joedaley617

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Jan 1, 2012
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I'm getting bad scaling in most games after adding a second EVGA GTX560ti Superclocked. In games like COD4, Portal 2, BFBC2, and Mafia II, my performance is great. I get almost perfect scaling in those. However, in games like L4D and BF3, I get very low usage of each card, and my framerate either does not improve (L4D), or drops considerably (BF3). I understand BF3 has had problems with SLI, but L4D? Across the board however, I'm not getting a consistent usage. In Cod4, my usage sometimes drops between 80% and 60%, with my FPS going down to about 190.

I'm running on the latest drivers. Specs below:

AMD Phenom II X4 975 @ 3.6 GHz
EVGA GTX560 Ti Superclocked x2
8GB DDR3 1600mhz
750w PSU
Gigabyte 990fxa-ud3 mobo



1920x1080 res.
 
since your gfx power goes unused on load, the bottleneck might be somewhere else. anyway, did you update all the drivers and gamne patches?
imo the phenom cpu is the prime suspect for bottleneck.
next could be the pcie lanes on the second slot... is it x4 or x8?
use a program like msi afterburner/gpu z for gfx card monitoring and cpu-z/hwmonitor/speccy for cpu and system monitor. if your cpu keeps hitting 100% while gfx cards go less used, the cpu might be the bottleneck.
 

Ferinthul

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Jan 2, 2012
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Bottleneck from the CPU
OC it or get a better one.

BF3 isnt just a graphics intensive game, it also uses the CPU a lot so i think the drop in usage is caused by the cpu.

Cheer up, people are here to help you. Its not helping your case any if youre calling people dense and getting angry from people helping you.
 

clutchc

Titan
Ambassador
Just what is the concern you seem to have with this "usage' thing? SLI doesn't scale perfectly with many games, if that is what you are refering to. I for one don't see any issue as long as you are getting good/excellent framerates. If you are experiencing 'stuttering' however while still experiencing good framerates (and blaming it on usage) , that's sometimes common with 2 cards.
 
math...i don't like math....
lessee... stock gtx 560ti can use roughly 15 amps, higher if overclocked.
sli would use roughly 30 amps at stock, more if overclocked..
i think i saw a guru 3d article where a gtx 560ti used like 196w on load.this one uses over 200w.
i am assuming that amuffin meant the overall ampere requirement. i could be wrong.
@OP: the fps drop seems like a software problem. i read from this following article that bf3 is fps-locked by frostbite engine at 200 fps.
http://vr-zone.com/articles/amd-radeon-hd-7970-quad-crossfirex-the-stock-air-cooling-champion/14444.html
so the fps drop you are experiencing might be from the fps throttling..
 


How is 188w over 200w? :heink:
 
ugh.. this is why i don't like math. i always ... well..
okay. how about this review? i am not trying to argue with you, i am just trying to make sense of the numbers. tpu's says that the (maximum) power was measured for the card, not calculated like guru3d. however, i'd take real life measurements over benchmarks anyday. afaik reviewer sites usually use clean pcs to test hardware.
 

The line :-
Just like the GTX 580 and GTX 570, the GTX 560 comes with a current limiter system which reduces clocks and performance in case the card senses it is overloaded by stress testing applications. We disabled this feature for our "Maximum"
is enough to throw that result out of the window. I have not disabled that feature on my cards therefore they are not using that much power.
 

ah. makes sense.
i should have noticed that in the review.
thanks mousemonkey. :)