This is my first Sli setup so i need some extra help to be honest. So I can run valley perfectly fine with a score of almost 4k but when ever i try to run heaven benchmark it crashes once it gets to the 10th scene. Far Cry 4 at ultra im not getting great frames. BF4 getting good frames but is really hard to oc with SLI. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
just upgraded from 660ti sli and it is all about the drivers. I overclocked with sli the same as a single card I set my weakest card as the 1st gpu and oc sli was awesome when games supported it fully but not all games were created equally
As Barry says, not all games support SLI equally. One game can be perfectly stable on a certain overclock setting whereas another will crash, which I have seen several times. Additionally, the weakest card will dictate your overclocking limit - I used to have a trio of GTX 580s that I could barely overclock because of this. IMHO, I think using the Heaven 2.0 benchmark is the best way to test GPU stability. Run it for at least 2-3 hours, ideally 12.
Temperature (ie from overclocking) or system instability can cause crashing. What kind of case do you have, and is it well ventilated? Also is your CPU overclocked? SLI requires more CPU power than single cards, so if your CPU isn't fast enough to mitigate the CPU overhead, your performance will be limited..
I'd put the most powerful card as GPU1 (top) and the weaker as GPU2 (bottom). This to ensure that you have the highest boost clocks when playing games that dont support SLI. Also the more powerful card should have higher ASIC and therefore run cooler than the poor card which is good since GPU1 always gets hotter than GPU2.
I agree with this - you want your best Card as the top Card, as not all games support sli. Just test each Card seperately what they can reach in OC, and set it to what the weakest Card can obtain, while using them in sli.
I have a fractal Design R5 with 4 140mm Noctua Server Fans so yeah defiantly well ventilated. temps for the bottom card are about 72 and the top is 79 so no over heating just it crashes on Heaven 4.0 and bf4 usages hit 100 but never stay at 100 and I just want to get every bit of performance
Well that may not explain the crashes then, but it could explain the poor performance. As I said earlier, SLI requires more CPU grunt than single cards, so I'm pretty sure you're CPU bottlenecked. After you find out the source of your instability, I would try overclocking the CPU as it should improve your performance.. As for the crashes, look at Event Viewer to see if you can get a clue as to what's causing it exactly.
I just oced the CPU to 4.1 seems alittle better but I see in Afterburner the CPU cores are hovering around 90% in bf4 not 100% and Im still not getting 100% gpu usage. No event handler error for the heaven Crash don't see anything yet still crashes
Getting 100% GPU usage is conditional, and not guaranteed. Factors which influence SLI efficiency are how well the game exploits multiGPU, the quality of the SLI profile, how fast your CPU is, what settings you have enabled etcetera.. For example, just turning on V-sync will lower your GPU usage because it imposes an FPS limit.. Personally, I wouldn't worry about my GPU usage as long as the game is delivering high frame rates with consistency and fluidity.. It's probably a hardware event then. Does it happen in games as well, or is it just benchmarks?
Just heaven 4.0. BF4 crashes once in a while but its the sound loop crashes that every has posted about.
If Heaven is the only thing that's crashing, then it might be because the program is corrupt somehow. I would run some other benchmarks to make sure though..
3d mark I get a score of 14000 with the firestorm 4000 with valley on extreme and none of my games crash except for bf4 with its usual ea junk problems
