266.35 then it should be 266.35 for the two 9800s and the i760. Mixing drivers is a bad thing. Without a way to go back to original OS there is not many ways to easily determine what all is going on. There is no reason why the 266.35 should have problems with SLI.  Check and see if your bridge and video cards are the same version. If not, run Driver remover and do a clean install of the 266.35 driver. 

[Newcombc7]

I cleaned out all my drivers with Driver Sweeper, a program I downloaded for the task, and then I restarted. I installed the 266.35 drivers with a clean install, and it said it installed fine. Upon restart after install of the drivers, I look in the device manager to find that the nforece 760 i SLI has installed to 266.35, but the two 9800 s card are on 197.13. Very strange. Any suggestions?

[Newcombc7]

To further add to the problem, when I try to update the two graphics cards manually in device manager, and windows recognizing I have 266.35 on my computer and eligible to install, while updating I run into a Code 28 error.

[EnzoMatrix]

Did you run Driver Sweeper in 'Safe Mode'? That is the suggested way to completely clean your computer of old driver elements. There is a GREAT article at laptop video to go on how to run that program with best results. You have to uninstall the driver, BEFORE rebooting remove all devices from Device manager; i760 and both 9800s, reboot into Safe Mode. Run Driver Sweeper (while in safe mode) reboot and install new driver. Least that is what I remember. Ok, the conflicting driver versions IS the problem. With SLI not working and everything and it is also endemic of broken 'inf' in your OS. Now, I am NOT familiar with Win7, yet. I did not realize that version 197 was even supported by 7. At this point, I would check the tick tock at laptop video to go on driver cleaning. Did you do it exactly as they explain, if not go through it again and follow exactly their steps. Last, the 197 driver, how did it get there? Did you allow Win to install the default driver? You have to remove ALL older driver downloads and unpacked driver installs. Be sure to check C:NVIDIA/Display Driver and remove all driver folders. This will prevent the installation of any old drivers.