Zeggi

Hey!

ive got a question about SLI setup, im runing 2 asus 6600GT TOP @ 607/1270
now when enable the GPU load balance i get a long bar to the left that goes vertical and a small one horizontal that goes upp and down its near the middle now lowering the Resulotion in games from 1600*1200 > 1280*1024 the meter goes down a bit, NOW my question is how do i read the meter? the higher it goes the more load on both? or is it a balanced meter that show what card gets the most load, if it goes up the top gfx cards gets more load and VV.

im playing Guild Wars alot and noticed that the game is runing reall slow when to much details show up, like 15characters and a bunch of ligt effects thats in battle in a mission mode, while runing around in a city with over 100players and many details the games runs smoothly. i have no idea whats wrong with the game, cause sometimes i have to lower the res to 1280*1024 to prevent it from crashing, the temps are @ 40-43 on both cards..

CPU amd64 newcastle 3500+ @ 2,55ghz 1,6v
Geilddr @ 533mhz 3-4-4-8 2,9
Asus A8N SLI Deluxe
Asus 6600GT TOP @ 607/1270
OCZ 450W Modstream
wd 36gb 10krpm
wd 74gb 10krpm
pioneer a08
plextor 24x

All this is cooled by waterchill dualrad set
in game play i get the following temps
Cpu 50-46
SyS 33-35
VGA1 40-43
VGA2 38-41

would be thankfull for a few answers.

HawgsHead

Dont feel bad. I couldnt figure it out eather.When I first put my SLi rig togther and saw that thing I thought my ULTRA's were screwed up BIG time.I didnt know how to make it go away.A few days later I figured it out.But beats the heck outta me on how to read the thing.What is that rig 3DMARK05ing???6000 or so?????Mabye Z knows something about it....Hey Z,whats up with the green bars on SLi rigs????

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Rig specs to the left in the boxes....X-Box 360 w/Hitachi 42" HDTV....If Darwins theory of evolution is true then why are monkeys still monkeys?It takes much more faith to believe in Darwin's theory over the Genesis account of creation.

Zardon

Its quite simple to understand and equally as important for troubleshooting and for testing your own profiles. imagine the top half of your screen being rendered by card 1 and the bottom half of the screen being rendered by card 2.

check here for more information on that

basically if you look at the crude graphic I threw up above, and look at no1 and no2, you will see this is showing the load meter for both card 1 and 2.

the horizontal bar No.3 sli meter, should in an ideal SLI situation remain totally in the middle of the screen (such as with 3dmarks), however this is not always the case and frequently if you make your own profiles for games and they dont work correctly you will see this line lower to the bottom of the screen, meaning that card 1 at the top is handling all the rendering - other rendering modes should be tried in this situation. This is an invaluable option to use when testing games and rendering methods.

HawgsHead

Thanks Z!

__________________
Rig specs to the left in the boxes....X-Box 360 w/Hitachi 42" HDTV....If Darwins theory of evolution is true then why are monkeys still monkeys?It takes much more faith to believe in Darwin's theory over the Genesis account of creation.

Zardon

make sense now?

Zeggi

thanks for the post, and well i think everyone that plugged in a sli rig comes to that conclusion "my cards fucked"

anyway about 3dmark05 i get 7600, im kinda happy with that, ive done some changes since lasttime i benched it. going to do another soon, since you brought it up

Thanks for the the drawing Zardon, so i guess when im playing GW and it stays @ the middle or atleast near it its runing in SLI Mode and lets both card handle the rendering, when i play the game i get sometimes some mayor laggings all the players and movment goes reall slow and gives some hacks no not jumps cause by the arenanet server... when i lowered the res. i noticed the bar go down ALOT, it was in the middle of the 2nd red bar so i guess that means the rig isnt runing that well and the sli config is kinda usless... ive read some about SLI and noticed that runing in normal gfx settings, res, antiali. the sli config is useless while runing everything in mayor settings you see the benefits. so i guess il just push everygame to the limit

