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First time SLI what to expect?

murah said:
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 :)
Click to expand...

Yup, when I just read the thread for the first time my initial thought was 'expect heat!'.

My top GPU is hitting 79 after a few mins of gaming and throttling constantly, it should be up at 1180 and is coming down to the low 1000's.

I've never had an issue with SLI, all games over the past few years seem to work fine.

Surround is another story, but even then, you can still get most games over the past couple of years to work.

If you figure out a good way of keeping the top one cool let me know!

Most people put a 120 on the end of them but I don't have room for that so I have sat one in the HDD bay - not really any better.

I'm disappointed with the scaling though, I heard they scale up to 80% but in the couple of benches I have done it looks to be more in the 60's.


Cheers,
 
:D sounds like it wasn't too painful, nice - shame about the throttling, hope the fans work out (sounds like they should)

steveoz: 60% is still decent I guess. Especially if the more demanding games are newer & scale better? Or is it a random mix/CPU dependant? Would be nice to be closer to 100 though, quite a bit of performance potential wasted :(

jeffa: I think you're a little confused about how ram frequencies work, plus the OP has bclk not fsb. I'd direct you to the memory FAQ but it seems it's a bit outdated :(
 
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 :)

 
David Bisset said:
:D sounds like it wasn't too painful, nice - shame about the throttling, hope the fans work out (sounds like they should)

steveoz: 60% is still decent I guess. Especially if the more demanding games are newer & scale better? Or is it a random mix/CPU dependant? Would be nice to be closer to 100 though, quite a bit of performance potential wasted :(

jeffa: I think you're a little confused about how ram frequencies work, plus the OP has bclk not fsb. I'd direct you to the memory FAQ but it seems it's a bit outdated :(
Click to expand...

I'll do some more benches later and check, it's still a new setup with the 780's that I'm still tinkering with, but I read before buying in a few places they scale really well (80 % upward) In fire strike it was around 9k Ish i think with the single card, which was running rock solid on 1180 boost and pretty cool (65), it went to 15k or so with two.

The G45 runs two in 8x, I did wonder if this would be a limiting factor when I bought it, but most places I read said 8x should be fine and not take a hit, and the g45 was great for overclocking, we will see!

I'm not sure I can get the first gpu as cool as I need unless I put a custom loop in there, I know the stock coolers can keep the card at mid 60's under load, but it seems I just can't get enough cool air in over the top one, it's getting soaked too much by hot air thrown of the bottom which is a shame.
 
murah said:
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 :)

Click to expand...

That's cool, I did a similar thing, spliced an old 140 mm psu fan and a 120 in to a 12v moped (pmsl on phone and that autocorrect was too good to delete), cable tied them together but they wouldn't fit lol, too wide (and my god was that 140mm psu fan a noisy beast, when i tested it was far too fast)

So I went back to one 120mm on the side but it didn't make a diff for me. I was hoping my mods to the drive bay and sitting a fan in there would work, but nope, no dice :( Hope yours turns out well.
 
Guys, your doing it wrong. This is how you ghetto mod some sli cooling.:D



That was an early prototype with a 120mm fan, a 140mm one worked much better.
 
setter said:
Guys, your doing it wrong. This is how you ghetto mod some sli cooling.:D



That was an early prototype with a 120mm fan, a 140mm one worked much better.
Click to expand...

lol nice, apart from it wouldn't work for me, it would chop up my. a lea coming out of my second card :)

I do have a say 50mm ish vent on the back that runs down 50 percent of the case, but other than fitting lots of old school small CPU fans or nb fans on it I don't know what to do with it.
 
Cant beat a bit of homemade cooling. Avery early revision for coping with sli'd gtx 470's.



That was in a Lian Li A70F case, quite a distance for air to travel from the front fans.
 
setter said:
Cant beat a bit of homemade cooling. Avery early revision for coping with sli'd gtx 470's.



That was in a Lian Li A70F case, quite a distance for air to travel from the front fans.
Click to expand...

Still imao at this, when l see a true ghetto master at work and the best bit was setter had to remove the bootlace holding the fan.

As he needed it for his safety boots so he could go to work, that's class.:cool:
 
I ended up using an antec spotcool, it wouldnt fit anywhere in the shinobi xl case so made do until i got a gtx 670. The rear case fan mod above was used on the 670's in sli on my z77 setup and the hw in sig. Strangely the cards ran cooler in the maximus formula board. Possibly because of the layer of armour that covers the entire board, must help deflect heat away.
 
Anybody had any issues with sli on Skyrim.. When I had 2x 7970ghz xfire it was terrible to play and had to knock off xfire and drop monitor refresh to 60hz
Want to sli my 780ti but won't both if games stutter
 
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
 
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.

Mightyashy said:
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
Click to expand...

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
 
Last edited:
murah said:
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
Click to expand...

nice one :) can anyone else recommend settings
 
Don't use Clamp as default as some games use negative LOD bias to sharpen image and if you want to force aa it helps too, but only if set to allow.
 
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