geforce video cards in vista Options

[mtbarbee]

I want to install a new video card in my vista home premium. The computer is a HP a1710n
with vista preinstalled. It came with an nvidia 6150 le gpu attached to mobo. The question I am having is I read a review at Tigerdirect by a customer who bought the same card I'm looking at which is the 8600gt with SLI capabilities. He said that after install on his Vista system that Vista is not compatible with the SLI interface. I just find this hard to believe because alot of Vista computers from HP are pre-installed with vid cards form nvidia geforce that have the SLI capabilities. My question is has anyone else heard that vista wont run the higher end geforce cards because of SLI?

[greengeek]

Here's another review, he seems to think you need 2 PCIe cards and a bridge thingy to do it with.

[hkspike]

My machine is running Vista Home SP1 with an nVidia GeForce 880 GTS which is SLI ready. So far it's not misbehaving. Maybe I need to ask it to do more. Is there some specifc test I can try for you?

[mtbarbee]

My machine is running Vista Home SP1 with an nVidia GeForce 880 GTS which is SLI ready. So far it's not misbehaving. Maybe I need to ask it to do more. Is there some specifc test I can try for you?

Thanks for the reply so soon. All I really needed to know is if their were geforce SLI users out there running with vista. I'm sure that some graphic intensive games are out there to put it to it's max stages but I wouldn't know which is what. Not much of a gamer and that's not why I'm buying it. I just want a better screen resolution with the DVI port.

[goretsky]

Hello,

I believe that when Microsoft Windows Vista became available to the public in January, 2007 that nVidia did not have SLI-capable device drivers

The SLI Zone, nVidia's reference site for SLI, contains a this FAQ entry which lists the operating systems supported by SLI, which I shall quote from:

Windows XP 32-bit
Windows XP 64-bit
Windows Vista 32-bit
Windows Vista 64-bit
Linux 32-bit
Linux 64-bit (AMD-64/EM64T)

So, it looks like you should be set--just make sure you have downloaded the latest device drivers for your new video card before it arrives and have them ready to install.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

[tommyj12]

The latest I think it's 175.12 is supposed to work better, but previous ones did not work as well, or in some cases at all in vista.

Are you talking about buying another 8600gt? If so I would advise against it.

SLI does not offer that much of an increase in performance for the price, and you would be much better off to sell the one you have and grab an 8800GT.

It can be bought now for around $180, and the newer g92 chipset is really worth a few extra bucks. It will run any game you desire at high resolutions, and has 512mb memory. You also won't have to worry about the sli issues most games have.

Just keep in mind that if you go bigger on graphics your power demands will also go up.

This post has been edited by tommyj12: May 15 2008, 12:32 AM