What to do with my 2 8800gtxs in SLI -_-

[RA3KW0N]

So I grabbed a couple watercooled BFG Watercooled 8800GTXs earlier this year at a great price, $330 for both!

I'm currently game at 1680x1050 running on Vista 64-bit, and they're working pretty well. I can play Crysis Warhead at gamer settings at 1600xwith 4x AA, looks fantastic. However, recently I've been hit by that incredibly annoying "display driver not responding" that requires a hard reset when I'm running Warhead. Played around with drivers, ntune, GPU clocks, RAM timings, hardware voltages, etc. having a hard time ridding myself of this problem.

A lot of benchmarks show 2 8800gtx in SLI comparable to a siGTX 280, with GTX 280's prime advantage being that it has higher minimum framerates, offering smoother gameplay, which I can definitely imagine to be 100% true. The funny thing was that since I did a fresh install of Vista64 about a month ago, I've been playing games (CoD4 mostly) maxed out with SLI turned off and didn't really notice any sluggishness or poor performance until I tested out Warhead . Original Crysis played fine with my old setup of Vista64 with SLI enabled, so I'm not too sure if it's a DX10 issue.

And since I've turned SLI on, and started gaming, damn... these 8800GTXs are boiling my watercooling lol.

What do you guys think I should do? I love these cards... but what's the better option overall? Sell em both while they go for a decent price and invest in a GTX 280 + full waterblock ($$$$$$), or stick with it and try to fix that driver not responding error, and perhaps wait until GTX 280 falls in price?

I may upgrade to 1900x1200 res soon. As for system specs, I'm currently running an EVGA 780i, Q6600 @ 3.6ghz, 4GB RAM, and watercooling CPU, NB, GPU, GPU

[bojangles]

You're saying that it's heating up your watercooling considerably. Try taking one card out and see if it would help the temps because it could be that the driver is recovering from an overheat issue. There may not be good contact with the waterblock. If you still have the stock heatsinks see if you can put one back on and see if you get the same issue. Hope this helps.

[RA3KW0N]

the cards do heat up but not too much to make me worry that they're facing iminent hardware damage. highest load temps are 75C on one card (the one closest to the bottm of the case) because of the way I set up the water to go in/out of the block.

My case doesnt allow for too much flexibility for barbs + tubing to come out of the underside of the bottom card's waterblock because it gets too close to the case floor.

Top card idles at like 45C and doesnt go far past 60C under load.
Bottom card idles about 10C higher (55C) and goes to like 75C under load.

I can imagine that aircooled 8800gtxs will load at well over 80C so I don't think heat is the issue.

[reaverclan]

not bad my gtx 280 ssc on crysis normal will load at 74c with 16q its 79-82c lol that's on air stock cooler edit: the gtx 280 will also actually throttle down its clocks for normal pc use which is nice, and at idle its 54c which is cause my room is allways hot lol.

[zlojack]

Are both waterblocks the same?

If so, you can run the cards in parallel and the temps will be about even.

[Cranky]

You should try a variety of games, and synthetic benches before thinking it's directly related to your card(s), and or drivers. Cryteck doesn't have the greatest record for stability. I would keep those cards for a while to come; when looking at benches of a pair of 9800GTX's in SLI(overall performance difference between 8800GTX, and 9800GTX are minuscule) they perform well enough in newer games. If you want a new card, the GTX260(216 SP) performs very well for an around $300.00 price point on sale.

GeForce GTX 260 reloaded vs. the Radeon HD 4870 1GB - The Tech Report - Page 1

[Sniper]

Also what rad are you using? What's your total cooling setup? Maybe it's not enough for the cards plus everything else?

Also do you have the latest drivers?

[RA3KW0N]

Originally Posted by zlojack

Are both waterblocks the same?

If so, you can run the cards in parallel and the temps will be about even.

Hey zlojack, what do you mean by running the cards in parallel? Do you mean running them without the SLI bridge?

I'll draw a picture and show you guys so you guys can see why one card is hotter than the other.

[zlojack]

Well, the parallel thing causes much debate.

With lower flow and the inlets and outlets set up a certain way, it will work.

However, I think you'd be better off to just run the cards in series (ie one after the other)

Also, what's the total watercooling setup look like?

[RA3KW0N]

Originally Posted by Sniper

Also what rad are you using? What's your total cooling setup? Maybe it's not enough for the cards plus everything else?

Also do you have the latest drivers?

Heat's not really the problem, I'm trying to say. My loop stay relatively at a decent temperature.

Anyways, I think the issue with crysis warhead is an isolated incident. COD5 doesnt show any problems, I think it runs DX10 as well, and uses dual video support.

I guess I can't really complain... I was just worried about system stability in general.... *puts on pirate hat + eyepatch.