M-17x R1 Texture/Screen flickering problem

Hello.
Recently I installed F1 2011 on my lappy. Everything was running ok though F1 2011 was running very low fps. Then a few days back I cleaned my graphics card fans and the cards as well. I restarted the lappy and just to get a better fps in F1 I tweaked some settings in nVidia control panel. When I changed the SLI rendering to Alternate Frame Rendering, the game would flicker, like one GPU was skipping frames or so. Same was the problem with Fifa 12. Then when I restored to default settings in Nvidia Control Panel, the games worked fine. Today, I installed Assassin's Creed II just to check if I had the same problem with alternate frame rendering turned on (it flickers even when it is on "nvidia recommended"). But it was worse. The game would flicker all the time. And the textures in the game are awful, like its running in 16 or 8bit color mode. I then changed the rendering mode to Single GPU and the game worked fine.
So now I am having confusion as to what exactly is the problem. These are some of the possibilities I think:

1. Directx version: but I installed 9.0c also, and the problem persists
2. Graphics card driver issue, since i re-installed my divers after the problem occurr:reallymaded in F1
3. I have damaged my cards while cleaning them.

Now of all these I think there is a high possibility of the 3rd option and I am really afraid!

I am currently downloading some old drivers to see if that solves the problems. If nothing works I will even try a full factory restore.

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

Ok, the problem seems very strange.

I did a complete factory recovery last night, and the game then worked perfectly. I updated the drivers and in the settings I changed SLI rendering mode to "force alternate frame rendering", and thats when the flickering started. No use by restoring the settings. Just to make sure it wasnt due to the driver upgrade, I again did a factory recovery and this time also the game worked perfectly. But the minute I change the settings to "force alternate frame rendering", it started flickering. I then tried the "split frame rendering option" and guess what, the top half of the game was looking perfect, but there was flickering in the bottom half of the frame.

Is it possible that one of my cards is damaged?
I will check if I have put in the cards correctly after the cleaning work, but I still doubt that might be the case!

Update.

Just after trying everything, I disassembled the lappy, cleaned the card's contact points, put it back, and bingo! The game worked with alternate frame rendering. Although it runs very slow like 10-15 fps when in "alternate frame rendering 1". If "alternate frame redering 2" is selected, the game runs smooth. Any idea what might be the fault here. I think maybe the new 280.xx drivers?