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What is causing this slowness/instability?

Ryan7968

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 2, 2004
Messages
316
edit: Fixed, and I believe the issue was due to voltages. All I know for sure is that it takes more voltage on the vcore and QPI voltage to be stable at my 4.0GHz overclock when both cards are installed.

i7 930 @4.0Ghz
Corsair H50
MSI Big Bang X-Power
12GB Corsair Dominator 1600
GTX480
Crucial C300 128GB
3 x 1TB drives
Sparkle 1250W

I built this PC last August. I only overclock the CPU and for almost a year it has been super stable. That was until this week when I added a second GTX480.

Immediately this second card made my system unstable. It had trouble posting so I dropped the overclock and it is running at defaults. It will post and boot into Windows 7 64bit, but everything is excruciatingly slow to the point that I'm not sure how it is even running. I've never seen anything like the behavior it is showing when it boots into Windows 7. Latest Nvidia drivers are installed and just to be clear, when the second card is installed and Windows loads everything is basically jacked up to the point of being unusable and I do not get a notification to enable SLI or see any SLI options in the Nvidia control panel.

The new GTX480 appears to be good. Either GTX480 works just fine as a solo card. They are not the same brand although both are the stock speeds reference design.

Does anyone have an idea of what to try before I go really deep down the troubleshooting rabbit hole?
 
Last edited:
Did you plug in the SLI Bridge and all the power connectors?
 
I did plug in the SLI bridge. I'm at work right now and it is donning on me that I should have maybe tried it without the bridge just to see if the behavior was different.

Both cards have the proper power plugged into them. The motherboard has a PCI-E 6 pin power connector that is plugged in. The motherboard also has two of the 8 pin cpu power connectors, however only one of those is plugged in at the moment since my PSU only came with one cable for that connection. I've ordered a 6pin PCI-E to 8 pin ESP cable to let me plug in the second 8 pin connection.

My mobo BIOS needs to be updated from 1.2 to 1.6 (which I will do this evening).
 
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