GTX 480 SLI...need help :(

F

Fabio

New Member
hey guys

i just finished building my new pc the other day and im having some issues with my graphics cards...

everything was running smooth today until my computer locked up playing a game, i couldnt bring up the task manager to close the program and instead had to force the PC off.

since then my display will turn off every 5-10 mins, for a second and a message will pop up on the task bar saying that my video driver has recovered from an error

it also seems that my graphics cards are running really hot, like REALLY hot :(

any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you in advance
 
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Are you running the latest drivers? What kind of PSU do you have? Have you tried loading a restore point before this happened? Were you playing other games just fine before this happened? And these cards run really hot in the first place especially in SLI, but they can also take the heat. As long as your not idling at 95c then you should be fine. If heat is a concern then maybe you will want to look into maybe getting a new case or more fans, not sure what you have right now.
 
yep im using the latest drivers, i havnt tried a restore point as it didnt really occur to me that it could be software related...

i know these cards run hot but i didnt expect this much, my idle temps are around 60c

oh and my PC specs are in my sig :)
 
in the first to slots, i had thought about seperating them but if i understand correctly i would lose some performance...? i would rather crank all the fans up lol and im not sure if the temps are the reason for the strange goings on

i just wanna play some games already :(

does any body think i could have a faulty card?
 
Yea, you'll lose some performance running 16/8X, but only like 3 or 4%. I'm running one of mine in 8x rather than having the top card run 10c hotter because it's sucking hot air. If I had 480s I'd separate them and run a slot cooler between them.
 
you would think they would be able to run next to each other, coz what would happen if I wanted to run three way or even quad sli? my case has a massive 200m fan on the side facing the graphics cards but it doesn't seem to be spinning very fast, is there a way I could crank it up? it is the only fan I have hooked up to the motherboard...

I think I will try one card at a time aswell, do u think I could have damaged one already?
 
I don't know how they expect high end cards to maintain cooling when there's no space between them for airflow. My 775 MB is a 2-way Xfire with a two slots between the two 16x slots so there's about 1" between the two GPUs. When I bought my current three-way SLI board I never thought about the slot spacing until I went to put the second card in. Then I just sat there thinking, I'll bet the top card's gonna run too hot. I do know that my next board will be a two-way Xfire/SLI with adequate spacing between the 16x slots - I'm never gonna run three GPUs anyway.

Run some benchmarks with them where they are like 3DMark06, 3DMark Vantage, Ungine Heaven, or the Crysis benchmark and take some temp readings at idle and at load. Then separate the cards and do the same thing again. That's what I did before I separated mine. I gave up 2 FPS in Crysis, (55.5 FPS - 53.6 FPS), 6c at idle, (55c - 61c), and 9c at load, (73c - 82c)

You should find some fan speed adjustment in the BIOS if the fan is attached to a MB header marked SYS_FAN or OPT_FAN, (but not PWR_FAN), under hardware monitor or PC Health heading. It may be turning max already. If it's attached to a PWR_FAN header it is turning max. Those big fans aren't meant to spin very fast.
 
thanks for all the replieis by the way, much appreciated...

i did look in the bios settings and tried to crank the side fan and cpu fan all the way up but it made no difference

i dont know if i will even have enough time to run a bench test, coz when i tried to launch metro 2033 last night the resolution was set to the lowest and the menu came up all distorted to the point where i had to force the game to shut down

i might try switching them around, and then running one at a time, and ill try and post some pics of my system
 
ok this is starting to drive me nuts!

I tried a restore with no luck, and I even reformatted the pc to start fresh... it seems to be worse!

can this be doing damage to other parts in the computer?
 
I'd pull the top card out and move the lower card up to start. No, I don't think a bad GPU can do any damage other than to maybe your OS. Very nice build BTW.
 
thanks man, I'm really starting to lose my patience now I've pull the cards out and tried them both individually... and still the same problem :(
 
Well, I don't think you have two bad cards, but your issue is obviously video related. Hmm. Could be the MB I suppose.

At this point I'd probably start with fresh video driver install for each card individually with a restart. If that doesn't help then a different GPU altogether.
 
ok, i think i have come to the conclusion that it is a problem with the driver...

at the moment i am using the drivers that came on the disc with my cards, fingers crossed :)
 
ok... im now using nvidia's 258.96 drivers, which is the second most rescent driver on there site and a clean install of windows 7 64bit (i havnt installed any other drivers off my motherboard disc)

the error message i was getting before "display driver stopped responding and has recovered" hasnt come up again but my computer still crashes!

now im not so sure what the problem is... has anybody had a similar issue or even heard of this before? i dont even know where to look now :(
 
Originally I was going to post that I doubted that could be the issue, but I see that the last four BIOS updates have been to address stability. If you're not running 1005, I'd update.
 
thanks for your help jevery, i really appreciate it

i decided to take my PC into Umart where i got all my parts from this morning before work so they can run some tests over night and see if any parts are faulty...

just really sucks coz ive been looking forward to building this baby for the past couple of months :(

so close... yet so far...
 
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