SLI Setups

I just updated my rig with a second Asus Strix 970, and have been messing around with SLI and testing out games since last night.

At first my top card was the card that got a bit warmer by a few degrees. I updated to Nvidia latest driver and am now noticing that in BF4 for example my top card is running about 20C cooler than my bottom card. I am plugged into the top card, and I thought that was the card that is "primary" and is suppose to get warmer.

After about an hour this morning in BF4, with fans set to 50% on both cards, yes I checked it is working, my top card hit a max of 55C and bottom card hit a max of 75C. The bottom card is relatively close to my EVGA 850w G2 power supply if that would matter at all.

The SLI config is working as both GPU usages maxed out at 98%, and my FPS was hitting the cap in BF4 of 200FPS on Ultra.

Any ideas? I'm going to try and do a clean install with DDU.

 

Hey Talon! A similar phenomenon occurs with my G1 980 Tis. While the top card is working harder, it is blowing its hot air down at the second card. A lot of the times it can be an airflow problem, but its not that uncommon. I solved it with a lot of case fans. Usually its a lot of the air coming off of the top card has no where else to go and hits the second one.

Edit: although your temp difference was twice as big as mine. Your psu could be further hurting the second cards airflow.

 

Oddly enough if I just leave the cards fan profile to stock in auto mode my issue is completely resolved. Just ran another 30 minutes or so and temps were about 63C card 1 and 67C card 2. I think these temps are great for SLI. When I had a single 970 on stock profile it ran 67C max. Top card hit 38% max fan value and bottom hit 52%. While the temp of card 1 went up a bit, I'd rather they are roughly uniform in temperatures. I think I'll just leave the fans on AUTO mode as I'm happy with that.

Also I have a TON of case fans lol. All pull in and up.

 

That... Makes no sense... Those are lower fan percentages how did it get cooler? Also you have exhaust fans on the top and back right?

 

So I was wrong, my top card is reporting as card 1 and my bottom card for some reason is reporting as card 0. I figured this out when I was going to flash my new card with the older cards vBIOS. Decided against even messing with them since they work great as is. The temperature discrepancy is due to the ASIC of the cards. My new old card has a paltry 57.6% but my new card has 76.3% . The older card runs at 1.2v for stock factory OC and the newer card at just 1.1v. It leads to about a 5-10C difference in temps between the two cards depending on the games.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/8742007 -- Better than 99% of all results, I think I'm set for awhile with this setup. At least until Pascal comes and my itch to upgrade kicks in. BF4 beautifully. Looking forward to some Battlefront.

 

Hahaha I was so confused with those temps. Glad you got it figured out.

 

After spending a week with SLI 970, I deicded I cannot deal with the headache that is SLI today. It actually seems worse than when I had 8800GT in SLI. How the hell could it be worse all these years later? Certain games like BF4 worked great, but other didn't work at all and others had weird utilization and not fully boosted clock speeds. I cannot deal with that headache and went to Microcetner and picked up a Asus Strix 980 Ti this morning. 970s have been listed for sale. .

 

Took you a while to realize .
IMO, it's always (well at least recently) better to have one powerful GPU instead of two less powerful.

 

I know man, I have to admit my mistakes on this one haha. This 980 Ti Strix card is so damn beautiful to look at.

 

Enjoy your new GPU!

 

Join the club. SLI scaling and usage sucks balls. I bailed on Maxwell SLI (desktop) too.
Sadly, the gaming experience simply isn't as good in 95% of games. Things suck so bad I'm sure NVidia is trolling bring out their next dual GPU.

 

Join the club. SLI scaling and usage sucks balls.
The gaming experience simply isn't as good.

 

I just don't remember it being so bad, and figured they could have only improved upon the technology since I last had it. But from my tests, I found that only about 30% of my games fully utilized both 970s properly and maintained the advertised boost clock speeds as a single 970 was doing. I've also been playing a lot of Rainbow Six Siege Beta lately, and I know its only in beta, but it didn't work either. I just ultimately decided I don't want to mess around with waiting for third party fixes, driver updates, software updates etc.

Both 970s have already been sold, I made out with $570 on both cards, less shipping and fees. I lost some money for sure, but I also used one of the cards for almost a year. My recommendation to my friends who also have 970s is now to stay far away from SLI and either be happy with the performance of that card or just upgrade.

