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680 Power Edition SLI, underwhelmed! think something is wrong?

3t3P

3t3P

3t3P

Soldato
Joined
20 Dec 2006
Posts
3,760
First, have some photos:





So installed these yesterday on my base system:

MSI GTX 680 Power Editions stock coolers custom fan profile, always below 70degrees.
BIOS 80.04.47.00.16
As far as I know not in 'LN2 mode' as ran cards in stock BIOS switch position.
ASIC Quality 76.7% and 79.3% (GPU 2 is the better ASIC)

700D (not best case for air cooling I know but can't afford GPU blocks atm)
2500k @ 4.5Ghz
8GB Corsair
Win7 64 ultimate
P8P67 Deluxe
Latest NV WHQL Drivers with SLI enabled and Asus SLI ribbon connector (not sure what way round it is if it matters)

Now in some ways things are much improved.

e.g. Crysis 3 I am now on ALL very high and get 60-70fps, so with a bit of AA I enjoy 50-60 FPS which is great.

Heaven 4.0 at 1080p extreme setting



3DMark11 P setting



On Tombraider 2013 I run everything maxed out bar Tress Fx and high levels of AA.
I play it in 3D.

Like this I get 35-60fps with stuttering in fire fights (35fps) and even when not, at random point of maps when I look around I get stuttering of the image.

The cards have a small core clock of +23Mhz with Mem at 7Ghz effective.
Stock volts (going to connect multimeter up and see if core voltage is even controllable)

The core will not go higher without crashing in heaven, really disappointed although it is the first time using Boost GPUs so don't really know what I'm doing just yet.

Are my scores normal??

Is this dreaded 'CPU bottlenecking' manifest?

Basically I don't see how I came from 880 CUDA cores to over three thousand and don't have a completely overwhelmingly amazing experience:(
 
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What's your GPU usage?
Tomb Raider could very much be a CPU bottleneck.
Same as Crysis 3.

They're fine for single card configurations, but with some of these newer engines and crossfire, it's like can't handle all the to and fro (Even if in actual raw performance they may be adequate, but have a thread limitation)
 
CPU usage maxed at 80% per core in TR

GPU useage I will go check now.

Hmm GPU-Z said GPU 1 went to 96% and GPU-2 30%?! (In TR)
 
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TR's a CPU bottleneck for sure.

It's like these newer engines can only push so much down 4 threads, even if you're not actually maxing out your cores.
Although I'd give your CPU usage a look at, incase you are maxing them out. In which case, overclocking further could help very slightly, but I'd still be jumping on a 3770K.
 
Tomb raider is a beast at max with high levels of anti aliasing. My two gtx 670's with a moderate overclock get similar to what you are getting, both at 100% gpu usage. An i5 will bottleneck in some games like crysis 3. I have an i5 at 4.4ghz and my gpu usage drops to 70-80% in bits with lots if grass animation. My i5 will be totally maxed out at this point. An i7 WILL give you better minimum and average framerates in crysis 3 and battlefield 3 as they make use if hyperthreading.

All seems normal to me. You get 5fps more in heaven and about 90 points more compared to my 670's and i5.

Just check out the bench threads and you will see the performance you are getting is right on the money.
 
I don't understand the significance of a GPU not running at 90-100% does that indicate CPU bottleneck?

Yeh the scores are actually ok compared to others on the forum.

I don't play BF3, will an I7 help these cards perform in SLI better on all games?
I thought an i5 at 4.5 was plenty.

Got multimeter on the cards now, seems voltage is controllabe via precision:D

I am not sure what is safe on the core for these cards does anyone know?
It allows a max of 1150mv

Though just ran heaven and measure 1204mv from the GPU1 (ASIC 76.7) and 1214mv from GPU2 (ASIC 79.3) when it was set to default 987mv in precision.

Tried 1000mv in precision, the cards just boosted to the same voltages anyway when running heaven, seems there's no real control.

I don't know why the cards won't even boost to 1200mhz, will increasing power target help?
 
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1200 boost is pretty good on stock voltages! You can't hope for much more than that unless you get a real golden card.
 
Ah no the most they boost to is 1130Mhz.

It shows again that higher class components and fancy things don't affect the core lottery at all.

3DMark11 14,435 @ 4.7Ghz

3DMark11 14,736 @ 5.0Ghz

Managed to get CPU to 5.0Ghz on 1.475v, max temps 72degrees and Prime95 stable for 6 runs, Crysis 3 stable for over 45 mins.

Activated LN2 BIOS that allowed 1222mV core letting me keep stable +26mhz = Max boost of 1150mhz and 1163 mhz which I am happier with but still gutted to not get 1200mhz.

That gave me heaven 4.0 of 1886

Best I can do for now.
 
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