Can no longer activate SLI with two GTX 980s

[Aetohatir]

Hello guys,
I have some problems with my GTX 980 SLI.
It used to work fine, but I recently had to do a clean installation of Windows, and now after everything is done I can no longer engage the SLI. (See Image 1)

I will give you a full run down of my specs further down, however to what I have already tested:
I have made sure, that both cards are shown in my device manager (see Image 2)
I have tested out both cards alone, in both PCIe slots. Both cards and both PCIe slots work fine.
I have done multiple clean installations of the current graphics drivers.
I have tested two different SLI connectors and tested multiple configurations of the SLI connection part on the graphics cards.

My system is most likely not the problem, as I had this running before, but here is my set up anyway
CPU: i7 4790k
Mobo: GA-Z97X-UD7 TH
RAM: 32GB Geil DDR3 (unsure about frequency)
PSU: be quiet! Straight Power 10 800W CM

GPU 1: Asus GTX 980 Strix
GPU 2: Palit GTX 980 Super JetStream

I also have a capture card inserted over PCIe (Elgato HD 60 Pro)
And a PCIe SSD (Plextor M8Pe 500GB)

I hope you guys can help
Thanks

[Vegetable]

This sounds stupid but trust me here. Take the SLI bridge and literally blow out the connector(s). My Gtx 580's didn't wanna do right with my HB SLI bridge until I blew some dust out of it

[Aetohatir]

6 minutes ago, Vegetable said:

This sounds stupid but trust me here. Take the SLI bridge and literally blow out the connector(s). My Gtx 580's didn't wanna do right with my HB SLI bridge until I blew some dust out of it

Good idea, however it didn't work.
I even made sure and used Isopropyl alcohol to wipe the connectors down.
No luck

[Vegetable]

31 minutes ago, Aetohatir said:

Good idea, however it didn't work.
I even made sure and used Isopropyl alcohol to wipe the connectors down.
No luck

Rip. Umm put the higher ASIC quality one on top. This was the only way my 570's would work because for some reason any other way resulted in both cards running pcie 3.0 4x but this may have just been something else entirely. You can check via GPU-Z

[Mick Naughty]

So all of those cards where in the build prior to the clean format, also its windows 10 and it was before the install?

[TheRedViper]

3 hours ago, Vegetable said:

This sounds stupid but trust me here. Take the SLI bridge and literally blow out the connector(s). My Gtx 580's didn't wanna do right with my HB SLI bridge until I blew some dust out of it

nintendo 64 nostalgia

[Aetohatir]

On 2017-5-31 at 11:35 PM, Mick Naughty said:

So all of those cards where in the build prior to the clean format, also its windows 10 and it was before the install?

Yes Win 10 Prior as well
 

 

On 2017-5-31 at 9:12 PM, Vegetable said:

Rip. Umm put the higher ASIC quality one on top. This was the only way my 570's would work because for some reason any other way resulted in both cards running pcie 3.0 4x but this may have just been something else entirely. You can check via GPU-Z

highter ASIC is on top
 

 

23 hours ago, TheRedViper said:

nintendo 64 nostalgia

my thoughts lol

[Aetohatir]

Update: So I solved the issue.
recently my motherboard died, and I had to buy a new one.
I now use the AsRock Z97 Killer Fatality

with the new board SLI works again. So I am guessing my motherboard was somehow damaged.
Oh well, All is fine now, except now I have the activate windows Watermark, and I've misplaced my product key