 

Well I ended up with a 980 Ti. Still tweaking it atm but I will say this: a decently overclocked 980 Ti (meaning 1500+ core and ~7800 mem) matches my Gigabyte 970 G1 SLI setup at stock. Both of my 970s could be pushed all the way to 1600/7800, and at those speeds they're a few % faster than a 980 SLI setup. So OC to OC right now my 980 Ti has about 85% the overall performance. So I suppose our personal experiences are similar. Still mighty impressive though, and best of all no headaches to deal with (apart from coil whine, but that's another story for another day).

*puts tinfoil hat on* You know, I honestly wouldn't put it past nVidia at this point if they intentionally gimped the SLI experience as well in order to force people to constantly upgrade to their flagship card. I mean how else do you explain that THREE people on here with Maxwell SLI (me, TBoneSan, Talon) have complained about the same issues over and over again? I just wish AMD had priced the Fury X more aggressively, because at $649 I just couldn't justify it over the 980 Ti. But at $549 it would've been a no brainer. Oh well hopefully they get back in the game with Arctic Islands.

Btw gotta love the honesty here on NBR. Only on here can I actually complain about SLI without rabid nVidiots saying "you did it wrong retard", unlike certain desktop forums.

PS: Anybody want to buy a "heavily used, overclocked to the hilt, pushed to the edge, but kept very cool under water" 970?

 

Nice! Which brand/model did you go with? I was torn between the EVGA Classified, Giga G1 Gaming, and the Strix OC. All were in stock, but I had been eyeing the Strix for awhile and it matches my black and red color scheme.

I guess this card is suppose to Boost to 1317mhz when set to OC mode in the Tweak profile but it boosts to 1404mhz right out of the box with zero tweaks at all. I haven't even tried to overclock her yet. Tomorrow me and my cup(s) of coffee will be ready.

 

I actually went for EVGA's Classified initially, for both the EVGA warranty as well as the extremely beefy 14+3 phase power delivery. Too bad the first card had significant coil whine, and somehow the second card from RMA was even worse. Not to mention both cards only had 70/71% ASIC, and for a $700 card that was just absolutely unacceptable. (the coil whine, not so much the ASIC) But given that EVGA is now doing this retarded ASIC binning business with their 980 Ti Kingpin, I wouldn't be surprised if all the high ASIC cards got binned away.

Did debate between the Gigabyte G1 and MSI, but in the end decided not to play the coil whine roulette, as I know from personal experience just how awful Gigabyte's coil whine can be (on the other hand after I RMA'd my cards to Gigabyte, I got back a pair that was supremely quiet). Asus was never seriously considered because

a) waaaaay oversized PCB. I thought the Classified was bad but hot damn the Strix took it to a whole new level. Not a problem per se but did mean I'd have to rework my entire watercooling setup, so no go
b) heard enough horror stories about Asus's RMA process to steer clear for now

Anyway, in the end I got the MSI 980 Ti Gaming, mainly because TigerDirect had a special so it was the cheapest of the non-ref cards. And with this awesome cash back deal my bank was running I ended up getting the card including shipping for $620, a pretty unbeatable deal. I

The card does still have coil whine, but I felt it was manageable, plus with a 77.5% ASIC score there was just no way I was going to let it go. So now I'm still tweaking it, but currently running 1530/7800 @ 1.21V and passed Heaven for 2 hours. As long as it doesn't crash in BF4 I'm good to go (of all the games I have, BF4 is the only one that forced me to run my 970 at 1575 instead of 1600 since it would always crash). Had to throw on a waterblock though, GM200 sucks down power like crazy and runs HOT . I made my own bios to remove the power limit, and even under water it pulls anywhere from 325-350W when running Heaven. On air it was pulling something like 360-380W! And people thought the 290X was a power guzzler lol.

If you want to do any kind of serious overclocking, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say an AIO is almost a must, unless you enjoy cranking up your fans to 11.

 

@n=1 why not a 980 Ti Lightning?

 

Nobody is interested in making a waterblock for the Lightning sadly.

 

That card is just so dang ugly though.

 

Did the Lightning just come out?

Well @n=1 would be water cooling it anyway so doesn't really matter how the cooler looks.

 

True. The lightning did just recently release.

 

It just came out, and EK has already announced they won't be making a block for it.

 

Aaaaawwwwww yyyyyeeeeeeeeeeaaaaahhhh



http://www.3dmark.com/fs/6130807

This was with 1580 core/2001 mem @ 1.281V. Pretty sure I have a tiny bit more to squeeze, but too lazy right now, maybe when I feel like breaking 22k graphics.

And yes GPU stayed below 40C the entire time, you're not reading that wrong.

 

Nice, you got about 150pts on my best so far.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/8351938?