Sli Headache

[PilotPlangy]

Hi everyone many years reading, first time posting!

Welcome to my headache:
My sli setup does not work..
Im no noob as ive played with stuff like this for many years now - but hey i might have mucked up something.
I have spent 20 hours now troubleshooting and have now given up. Im running two old cards (Asus 9800GT 512MB tri sli cards) on an xfx 680i sli mobo with win 7 ult 64. when I put the second card in the other day I was surprised to see no performance increase in any games and a performance decrease in 3DMark 06. There is however a noticeable difference in the 3D mark vantage first scene (i only let it run for a minute or so to see if its working. (at times during the troubleshooting ive had major artifacting in the first scene - weird)Games have basically stopped working. If the game gets passed the loading process (just before you play) it runs smooth enough for a minute or two but then starts sticking, then smooth again, sticks again.. until the screen goes black (but audio is still playing fine) so i ctrl+alt+delete the ah heck and find that game is either not responding or running fine in task manager.
Crysis works but on low quality settings, if i push the settings up the game starts sticking and fails. Company of heros does not work at all. Prototype crashes. Modern Warfare 2 freezes after loading. Not even good old farcry is totally happy, it freezes after about 20min.
I have tested each card separately and they are fine.
Heat isnt the issue - both cards are watercooled. power isnt the issue - they are running on a cooler Master 700W 52Amps on the 12v rail. I have tried drivers from 2 years ago up to 280.26 (seems more stable on older drivers)Ive even swapped them around to find no difference.
Im about to re-install windows to see if it may make a difference.
None of the cards are clocked. Only the cpu is.
Can anyone help?
thx for your time!

 

[DelroyMonjo]

I'm certainly no expert but it sounds like a BIOS problem. Have you ever tried to update it?
I googled that MoBo and saw page after page of problems with that model.
3 cards SLI'd? You tried going into BIOS and checking to see if SLI bus on all three cards are at 100? Look here and see if anything helps.
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Motherboards/XFX-nForce-680i-SLI-Motherboard-Review-1333-FSB-Support

 

[Rollo]

Hi everyone many years reading, first time posting!

Welcome to my headache:
My sli setup does not work..
Im no noob as ive played with stuff like this for many years now - but hey i might have mucked up something.
I have spent 20 hours now troubleshooting and have now given up. Im running two old cards (Asus 9800GT 512MB tri sli cards) on an xfx 680i sli mobo with win 7 ult 64. when I put the second card in the other day I was surprised to see no performance increase in any games and a performance decrease in 3DMark 06. There is however a noticeable difference in the 3D mark vantage first scene (i only let it run for a minute or so to see if its working. (at times during the troubleshooting ive had major artifacting in the first scene - weird)Games have basically stopped working. If the game gets passed the loading process (just before you play) it runs smooth enough for a minute or two but then starts sticking, then smooth again, sticks again.. until the screen goes black (but audio is still playing fine) so i ctrl+alt+delete the ah heck and find that game is either not responding or running fine in task manager.
Crysis works but on low quality settings, if i push the settings up the game starts sticking and fails. Company of heros does not work at all. Prototype crashes. Modern Warfare 2 freezes after loading. Not even good old farcry is totally happy, it freezes after about 20min.
I have tested each card separately and they are fine.
Heat isnt the issue - both cards are watercooled. power isnt the issue - they are running on a cooler Master 700W 52Amps on the 12v rail. I have tried drivers from 2 years ago up to 280.26 (seems more stable on older drivers)Ive even swapped them around to find no difference.
Im about to re-install windows to see if it may make a difference.
None of the cards are clocked. Only the cpu is.
Can anyone help?
thx for your time!

You have a vendor specific, 3+ year old three way SLi set up.

Three way SLi on 9800GTs is not supported by NVIDIA OEM drivers to my knowledge, and my guess is it's been a while since Asus put out a driver for this given the vintage of the cards.

If you get three cards that have current driver support for three way SLi, and the bigger PSU you would need to run them, your problems will end.

However, given the age of your cards, a better plan would be to just sell them and get a GTX570/HD6950/HD6970 for a few bucks more and get the same performance out of one card.

 

[PilotPlangy]

Thx for the answers guys

After installing windows again it seems to be much more stable, now running 275.33
But still not perfect. Got major artifacting in stalker.

I am not running tri sli, im just running two cards. I was just trying to say the asus cards have 2 sli connectors on each card. thought that might be a factor..

All the bus speeds are running at 100.
I am very tempted to update the bios but its something ive never done before and i understand it can be super dangerous :/

Thx again

 

[PilotPlangy]

HAHA!! bios updated! working great.
But not fast enough.. sellin them now lol

 

[PilotPlangy]

Best answer selected by pilotplangy.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

not fast enough? are you sure its not a CPU bottleneck?