Placebo effect, or actual improvement?(now SLIed)

[blaze_125]

So yesterday I changed my PSU and put in a second 560Ti in my rig.
I don't have the sli bridge yet, so the second gpu is just free standing in there and basically doing nothing.
Yet... I played BF3 last night(same settings as before) and it seemed to run alot smoother?

[JJThomp]

I'm thinking placebo effect

[sswilson]

Does BF3 benefit from physx?

[blaze_125]

Originally Posted by sswilson

Does BF3 benefit from physx?

Not that I'm aware.

[Dzzope]

Possible your getting cleaner power and the card and cpu are able to work a bit harder?
Though I can't see that kind of improvement from a psu... more stable and higher oc are possible but that would require you to do some tweaking..

[BrutalGreen]

what motherboard? I believe that one Lucid Virtu multi-gpu thing that didn't quite work that good but let you use AMD and nVidia gpus together on like a total of 2 motherboards doesn't require any kind of bridge...

then again I highly doubt that's your case and this is just placebo!

[blaze_125]

MSI P67A-G43 is my board.
BrutalGreen: From what I quickly read yesterday only the 2xx series driver allowed SLI without the bridge, but that's not really what you're talking about.

Absolutely no modifications were done to either the system or the settings. Only a PSU and an extra GPU... I whish I had kept a FPS log so I could compare and know for sure. It's gotta be placebo.

[Dzzope]

Pull a card and see?

[blaze_125]

So... Same settings once SLIed gave a good 30fps increase
And here is what it's looking like now.

Fwiw, I read in multiple places that running games on 3 monitors required 3 almost identical monitors and it almost kept me away from trying, since almost everything I had read thus far pointed in that direction... Well, as you might be able to see in that picture, I'm running 3 entirely different monitors.

From left to right... 17", 24", and 19".