How to confirm SLI bridge works?

[sclaws]

Not sure how to prove this. Vista Ultimate 32-bit and evga 680i board with two PNY 8800GTX cards. Initially installed and didnt have an SLI bridge (evga failed to include it in the box) so I didnt mess with SLI. Now that I got the bridge installed, there really was no OS indication that it was installed or recognized (no pop-up at all regarding the bridge as was suggested in the evga manual).

Is there any way to test the bridge's functionality short of pulling the bridge and 2nd vid card and running 3dMark03? When I ran 3DMark w/SLI disabled in nTune I hit around 11200. Turning SLI on hit 12330's. This again was with the bridge connected and both cards installed.

I'm just trying to see if there's a way to do this without pulling hardware out as I'd rather not physically stress components any more than necessary. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

[rewt]

SLI will work with or without the bridge. In fact, I don't even use the bridge on my setup because it creates problems. It's a known issue without a fix.

The bridge just helps free up bandwidth, so it can increase performance if you get it to work properly.

Run 3dmark with and without the bridge. With the bridge should give you a higher score than without it.

[J-Mag]

You could use a multimeter and check for any high levels of resistance on all of the traces.

[einstein_314]

Not sure how to prove this. Vista Ultimate 32-bit and evga 680i board with two PNY 8800GTX cards. Initially installed and didnt have an SLI bridge (evga failed to include it in the box) so I didnt mess with SLI. Now that I got the bridge installed, there really was no OS indication that it was installed or recognized (no pop-up at all regarding the bridge as was suggested in the evga manual).

Is there any way to test the bridge's functionality short of pulling the bridge and 2nd vid card and running 3dMark03? When I ran 3DMark w/SLI disabled in nTune I hit around 11200. Turning SLI on hit 12330's. This again was with the bridge connected and both cards installed.

I'm just trying to see if there's a way to do this without pulling hardware out as I'd rather not physically stress components any more than necessary. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
As it's been said already, if you have SLI enabled in the nvidia control panel, then your cards will be running in SLI mode with or without the bridge installed. All the bridge does is free up bandwidth between the 2 cards. Otherwise it has to go through the PCIe bus which bottlenecks it. There is a difference in performance, but from what I've read it isn't a whole lot...

The best thing to do is to run 3Dmark with the bridge and then without it. Make sure SLI is enabled in the nv control panel.

[john19055]

It will work without the SLI connector ,but it will hurt your performance in games ,at least it hurts mine and on some games it is quiet a bit of a difference without the SLI connector.