Am I being bottlenecked?

[Tzamen]

Can you run only 1 card to see the defective one?

[Mokona512]

agreed, it would be good to see the single GPU performance, I do not have much experienced with mismatched clock speeds, but I do know that nvidia's frame pacing freaks out if both cards are not performing the same.

[Master Butters]

So you think one is defective?

[ModJPB]

It is normal to have fluctuations in fps, but give these a try.

update ALL drivers and bios.

I found that crossfire and sli setups suffer from extreme changes in fps. Try running the games with a single GPU.

AMD memory controllers dont like a lot of RAM. Replace your 16GB with 8GB of faster and lower latency RAM. Anything above that is overkill, unless you do film editing. I dont know why people think they need so much memory. It really hasnt been until recently that games have benefited from even more than 4GB. Battle Field 4 and planetside 2 are the only ones that have shown a slight difference from more than 4GB. 6-8GB of memory is the sweet spot before the memory starts to slow down due to higher latencies and reduced bandwidth frequency.

[Otis]

If I am not mistaken, in order to run SLI both of your vid cards have to be identical as in a perfect match

[Master Butters]

If I am not mistaken, in order to run SLI both of your vid cards have to be identical as in a perfect match

I was told that my cards would be fine since they were both 680 4gb cards. I was told that the faster one would just downclock itself to the speeds of the slower one.

[Mokona512]

the latest drivers allow for some mismatch as the frame pacing will try to balance things out, but it is nota perfect process which is why it is best to keep the cards synchronized. some programs such as evga precision and msi afterburner will have options to synchronize the clock speeds for SLI.

Other than that, SLI should not cause huge swings in frame rates unless you have Vsync on which will cause the framerate to snap to multiples of your refresh rate such as 30, 60, 120 FPS

[Master Butters]

I generally don't have Vsync on unless I'm getting over 120fps a lot. (Which never really happens)

[Master Butters]

Can you run only 1 card to see the defective one?

Here are the Heaven benchmarks for each card:




The left one is the Classified card, the right one is the regular version. The Classified card's core is clocked a little higher than the regular, but overall are the same.


EDIT: After having played a couple games (League of Legends and Battlefield 4) I have noticed that I seem to have the same performance (Roughly) with my 1 680 Classified as opposed to 2 680's in SLI. Occasionally in BF4 I noticed my FPS would fall down a lot (I think it fell to around the 30 range on one map), but overall it'd be more static.

I think I might just buy a 780 Ti when I get my tax return this year. lol

[USCG COx]

The cards are not the problem, Your Rig is outstanding and doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

Your bottleneck is Hard Drive.
Boot a game on a Seagate SSD and you will have 0 issues, Case closed!

[Master Butters]

The cards are not the problem, Your Rig is outstanding and doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

Your bottleneck is Hard Drive.
Boot a game on a Seagate SSD and you will have 0 issues, Case closed!

I have League of Legends and BF4 on my Crucial SSD (and my OS) and boot times are super fast. I don't see why my SSD would be killing my FPS as much as it is.

[Peasnriz]

Its not some random process screwing things up, like a virus program downloading a patch or something. (Doesn't really fit though because of the benchmarking you have done.)

[Mokona512]

A hard drive will not impact frame rates as games will load all working data into RAM.

It seems that something is keeping your SLI from taking effect properly. It is improving benchmarks, but it does not seem to be offering the full SLI performance that it should be offering.

2 680's working well in SLI, will easily beat a 780TI, even if it is heavily overclocked.

for example

[Foxbat40]

I think you need to download EVGA Precision software and set your Cards so have synchronized clock speed. This should normalize your FPS. Also make sure your drivers for your Motherboard and Gfx cards are up to date.

I read the entire post before commenting.

[AOD_Syph3n]

I use to run 580s in SLI and I had to always have vsync on just because even if my FPS was decent i would get micro studdering and when the fps would jump or drop because of an explosion or a large field of view it would cause issues. Try just running with Vsync Forced On and just see if you see any improvement at all. And always do the obvious, reseat your cards, the sli bridge, and your ram, ensure everything is snug.

[Deadzone]

Do NOT upgrade to win 8 unless you have used it hands on with a different computer. Its a really bad system.

Sent from my swag using boobies

[Mokona512]

direct x 11 is partially supported on windows 7, mainly all of the gaming related stuff has been ported over.

the current dx 11.1 features on windows 7 are


Direct2D
DirectWrite
Direct3D
Windows Imaging Component (WIC)
Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP)
Windows Animation Manager (WAM)
XPS Document API
H.264 Video Decoder
JPEG XR codec

ID3D11Device1, ID2D1Factory1, IDWriteFactory1, IDXGIFactory2, IWICImagingFactory2, ID3DUserDefinedAnnotation and related APIs are available. Methods that depend on WDDM 1.2 drivers or new Windows Store app APIs are not supported.
Improved Direct3D 11 device interoperability via ID3DDeviceContextState, including the improved interop with Direct2D/DirectWrite
D3D11_FEATURE_DATA_D3D9_OPTIONS feature detection

[VanDS]

if you run a dual screen setup try disconnecting one and play a game on just one screen and see if your FPS change. Dual screen (or more) can hurt FPS sometimes between fullscreen/full windowed modes. Had that happen to me before.
Another thing also is giving geforce-experience a shot. It may not fix your problem but it can make your games more bearable while your rig is being more thoroughly troubleshot by the local AOD geniuses.
v/r,
VanDS

[creamgirL]

It has nothing to do with your SSD at all. You need to unplug and remove your refurbished, 680 4gb because BF4 doesn't even really support SLI anyway. There's no purpose to have one and it's likely causing the problems. Then, you need to set up your ram on an XMP profile at 1.5-1.65v and overclock or just set to 1600 or 1866. Run Memtest on each individual stick of RAM.