BF2S Forums good ol SLi

Lol. That page says that I need a 600+ watt PSU to run my system... Absolutely not true. I have a nice 480 and it works like a charm because it supplies LOADS of amps.... Amps are the "beefy" part of a good PSU, not the watts. Any PSU can supply you with enough watts, but amps is what you need to get things going.

But that's besides the point. The line in question has nothing to do with the PSU. If anything it would simply reboot the PC (usually) if it cannot supply enough power to your units. I'm guessing that the stripe you're seeing is there because of either:

1) Bad memory block on GPU (try each card alone to find out)
2) Bad configuration of your SLI (try altering config to find out)
3) Loose connection on card/cables (try checking your cables)
4) Bad IRQ assignment to shared IRQs (sometimes happens if you do not run BIOS as PnP)

Hope this info helps.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but watts=volts x amps. If you got watts you got amps, because all the voltages in computer power supplies are fixed. 480 watts is barely enough to run one 7900gtx.

PheloniusRM wrote:

Sorry to burst your bubble, but watts=volts x amps. If you got watts you got amps, because all the voltages in computer power supplies are fixed. 480 watts is barely enough to run one 7900gtx.

Yeah, so explain to me why most 480 watt PSUs can handle a en EATX or BTX connector ? I'll tell you why, because it DOESN'T SUPPLY ENOUGH AMPS ! 12 amps on the 5v is NOT enough for EATX.

In pure physics you'd be right, volts x amps = watts, but on a PSU where you have 3.3v, 5v and 12v there are DIFFERENT AMOUNTS OF AMPS for each of these voltages. Which is why I'm saying his problem has NOTHING to do with the PSU.

Crazyfool_OA wrote:

Actually, I think you'll find that not having enough current available on the 12v rail to run all your crap, will cause the 12v rail to drop in voltage, which means you no longer have 12v, which tends to fuck things up that like to have 12v rather then 11.2v, like graphics cards.
I'm not saying his problem IS not having enough juice, but you'd be supprised how many times I have answered this sort of question in the same way and upgrading to a decent PSU has magically fixed the problem.

True that..... However, this is usually only the case once the PSU gets "a little older", for some reason or other I only encounter the "magic bullet" when the PSU is about 1-2 years old. A rule of thumb is that you drop about 1% of the PSUs power every month of service it sees (most people dont light up their PC enough to observe this problem, before the PC is so old they need to buy a new one, and get a better CPU to go with it, thus never experiencing the problem). My point was that many (even brand new) PSUs tend to have not enough amps to cut the muster. A simple EATX or BTX MB REQUIRES 15 amps whre even a brand new HIPER-x PSU will only supply 12, SPECIFICALLY for the reason that it tries not to "dip" the rail below a specific threshold (ie 11v on the 12v). But not knowing more about the rig he is using, we can only guess.

The point here being that if the dude sees a SINGLE "bad" line when using SLi, then it's not the PSU because if there wasn't enough power to go around the SLi'ed card would not be the only thing to not get enough power, and you'd have more than a single line on your monitor that fails.....

After this lenghty discussion on weird PSU configs, I'm rather hoping that the poster will return with some simple explaination like: "I forgot to plug the card in"....

<SS>SonderKommando wrote:

its the sli scaling deal. go into your card options on the sli multi gpu tab and uncheck it. you can find more about this on nvidia's website. its basically showing the load level on both of the two video

This is the exact problem. I spent the best part of a day, numerous reboots and reinstall of drivers trying to figure out why the hell I had a 'progress' bar on the side of my screen that only showed in 3D programs like games.

You'll find it under the 'Enable SLI' check box. Just uncheck it, and it will disappear.