New to SLI help please

[kmufc77]

i have today gone SLI for the first time in 10 years of computing.
i have a couple questions please for all you Nvdia experts please.

1.Nvdia control panel : SLI performance mode do i keep this at Nvdia recommended?

2.90% games are showing the SLI visual indicator except stalker clear sky which is by far smoother gameplay than before with a single card setup?
do some game enable SLI but sometimes not show the SLI indicator?

3.The SLI indicator has a green bar that changes from time to time when gaming is this to show how much of the game 2 cards are using?

4.When enabling SLI from a fresh install of drivers the system hangs for 2-3 minutes before accepting SLI is this because of windows 7 im using?

5. GPUZ: shows sli enabled but my 2nd card is now showing 8X pcie 2.0 confussed as i though i had 2X16 pcie lanes with this mobo i also have a PCI sound card is this the problem?.

6.GPUZ. under the sensors bar i havent got any GPU load information im positive i had this with crossfire a few days ago.

Edit: ive had to ring Gigabyte as ive tried loads of bios and my 2nd card is still at X8 pcie 2.0, it seems that the SLI bios u need to enable sli is not enabling both lanes at X16, is this a big difference i will notice?

 

[Rroff]

Not all games will display the load bar in those that do the bar starts in the middle for each GPU and extends towards the screen edge in each direction - the closer to the edge the higher the scaling/usage of SLI.

Pretty sure you should see dual X16 in SLI but if it doesn't have the NF200 chip they might have been cheap.

 

[kmufc77]

Not all games will display the load bar in those that do the bar starts in the middle for each GPU and extends towards the screen edge in each direction - the closer to the edge the higher the scaling/usage of SLI.

Pretty sure you should see dual X16 in SLI but if it doesn't have the NF200 chip they might have been cheap.

Thanks for the reply Rroff i was hoping for more replys though

 

[Rroff]

Leave the SLI setting in the nVidia control panel on nvidia reccomended... if you want to tweak a game profile then I reccomend getting nHancer as it seems a bit better than the nVidia control panel for tweaking profiles.

Is the soundcard PCI-e or PCI? if its PCI then it shouldn't affect the x16 slot speeds but if its PCI-e it might do... also if its relevant to the X58 platform try increasing the PCI-e bus to 101MHz (stock is 100) sometimes this helps with SLI and bus speeds.

I don't think GPU-Z is capable at this time of reading nVidia cards load/useage info.

Aslong as its PCI-e 2.0 x8 then you won't notice any difference from x16 with a 285 SLI setup - you'd need to be running a 295GTX in each slot before you'd see the performance being hit - if its only pci-e 1.0 @ 8x then you will experience longer load times and a few percent off the top performance wise but nothing dramatic.

 

[kmufc77]

Thanks mate youve all but covered all my questions, my pcie lanes are pcie 2.0 i thought as much that i wouldnt see any decrease.
the soundcard is pci thanks for ur help

 

[Rroff]

At a guess I'm assuming the X58 platform uses the NF200 chip to provide 2x PCI-e 2.0 x16 lanes in SLI so the motherboards that don't have it and had SLI added as a later patch are forced to share a single x16 signal.

 

[kmufc77]

At a guess I'm assuming the X58 platform uses the NF200 chip to provide 2x PCI-e 2.0 x16 lanes in SLI so the motherboards that don't have it and had SLI added as a later patch are forced to share a single x16 signal.

This must be the case as ive tried 5 different bios which all enable SLI, not that worried as like you said i wont notice any decrease in performance,be interesting to hear what GB say when they get back to me.