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SLI issues

Calranthe

Calranthe

Calranthe

Associate
Joined
5 Oct 2007
Posts
620
Hello,
My Gaming pc:
i7 4790k stock speed
H100i corsair cooling
16GB Team Group
Gigabyte G5 Z97x Motherboard
SuperFlower 1000w platinum psu
970 GTX Galax graphics card stock clocks
Sennheiser PC 363D sound system
Iiyama Prolite E2773HS monitor
Intel 480GB SSD
4 TB HD.
Windows 10 64bit home premium.
Corsair 750D case well ventilated.

All drivers updated, recently I managed to get hold of a second 970 exact same one Galax 970 both running same clocks.

Physical installation went well, found an old sli bridge, added the second power cable to the psu, booted up pc and turned on sli in the control panel.

Everything seemed fine and then the instability started to appear it can happen in a game like Witcher 3 and Dungeon defender 2 or on the desktop or web browsing and is best described as some one slamming the graphical breaks on:
Frame rate starts to stutter
Frame rate slows
PC slows
Sound crashes
Pc freezes
After a while screen may go black and pc reboots or Complete lock up until a 10 second push of power button or windows 10 access violation blue screen or nvidia driver stops working but mostly it is the complete freeze and then I need to power down pc.

Heat on first card usually sticks between 50-68 on second card it goes up to 75.

At the moment I have taken out the second Galax and ordered a new sli bridge incase the old one is faulty.

Any advice is very much appreciated want to get my rig stable before fallout 4 comes out :)
 
Start with basics.

Update mboard bios
Remove any overclocking programs afterburner etc
Reinstall drivers
Reseat cards and check the second card is in the right slot.
Check fans spinning on second card.

After doing all the above if your still having problems id be looking to test the new card on its own then if thats ok swap them so the origonal card is in the second slot

If you start having problems again then id look at getting a replacement psu
 
If both cards and Cpu are at stock, test each card individually, DDU driver sweep and a fresh install of drivers, make sure your Psu's not at fault although doubt it given the one you're running. If all else fails, memtest your memory as it could be throwing up errors. Just a case of trial and error to pin down the fault.
 
Everything is at stock speed, bios updated, tests with each card separate show no instability, games run fine as does heaven benchmark.
Motherboard bios is reinstalled, will do a fresh install of drivers once I put the card back in.
 
I had a recent issue with SLI with my two 580's, I had removed the cards to clean them and didn't pay attention to the power cables when I refitted them, subsequently had high temps and throttling on the top card and lots of stuttering in all games and on desktop.

I reconnected them with matching colours on each card two wires have yellow in them, two are all black, I'd previously had one yellow and one black on each card, rearranging them so one card had the yellow wired plugs the other the plain black ones cured the issue.

I'll post a photo later if that helps explain what I'm on about...
 
Boards are back in testing beginning now, I have left the bios at defaults (since bios update).
The sunflower 1000w has separate modular fittings for each connection (love it) so no mistakes made there but it never hurts to check.
Have speed fan on my desktop normal temps on fans.
Ran the unigen heaven benchmark 1920*1080 max AA, Max Detail, Max Tesselation) maximum temp reading was 78 and score ended up as 2450.
Going to play some Witcher 3 and see what happens.

Oh and cards are in the recommended slots for dual sli.
 
Update 10 minutes of Witcher and screen went black for 5 seconds then bad tearing on the screen and temp of one gpu has shot up to 85c. is that a bad temp ? other one is staying at 67c
 
I believe they are fine to 90'c and by fine i mean they throttle but wont expolde. But that temperature would be concerning. Have you checked the fans are spinning?? Have you tried without the case side?

Any chance of some pics?

Id be looking at a new psu now or borrowing one to try at the least
 
I am going to go back to a single 970 it just isn't worth the instability I am getting, will try again but the machine is used 12-14 hours a day can not have it going unstable.

Any new advice I am happy to try, thank you for the ideas.
 
Calranthe said:
I am going to go back to a single 970 it just isn't worth the instability I am getting, will try again but the machine is used 12-14 hours a day can not have it going unstable.

Any new advice I am happy to try, thank you for the ideas.
Click to expand...


I'd say see about selling both and buying a 980 or Ti. There's been some great deals on good 980's lately such as the 8 pack Hof for 350 quid. I'm sure you could get close to that by selling two 970's. Or add a bit more for the Ti. I wouldn't bother going dual card with anything but the fastest on offer. I did it once and regretted it. The only time it's woth considering dual card is if the fastest cards on the market are not fast enough and that's not the case here.


EDIT:

Just came across this which shows 970 sli in comparison to Ti and Tx,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4RyNNlKbJw&ab_channel=JayzTwoCents

I still think sell up and get a single faster card. That way the problems solved.
 
Last edited:
Calranthe said:
I am going to go back to a single 970 it just isn't worth the instability I am getting, will try again but the machine is used 12-14 hours a day can not have it going unstable.

Any new advice I am happy to try, thank you for the ideas.
Click to expand...

When the gpu gets hit does the usage drop sharply? How close are your cards to each other?
 
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