First time SLI what to expect?

[murah]

So it looks like I'm going SLi But I have no idea what to expect, and what to do to make it work! Also how does overclocking work in SLi?

My friend and I bought the same card (Asus GTX 670 4GB DCUII) and we both managed to overclock to 1202/7008 (his could do 1242/7008 but he decided to bring his clock down slightly to match mine for some reason). He's upgraded to a 780 so I get his "old" card.
Considering I know what both cards clock at would I be able to just pop the card in and set it to what he was using and away I go?

I am aware of the dreaded Micro-stutter but as I understand it G-sync will eliminate it, I'm planning on getting a G-sync monitor when that comes out so If I encounter Micro-stutter its not really an issue.

More concerned about noise/temps (Though this is by far the most silent GPU cooler I have ever owned) but anyone who can share their experiences would be welcomed

Thanks
M

 

[murah]

Expect many games to not work properly!

Hopefully most the ones I play will be alright, Am I able to disable SLi for those games that wont work without any ill effects?

 

[murah]

Say what?

It's a pretty well known fact that not all games are optimised for SLi some even having worse performance than single cards because of it. I'm not really bothered by this as I tend to play newer games and am looking forward to Star citizen

 

[murah]

It'll hurt... but you'll enjoy it the second time... oh wait... no

Haha i'm sure its not that bad, aside from the wallet being less full...might not need a radiator on in winter though

 

[murah]

Happy Christmas everyone,
Back on topic..what kind of heat/noise increases can I expect to deal with?

 

[murah]

Aside from game compatibility issues that may arrise can anyone tell me how it will affect my heat/noise ? Kepler cards throttle at 70c by 13mhz (i know it's not huge) since I'm at upto 64c is this going to push my top card to above 70?

 

[murah]

I'm really not bothered by Day Z , Star citizen is where it's going to be!

 

[murah]

So I went for it! far easier than I thought , Far cry 3 maxed gives me very decent fps yet to try many games out but I'm having issues with BF4 though I expected it, maybe someone can shed some light on the subject?

Playing BF4 suddenly it crashes like it used to with the sound glitch only no sound this time, anyone on teamspeak suddenly sounded like they were a robot and talking in slow motion then everything just hung for a bit till I did a hard restart. Managed all of 5 mins on BF4 again after that then another crash, this time I could hear TS pretty much perfectly but looking at the FPS counter in game it said 1...everything went really slow for a moment then BF4 crashed "Encountered an error blah blah close program" behind that window was an error window telling me my drivers crashed Tried with overclocks and stock with varying results it's driving me bonkers!

Also in most of the programs I have run (heaven, farcry 3) my gpu usage is 90-99% on both cards yet on BF4 the usage is all over the place

edit: same thing just happened in Bioshock infinite GPU usage was in the 90% range so that was good, all maxed out and getting 200fps (I know stupidly high) Anyway got about 10-15 mins of playtime before the game seemed to grind to a halt opening task manager took about 3mins something that normally takes a second on my rig :/ , everything sounded like it was in slowmo...Is this a sign I DO need an i7?

 

[murah]

Did you bother to read any of this thread jeffa seems not also what are you on about ??

update!
Benchmarks (firestrike, heaven, 3dmark11) all complete fine with great scores (im thrashing some 290x, 780s, titans and 780ti scores !) yet games seem to like to crash could this be a sign of an unstable overclock?

update update!
Dropping the PCIe lanes to 2.0 , disabling HPET in bios and dropping my OC on my cpu down to 4.4ghz seems to have "fingers crossed" sorted the issue, I'm going to leave the PCIe lanes at gen 2 and figure out if thats what has solved the issue. after hours on google I finally found someone with a similar issue and a Sabertooth z77 mobo, They found dropping the lanes to 2.0 fixed it for them

 

[murah]

final update for now unless i get any more issues

Changing PCIe lanes to 2.0 , HPET enabled in bios (Might not be enabled in OS though need to check that) and CPU at 4.6ghz again.. Bioshock doesn't seem to be crashing! Have not managed to get on BF4 yet but hopefully that will work as well.
GPU usage in farcry3 and Bioshock infinite is in the 90% range usually around 95-99%

To combat the heat I have dropped the memory overclocks on both cards to stock till I can get some solution figured out Top card is hitting 70c and throttling slightly but its a non issue and the twins look beautiful together, I can see why some people said SLI is a bit of a headache but worth it once your up and running (Maxing far cry 3 and 80-100fps scene depending, 1 card could only manage 45-59)

Thanks for all the help everyone

 

[murah]

I have a plan to mount 2x 120mm fans on a bracket in front of the cards, taking the fresh intake from the 200mm front fan and feeding it directly over and between both cards, should do it wonders

 

[murah]

Funny enough in benchmark runs bottom card sits at 62c and top sits at 68c , smashed a few single gpu scores and couldn't be happier with that I'll update with pics on the bracket and let you all know how it worked out, here is a pic of it outside the case for now excuse the poor quality picture

Spoiler

 

[murah]

Happy to report SLI is still functioning, both cards clocked to within an inch of their life temps while not perfect are very acceptable (top card max is 72c after a few hours). Can honestly say after a bit of a faff of setting up its entirely worth it and considering the price total for both cards not bad at all. The noise level has gone up slightly but I have some decent speakers I tend to wack up high for gaming so don't notice the background noise really.

I went from XF with 6950s to SLI with 780tis and found SLI to be much better. Had no end of problems with XF, fine setting up etc but was a nightmare with a lot of games. Not really had any issues to be honest with the Nvidia setup. Actually the first NV cards I've had.

Apologies for the slight hijack but guessing the OP will benefit from this - are there any settings recommended in the NV panel? at the moment I've got them set at their defaults other than enabling SLI obviously

This is something I'm after myself, I had to do a fresh install of the latest drivers and wiped out my settings so I'll go through the list and try to remember them all!
Ambient occlusion: ?? cant remember
Ansiotropic filtering: 16x
AA-FXAA: off (I tend to use SMAA injectors such as SweetFX or use MSAA game depending)
AA Gamma correction: on
AA mode: enhance app setting
AA setting: This one I'm stuck on but I think 16xQ CSAA is what I was using, someone might be able to confirm or select something better?
AA Transparency: 8x supersample
Cuda GPUs : all
Maximum Pre-rendered frames: Use 3d app setting (can play around with it, back in the day it used to help a lot not sure about it now)
Multi Display: set to whatever you normally use, single display for me
Power management: Adaptive (If I find my cards are not boosting fully I will set this to max performance in the actual game profile but if I leave it on the general settings then my cards don't downclock at idle)
SLI rendering mode: not sure just left it on Nvidia recommended
Text filtering - Negative LOD bias: Clamp (always been set to that no idea what it does!)
Text filtering quality: High quality
Threaded optimization: on
Tripple buffering: off (Pretty sure it should only be on for Vsync?)
Vertical sync: OFF

 

[murah]

Texture Filtering - Negative LOD Bias: LOD is the Level of Detail, and in some games you can alter the LOD Bias using various settings to sharpen details on screen. In such cases, you should set this setting to Allow, however note that altering LOD Bias can introduce aliasing (jaggedness to lines and edges) and shimmering. Since Anisotropic Filtering can also improve the sharpness of images without adding to aliasing, I recommend that you change this setting to Clamp for games in which you use any level of Anisotropic Filtering to give you better overall image quality.

found from another website