GPU Temperature question

[p dandy]

I got two cards in SLI (sli mode enabled in control panel) and I'm running a game. Is it normal to see one card be higher temperature than the other one? From what I'm seeing one is at 70 and the other is 43. Therefore, it looks like only one card is being used while the other is idling.

Is my computer only using one card? Is it possible for a game to top out at one card how some games don't always use all the cores? I'm just trying to understand the situation here. Take note that this is not an extremely graphics intensive game so would SLI not load balance in this case?

 

[Genocidicbunny]

If they're close together, one of the cards could have bad airflow and thus not be heated that much. On the other hand, 70C isnt that bad for a gpu.

 

[p dandy]

Yeah I'm not too worried about that 70C. That's with the fan at 40%. With the fan at 100% I can get it down to around 60C under load.

My actual question is concerning my observation that one is at 70 and the other is at 40 which kind of implies that the 2nd card in the SLI is not being used. Just curious about this situation. If a game is not super graphics intensive (Cyrsis level) will it not have any use for the 2nd card?

 

[3141592]

Unless you have a very crazy airflow in your case it means that SLI isn't being utalized. Make sure the re-install the drivers and check if the game your playing will use SLI, and good test to see if the problem is with the graphics card or drivers would be to download either the crysis demo or a futuremark benchmark and see if they both heat up. If they don't both heat up in an intense benchmark then the drivers or card arn't working. If they both heat up it means the game isn't using SLI properly, and if the game is that old it probably doesn't need to anyway.

 

[warpus]

You actually have to turn on SLI in windows, don't you? Did you do that?