Some info on my SLI upgrade

[dlb]

Here's the info... my full system specs:
AMD PhenomII Quad Core 955 Black Edition at stock 3.20ghz; 6gb DDR2-800 (recently upgraded from 4gb); 3 SATA2 hard drive (750gb, 320gb, 250gb; will soon be upgrading to 1.5gb, 750gb, 500gb); two IDE/PATA DVDRW optical drives; 900w Topower PowerBird fully modular power supply; two NVidia GTX260 video cards in SLI (one by Zotac, the second one just added is by Sparkle).

The newer add-on Sparkle GTX260 had slightly lower clocks; the defaults were 590mhz GPU clock, 999mhz memory clock (advertised as 1000mhz), and the shader clock was 1296mhz. I used NVidia System Tools to overclock this Sparkle card to match the clocks on the Zotac GTX260 I already had installed. The first screenshot attached is from my original Zotac, the second is from the Sparkle showing the overclock and the default clocks.... I'll be running some benchmarks later, and will post the results if anyone cares.

Actually - I'll post the bench results whether anyone cares or not!

[dlb]

For some reason, my screenshots didn't attach . . . I'll try again . . . . the first one is from the Zotac GTX260 which was factory overclocked, the 2nd screenshot is from the add-on Sparkle, which I had to OC myself (which was remarkably simple using NVidia System Tools), and it shows the both the OC clocks (they match the Zotac card) and the default factory clocks . . . benchmark results will follow.

[dlb]

The NVidia System Tools worked great for on-the-fly overclocking, but upon restarting the PC, the default clocks came back, it's settings didn't "stick". I tried using RivaTuner, which I had used in the past to ramp up my fan speeds, but it didn't want to behave either. I ended up using eVGA Precision to OC the Sparkle card to match the Zotac card (otherwise the Zotac would be forced to clock itself down to match the slower default clocks of the Sparkle card). After several restarts, the clock speeds and the fan settings are still where they should be. I lock my video card fans at 70%. It's a good balance between noise and cooling. If I use the "auto" fan function, they idle at about 53c which is too high; at 70% they idle at a max of 42c on a hot day, at 3am in idle mode they never get over 38c....

[dlb]

I'm pretty sure that nobody is really interested in my new SLI setup . . . . . . I'm only posting all this in the hopes that it will help someone else who is venturing into the SLI arena and has questions or problems.

I just noticed that the second GPU-Z screenshot above from the Sparkle card shows the 'Subvendor' as being BFG Technologies!!! Weird!

[theefool]

Well, interested, but didn't have much to say. Read it all though.

Though, I wouldn't mind see the case results.