• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

A few SLI questions

V

VulcaN

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 22, 2001
Messages
1,917
The cards in question will be evga gtx 580's (x2)

I only play games on one monitor, but I have a second monitor hooked up at all times that I use to display webpages, teamspeak, whatever while in game. It was my understanding that this does impact your gaming performance (or at least it used to) vs only having one monitor.

One of the reasons I wanted to go SLI so that I could have a 3rd device, a projector hooked up to the HDMI port.

1) Does this even further lower my performance in game?
2) If so, does it use less resoruces running in "cloned" mode rather than an extended desktop?
3) Is there any advantage to running a game on the "primary" display or can you run a game / 3d application to any one of the three monitors and get the same performance (assuming all monitors are the same resolution of course)?
4) Is overclocking as easy as starting up EVGA precision and sliding a few sliders? The last time I had to overclock an SLI rig I had to flash the bios on the cards and I'd rather not do that if I dont have to.

Thanks
 
1) I think if you have stuff going on on diffrent monitors it does impact your performance.. Cuz think about it having stuff running on the diffrent screens takes power. That power is taken away from everything else.
2) Im not sure
3) Again im not sure
4) Yes, Well I use Msi Afterburner. I have my overclocked to 825 on the core clock with a slight bump in voltage. Going for 875-900 though... But it is easy to overclock them now. Just use like Furmark to test for stability...
 
If you turn a monitor off, is it still costing performance because it is still outputting the data on that channel or is it smart enough to not render anything for a display that is turned off?
 
In running a similar setup (3 displays + projector), there's some gotcha's to it

You might have to pick between 3 /4 displays or SLI in the profile (that might be because my stuff isn't hdcp ready).. that's easy enough to do, but the drivers sometimes freak out and change where the start menu is located. No idea on 3d, but I usually have a movie playing on the projector, supreme commander is on two of the screens, and a web browser on the other (usually RDP'd into another machine to keep an eye on it)

The secondary display hasn't made any difference when gaming on the primary display that I've noticed, but there might be some. The only time i've noticed an issue is when the sound drivers get mixed up between the different audio outputs (xbmc to receiver, pc to the monitors speakers) and I get a studder, but that's a software issue with the build of xbmc i'm using. I can move the game/movie/other desktop items around to the different displays without any hits in performance.

I'm running all of mine on 460's, so if there was a big hit I would think it would show up as my cards are way slower then those 580's. I do have the cpu overclocked and 16GB of ram, not sure how much impact that makes on things. I'll prob add another card to drive the projector so I can use 460's in SLI while I have everything else going on (gt 430 or similar)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top