MSI 580 LE

[nnospoh]

Hey guys this is my first post, heard rave things about tom's hardware, so I thought I would check here first. I just built a new rig specs in my sig. I opted for the MSI gtx 580 Lightning Extreme editon gpu, everything seems to be working superbly. Only thing I'm curious about is that it runs 99% gpu clock when running fps games, is this normal? I haven't seen it go over 68-70C at load and usually 37C at idle. My main question though is this, There is a row of LEDs on the pcb 12 total 6 green 6 red. What are the purpose of these? The reason I ask is because only 11 of them are lit up and one of the green ones is off(LED34?), does this mean there is some problem I am unaware of? I'm running dual 24" asus monitors. Another thing is I cannot seem to get the colors to match on the monitors, could this have something to do with the gpu?

Thanks for all the help, this is the first time I've had the pleasure of running a setup of this magnitude, so far it's blown me away.

 

[x Heavy]

I own the exact two cards you speak of.

Now according to after burner, my cards in SLI will clock down to 50 when browsing the net, and then crank card one to max before shifting load onto card two. I don't care for the percentage of GPU Clock. I only pay attention to the little pink number overlay with the temp of the top card which usually does not exceed 55 degrees C in gaming. (Battlefield Beta, MOH LE etc)

It runs at about 28 idle bottom card and 32 top card idle because I have a custom fan profile that requires a 60% speed at 30 degrees C and ramps up to 100% at 55 C in separations by 8 separate points in your afterburner.

I do overclock my card with Voltage left alone, 1000 CPU clock, Memory at 2200 etc. both cards are harnessed together both in Afterburner and also in Nvidia control.

Regarding the little LED lights, those are the power phase lights to me. I have my PC on a windows 7 power plan that disallows any sleep, hibernation or any reduction or switching off anything. Always on, all the time. All of it backed by a hefty Cyberpower Sine wave battery capable of giving me 35 minutes of up time; which itself is backed by a Generac house generator that will run weeks.

And make me zombie target in a blacked out city.

The Bios MSI settings are also disabled regarding Euro Power saving, green savings and any of that crap. I think PWM is set to Max so that the LED's above my CPU are all blue all the way across all the time and my cards are bright Red and green with no LED's missing. I see the GPU LED's as how the cards are feeding. If all are full on then the cards have power. It is also a fast way to see if your one or both cards are offline and not receiving power.

*as Capt. Kirk..."full power now damn you Scotty!"

There are switches (Dip kind I think...) on those cards for Liquid Nitrogen Cooling, Don't touch them. Leave em be as they were set by factory.

Getting colors to match on your monitors are beyond my understanding. I use a Samsung Syncmaster PX 2370 over a HDMI cable to card one. I have neither the money or the inclination to add two or three monitors just yet. My wife would divorce me if I did. So I will have to wait until.... a failure of her computer monitor which will take some years yet. (Syncmaster 932bw)

There is something about that LED34 which rings a bell. Maybe you can google it here or in MSI and there might be something about it somewhere. I cannot put my finger on it.

The only issue I have with these fine cards are one. They require a strut to be built in the metal shop and attached to them to hold the weight in the HAF X. I will be replacing that side fan with a Antec Big Boy (Make sure you get rid of that fine dust screen.) to feed those cards some more air with a second big boy Antec inside the slot between the Hotswap drive cages and at the ends of the cards themselves.

When you overclock, back off when your Drivers Nvidia 280.38 beta BF3 fail and recover or when you see small colored squares on your desktop. You really don't need that kind of overclocking, but since it's there, screw it... crank that thing.

Back to your monitor colors. I recall a device with suction cups that you can attach to your monitor to tune it to a certain Red Green Blue value you want off Newegg. *Shrugs.

It's good to be king. The only other cards I should watch for in battle are the richer gamers with the Crossfire 6990's

 

[nnospoh]

Good info man, thanks. You went the opposite of me and sli'd your gpu while I "sli'd" my monitors lol. I will in January buy another card and monitor to run vision surround though. I search around a bit before i posted this as well as after posting here to see if i could find anything on the led34 and still have yet to find anything, was hoping someone on here might know. I just want to know if there is something wrong with the card or not so i can get it taken care of. and yes the card is a beast in size and weight, i got the 3gb one too so. It seems to be secured fairly well in my haf 922 though. as far as the monitor color it is still bugging me, im no graphic artists but it's enough to be bothersome when you have a white page half and half on the middle of both screens and one side is white and the other almost beige. i've played with all the settings i can find, both physical monitor menu calibration as well as nvidia settings and still cannot get the color right. you would think for this high end of hardware there wouldn't be these kinds of problems. $600 for a gpu that destroys most graphic intensive games yet it can't handle simple color calibration for dual monitors? ugh.

 

[nnospoh]

Okay so after taking a closer look, it seems that the LED 34 in question is actually broken off close to the board. Guess this could have something to do with it not lighting up.. Time for an RMA :/

 

[x Heavy]

Maybe a better signal cable will improve your monitors ability to "feed."

Color values are binary in hexdecimal and should display correctly wherever it may be assigned anywhere on a screen.

 

[nnospoh]

Maybe a better signal cable will improve your monitors ability to "feed."

Color values are binary in hexdecimal and should display correctly wherever it may be assigned anywhere on a screen.

What's better than DVI?