No Performance Increase with SLI 970's

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DarkThroat

DarkThroat

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Feb 15, 2016
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Just built a new SLI rig last night, and I appear to not be getting any increase in performance in benchmarks, which is very odd considering I was viewing benches of a very similar PC to my own and depending on the game, it ran twice as fast. Here are my specs.

Motherboard: MSI Z97S SLI Krait Edition
CPU: i5 4590 3.3GHz
GPUs: 2x Gigabyte GTX 970 4GB
RAM: 8GB
PSU: Roswell Photon 750w

I've got the cards hooked up with an SLI bridge, SLI is enabled in the NVidia control panel, but there's no change in performance from my old rig. I haven't had a chance to try actual games since I was on limited time last night, but FireStrike and Elemental yielding the same performance as my old rig.

I don't think my CPU is bottlenecking my GPUs as I've read several threads on this site recommending i5 4690 for SLI 970's, and that processor appears to only have marginally faster specs than my 4590.

Anyone have any ideas? Really hoping I didn't waste a few hundred dollars on the new hardware for the same computer.
 
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WildCard999

WildCard999

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Jul 18, 2014
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Try doing a clean install (check off box during installation) of the newest Nvidia drivers and make sure to re enable SLI in the Nvidia Control Panel and try again. Game wise you may or may not see a improvement, it depends if there's a SLI profile/drivers available for that particular game.
 
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bumnut53

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Are you sure SLI is enabled correctly? Easiest way to check is to download and GPU monitoring tool such as MSI afterburner and check both GPU's are being used. SLI can be a pain to setup but is great when it works.
 
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DarkThroat

DarkThroat

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Feb 15, 2016
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Thanks for the suggestions! After an hour of troubleshooting the build not posting last night, I did update the drivers since there had been a new one a few days ago, but I'll definitely try reinstalling the graphics driver when I get home work today and I'll reply back with my results.
 
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feelinfroggy777

feelinfroggy777

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Dec 13, 2016
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You are a little short on RAM, this may be an issue with Firestrike. I would go with 16gb running sli. You may be hitting a wall with the VRAM on the 970. When you run sli, you don't combine the VRAM of each card. The 970 actually only has 3.5gb of VRAM, so you are running 3.5gb and not 8gb. So you may be hitting the wall with your VRAM.

I would see how Unigine Heaven performs and some other benchmarks and compare your scores on hwbot.org. There you will be able to see other 970sli scores. Also, throw some games on and see how it goes as benchmarks are not always real world performance.
 
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DarkThroat

DarkThroat

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Feb 15, 2016
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Reinstalling the graphics driver may not have done anything, but I realized that FireStrike was running at a much higher resolution, and I game at 1080p, so turning it down yielded. results

Benchmarking GTAV and The Witcher also shower improved performance compared to my single GPU, though not as much as I hoped. I was able to max out settings and get either the same performance or better performance altogether.

I definitely plan on upgrading my RAM come tax season, but it's not a priority at the moment.
 
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