GTX 680 Throttling and temperature issue

[owlovethbl]

I recently added a second GTX 680 to my rig, in SLI with the first one.

The top card is a Palit GTX 680, and the second is an MSI twin Frozr II GTX 680. Neither card is overclocked.

According to EVGA PrecisionX, the Palit card is idling at 810mhz GPU with idle temps of 43°C, while the MSI card is idling at 342mhz GPU with idle temps of 30°C.

I know the MSI card has better cooling at stock, but why is the Palit card not throttling down to the same mhz as the MSI card when idling? I've set the global power properties in NVidia Control Panel to adaptive, but the cards are still having this issue. It's annoying that NVidia Control Panel doesn't tell you if it's applying changes to one card or both.

So what can I do to make the Palit card lower it's idle GPU clock?

 

[owlovethbl]

Could still be hardware, it just means Direct X stopped responding.

I'm going to guess at this point your PSU isn't outputting enough power for both GPU's, they are both pretty power hungry. I didn't see you had SLI on a 750W, especially with 680's pulling almost 200W each. You might need a bigger and good quality PSU.

If you really want to confirm, I'd test each GPU in each PCIe slot and see if there are any issues. If everything is flawless in that situation, you might be looking at power related issues. You have basically ruled out everything else.

How long should I test each card for, before I can say for sure that it's running with no problems?

As long as it would normally take to crash, 4-5 hours of gaming on Ultra detail I assume.

Teh thign is, these crashes aren't happening under load. Sometimes they are, but they're also happening during light use (watching netflix, browsing internet etc). I'm very sure the BSODs are not related to the amoutn of load on the system.

 

[Alec Mowat]

Just use it normally for awhile and see if it happens. If it good for a long period, a couple days or more, try the other card. Than try both again.

 

[RobCrezz]

Could still be hardware, it just means Direct X stopped responding.

I'm going to guess at this point your PSU isn't outputting enough power for both GPU's, they are both pretty power hungry. I didn't see you had SLI on a 750W, especially with 680's pulling almost 200W each. You might need a bigger and good quality PSU.

If you really want to confirm, I'd test each GPU in each PCIe slot and see if there are any issues. If everything is flawless in that situation, you might be looking at power related issues. You have basically ruled out everything else.

He already has a good quality unit with more than enough power.


OP, have you tried a fresh re-installation of windows and all the drivers? Just so we can determine if it is software or hardware issue?