This is copied/pasted from Reddit as my post there ended up being ignored. I figured I might be able to get some help here too, since this is a pretty darned tech-savvy community that isn't focused on one area.
(Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/3vhls8/disable_nvidia_sli_in_linux_mint_kde_v172/)
Begin Reddit post:
Greetings!
Long story short, I ended up with 2 EVGA GTX 970s with 4GB of VRAM
each, and I've currently got them installed in SLI. This is great for my
work in Windows 7, but upon booting to Mint, graphics drivers that
worked with only 1 gfx card don't work with SLI.I've read online that there are major conflicts that make SLI
impossible without doing some hacking, and that this is a cross-distro
and cross-de incompatibility.I noticed that when I first booted into Windows with SLI configured, a
message popped up asking if I wanted to run them in SLI, which I did,
so it quickly reconfigured them to run in SLI. This has me thinking that
maybe I can tell Mint to just use one graphics card and ignore the
other. I honestly have never messed with SLI before, so I don't know how
much is hardware and how much is software.
The main reason I haven't removed the second card yet is because the
dual-GPU is great for my design work, and I would prefer to keep the
configuration in Windows, but still have Linux function properly.
-Train
The issue still stands, so I would love some feedback. As a side-note, I'm between classes right now and won't be home for a few hours, so I won't be able to access the desktop computer in question for another 5 hours.
Thank you!