THANKS again for the great ex.drawing, and ofcouse great forum

Zeggi

BTW another question is about the Coolbit, i have dld it before and jsut executed it and when i look it up in regedit its set to 3 not 8, the difference well, when having it in 3 as it was in the begining, i get to OC the cards, the sli rendering mode has only 2 settings, single or dual rendering mode and you have another option called, additional Direct3D settings. where you can change the rendering framerates ahead in d3d mine is set to 3, dunno if the coolbit sett to 3 is better? or worse. when changing to 8 i get to choose the alternate rending method 2 and runing GW the Bars are F***ED the middle one is still and the vertical is shifting the high and low and it looks like GFX buging, like oc:ing to much

any ideas or tips, whats the difference bettwen 3/8 and benefits

Thanks again

Zardon

The best way to run SLI and im serious. is to install the offical Nvidia drivers, and install NO tweaks or third party software, if you want to overclock the cards use the built in options with the newest offical drivers. The last offical drivers did not allow overclocking incidentally so make sure on SLIZONE you are running the latest set.

SLI is still quite fragile and the trick is to keep the installation as simple and clean as possible.

Zeggi

yeah that sounds like a good ide, BUT im runing Xp64 and i installed the drives and i think that thoose dont support SLI, since i have no options leting me turn on sli. :/ so now back to Beta 76.71

HawgsHead

Not for me.I'm running the X-Treme-G 76.50's from Tweaks-r-us.com.My 3DMARK05's are 700 points higher than with the vanilla Forceware drivers nVIDIA has out now.I dont know why,but it juat runs better.And is quite stable.

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Rig specs to the left in the boxes....X-Box 360 w/Hitachi 42" HDTV....If Darwins theory of evolution is true then why are monkeys still monkeys?It takes much more faith to believe in Darwin's theory over the Genesis account of creation.

Zardon

Ive used those drivers, they are just lower IQ. thats why. Driver tweakers dont write any code, they just alter the settings within the offical drivers. imagine a rope with a dude called IQ on one side and another dude called performance on the other side. you pull one way, the other moves. the only people capable of making drivers faster with no IQ drops are the creators, meaning nvidia in this case. I could give you a set right now which would score another 1000 points higher than xtreme, but would you want them? if you dont mind crap IQ then yes maybe !

moral of the story, dont solely rate a driver on a 3dmark score.

Sandok

Zardon, you hit the spot!

Zeggi

ok now im back to my 76.71 withouth coolbit and well runing GW shows me the bar you said BUT this time the 3rd bar is totaly still and i have the no1 and no2 bar moving in stereo upp and down, not that far from the top and bottom but still they move, its not like before. when the no1 and no2 bar was still and the 3rd horz bar was moving upp and down near the middle.

hope you understand me, and maybe have a solution or any idea whats wrong?

and ohh btw i only have to settings for rendering, not 4-5. i got single card renedring or multi
is that right?

Zardon

Ok there still seems to be some confusion here. perhaps I still didnt explain it well enough.

The horizontal bar (3 SLI METER) in the picture above, ideally should be in the middle of the screen not moving at all, this means that the screen display is being perfectly split in two so both cards are handling the rendering equally. With me so far?

As for the bars moving on the left in an upward and downward motion, that is correct, that is card load. Just like if you hit control alt delete and went into the performance tab.

Zeggi

oohh, hehe well @ first i had the 1 and 2 just still while the 3rd bar was moving upp and down... so now its like you say. its totaly still the 3rd that is, while 1-2 move a little but they are bassicly as close the top/bottom as they can get so none is near the middle so it means it works playing gw but that means that both cards are almost maxed out in load :S but then again i play @ 1600*1200 AA4x and all other settings to highest.

ARGH!
edit part

Now playing its as i said @the start, the no1 and 2 are totaly still not showing any movement they are green adn still, while the 3rd bar is moving around the middle.
so either im doing something wrong or my drivers are F---- cause only option i have to choose in the driver is SLI multirendering or single and its set to multi.... i have no idea of what to do now, cause the xp64 drivers that you rec dont even have sli enable mode on em.. so im stuck with the 76 drivers untill new ones comeout for xp64