My 970's never get above 80C under full load and they are just air cooled. Ambient is around 20 - 25C. A lot of time, fan placement and direction is important especially if you water cool the CPU.

 

 

Vic

 

 

The method of stacking cards in SLI really kills the airflow and I can't find water blocks for the EVGA GTX760SC cards.

 

Checks these guys out.  They do water blocks for non-reference cards.  Linus tech tips recently reviewed a water block from these guys and it looked very high quality.

 

http://www.alphacool.com/index.php

Looks like I have to use the GTX970 block for the EVGA's.  I want a whole-card solution and not just a GPU block.  Thanks for the link.  I'll look into it after the new house is bought and we move in...

What model is your PSU?

 

 

I will check it tonight,.

Gordon, I use a Corsair AX1200i and it has worked superbly.

 

 

I want a whole-card solution and not just a GPU block.

 

Agree, I put a thermal sensor on other parts of my Titan X and it was VERY hot, GPU cooling alone is only one part of the heat exchange equation.  Just want a full water block that I can run thru my existing water cooling loop.

 

Cheers, Rob.

Amazing! This new architecture was supposed to run cooler because it used less power. 

Great for frying eggs on though!!

 

Sunny side up Gentleman?

 

Paul

 

Amazing! This new architecture was supposed to run cooler because it used less power.

It does - try running the same thing on a GTX480. Keep the fire extinguisher handy though. I find my 970's much cooler overall however I then push them harder and the temps start going up again. Cannot blame the card or the architecture.

 

Vic

Well, the excitement wore off quickly for me.

 

Basically no improvement for me with dual 970's (working fine as indicated by the green SLI indicator).

 

Most of the time the green bar is very short (about 1"-2" tall) which would seem to indicate P3D isn't yet very good at distributing the workload across the GPU's.

 

Interested to hear the results of others.

 

 

Most of the time the green bar is very short (about 1"-2" tall) which would seem to indicate P3D isn't yet very good at distributing the workload across the GPU's.

 

Yes i agree... i used the SLI indicator and it didn't move....not really sure what it is meant to do that is fluctuate up and down or stay static?

 

I have been suing the P3D-AFR exe to run SLI and it works no worries, i tried using the P3D exe but just had a blank screen..!

 

SLI is enabled and confirmed...i also just used the stock profile for P3D in inspector rather than my highly tweaked one... seemed to be ok...

 

Hopefully the new driver will make leaps and bounds and we can get rid of these work rounds!

How did you get the SLI indicator to work in P3D  ......

 

I have it ticked under 3D settings but nothing there ....

 

I am spanning over three screens though ... maybe that is why it doesn't work for me??

 

Paul

Can someone give me a refresher on what's CPU vs GPU intenstive in FSX/P3D?

 

SLI is definitely working for me, but at a place like CYSE (Orbx Squamish), I'm only getting 25-ish FPS with both GPU's barely getting over 40% usage.

 

Curious what settings I should be adjusting to play around and test with.

<Clears throat>. In the "old days", the CPU was used to draw the wireframes of 3D objects and the GPU was only used to paint textures onto the wireframes. Of course, this is terribly simplified, but that's the basic concept. The CPU also had a lot of other stuff  that it was designed to do like math and keeping track of the entire app. As GPUs became faster and faster, most 3D app authors started to shift the graphics workload from the CPU to the GPU and they left what was appropriate for the CPU on the CPU. This was mostly fostered by the fact that it is much easier for a user to upgrade a GPU  (which is basically plug and play) than it is to upgrade a CPU, which more often than not requires a new motherboard and new RAM.

 

Given that FSX is a pretty old 3D app, the CPU limits the GPU's ability to do  a lot and this results in a bottleneck. One or more CPU cores run close to 100% and the GPU is sitting around twiddling its silicon thumbs. This is why one can only get so much improvement in FSX by just upgrading the GPU.

 

What's worse is that even though with P3d LM offloaded much of the FSX graphics calculations to the GPU, the way that P3d is multithreaded is that it still has a lot of calculations on Core 0 of the CPU. This not only bottlenecks the GPU, but it also bottlenecks the other CPU cores as well. The only solution is for LM to continue to move as much as possible of the remaining calculation load to  either higher numbered CPU cores or the GPU. nVidia GPUs use CUDA, which also allows them to do much of the arithmetic that a CPU can do. AMD has a similar approach.

 

That's a very short answer trying to cover a detailed issue raised by your question.

 

Curious what settings I should be adjusting to play around and test with.

 

Tessellation, Shadows (cloud, terrain, sim objects), Water, reflections, volumetric fog, high levels of AA (I use 8X MSAA + FXAA).

 

What I've noticed so far is that I can max out all shadow distances (including terrain), enable all shadows (except "flagged content" and "trees") turn on all reflections without as much of a performance hit as single GPU.

 

What I can't do is change Building Autogen (still has to stay at Normal), still have to keep AI traffic at 20%, road traffic at 14%, ships 0%, boats 0%.  High levels of building autogen seems to cause stutters, trees are fine (even Orbx HD trees).

 

Still experimenting with cloud density setting (usually run medium with ASN).

 

Here is a sample using some pretty extreme settings in 4K (settings are in video) with PMDG 737 around Orbx KSEZ ... it's a good test area because of the mountains/hills as they will really give the Terrain shadow system a good workout.  Notice there is an FPS drop when the PMDG 737 HUD is lowered and some stutters over KSEZ.

 

 

GPU's were not overclocked in this test.

 

Cheers, Rob.