Dual GPU Issue!

Soldato
Joined
16 Dec 2005
Posts
14,443
Location
Manchester
OK so I went a bit perculiar last week and bought another GTX 260! My plan was to have my "main" GPU for the every day stuff I do and the new secondary one to fold full time. The main would fold too, but if you have seen my PPD lately I am not getting a lot of folding done on it at the moment! :p

Biggest problem is remembering to turn it back on when I am done gaming. I might do a bit of Crysis for half an hour to blow some steam and completely forget to turn FaH back on. Que 4 hours of not-on for my GPU! :eek:

So, I put in my new GTX260 and I hit the first snag. There aren't enough 6-pin adapters on my PSU. Should've seen that one straight away. So, I take off the two molex-to-6 pin convertors, pull out the PSU and then wack in another PSU. This one had two 6-pin adapters as standard, and I used the two convertors I had to make up the rest.

Next problem, the second card completely covers 3 of the 6 SATA ports on my board. I need 5 of them! I overcame that problem by not having a DVD drive nor one of my data drives [not a long term solution but wanted to get this thing running].

So, I finally come to boot my PC and no display... both cards have powered up all lights on keyboards lighting up etc as normal. Hmm I say. I then changed which card my monitor was plugged in to and hey presto, I have a display.

The problem now is that it is using the secondary card, not my primary card! The second PCI-E slot is only x4 so I don't want to be using this card for gaming etc. I am not sure how to go about fixing this, as I have never had a dual GPU system before. My motherboard is the P5B-Deluxe. Nothing in the BIOS leaps out at me as a way of selecting which GPU should be the main display...

After the long winded story we come to the question, how do get the display coming through the primary card and not the new secondary?
 
i think this happens with most mobo's when using more than 1 graphics card the second pci-e always seems to become the primary graphics slot.
to solve this i think you will have to go into display properties and select resoloution. from there select the other monitor/dummy plug and set that as the main desktop.
from there when you swap the dummy plug and vga cable about the monitor should then be running from the graphics card occupying pci-e slot one.
 
There shoud be an option in the BIOS for display device, where you can select PCI or PCIE and in some instances specify which PCIE slot you want?
 
That's the one SB
Was still asleep this morning - wife and son both have bad colds and the coughing is keeping me awake.
I should have guessed that a direct showthread link would have worked - my bad
 
Last edited:
fahmon_dual_gpu.jpg


Weeee!

Shame the first two I got were 1888 pointers! :p

It is great knowing that I am going full wack on at least one GPU client when I interrupt the other GTX :D

Still need to find a way of plugging in my HDD and DVD drive lol. Second card covers the PCI-E x1 slot so a SATA add on card will only be SATA I :( Meh, my backup disk doesn't need full speed!
 
Hmm

Either the stats are a bit behind or my foldy output isn't as high as FaHMon claims! I hope it is the former as my new GPU has been folding 24/7 since I got it working. FaHMon claims I do anywhere in between 6.5 and 8K PPD.

On a related note, how does one overclock and test a secondary GPU? I can change its settings in Rivatuner just fine, I just don't know how to actually stress test it... o.o Any ideas?
 
OK nevermind. Worked it out. I made the secondary GPU be the main display, I could use Furmark just fine. Both GPUs are on 556/1498/999 [core/shader/mem]. :)
 
Back
Top Bottom