Unable to utilise SLI when all PCI-E Gen 3 slots are occupied?

[MeihanMike]

Hello,

 

Just picked myself up an Asus Xonar Essence STX to finish off a rig I've been adding to steadily over the first half of the year!

 

Here's most of the parts list:

 

• Intel 3570k
• Corsair H80i CPU cooler

• Corsair CX600 Power Supply

• MSI Mpower Motherboard
• 2x EVGA Nvidia 660 in SLI
• Asus Xonar Essence STX

 

So once I had everything installed this was the configuration I had:

 

 

So basically the 2 graphics cards and the sound card occupy the PCI-E Gen 3 slots on the board, with a small wireless card in the top 1x slot.

 

Once I got into the operating system I noticed I was unable to activate SLI or configure a surround setup.

 

I tried reinstalling drivers, reseating the hardware and after checking device manager I could see that both cards were being recognised. But I was still unable to activate SLI.

 

 

 

After some more mucking around I discovered that as long as I left the bottom PCI-E gen 3 slot unoccupied I could use sli and surround wioth no problems. So I moved the soundcard into the top slot and removed the wireless card completely. Leaving what I have now:

 

 

So my question is:

 

Is there anyway to get SLI / Surround working while having the lower most slot occupied?

 

It's not much of a problem I'm more curious if anything, also I think it looked neater before I had to change everything round.

 

Thanks a lot.

[joelthezombie15]

Probably a silly idea, but have you put the network wifi card in the bottom? Maybe the sound card was requiring to much band width or something idk.

[felixbearpig]

maybe the sound card is taking to many PCIE lanes and switching into 8X 4X 4X, sli cant run in that configuration and try to put the wifi card between the gpus, isnt there a 1x slot there?

[Levent]

have you looked at solutions like this?  you can place your wifi card to that white slot with PE-FLEX16KR-3 (its GEN3 you can even use your graphics card with this)

[MeihanMike]

Probably a silly idea, but have you put the network wifi card in the bottom? Maybe the sound card was requiring to much band width or something idk.

Yeah I tried this, same issue.

 

maybe the sound card is taking to many PCIE lanes and switching into 8X 4X 4X, sli cant run in that configuration and try to put the wifi card between the gpus, isnt there a 1x slot there?

 

This seems like the most likely reason to me. Thanks for pointing out that 1x slot, went completely over my head!

have you looked at solutions like this?  you can place your wifi card to that white slot with PE-FLEX16KR-3 (its GEN3 you can even use your graphics card with this)

I'm not sure this would help what I was wondering about, cool product though.