SLI newb questions

[Vdubchaos]

2nd 460GTX MSI Hawk will be arriving today (buying it from my brother in law for $100 bucks).

I have few questions
1) Outside of installation/SLI Bridge, do I need to change any Bios settings on the MB? Or will my MB automatically recognize 2 video cards and change to 8x/8x (I believe it is). Do I need to adjust anything manually?

2) Video Driver - do I need to uninstall/install new driver? Not sure if these is SLI drivers etc. Or will my driver automatically recognize 2 cards and that's it?

3) What kind of video card tests should I run to make sure SLI is working correctly?

4) I might be overclocking when BF3 comes out, what do you guys recommend as far as Video Card Stability software goes?

5) Which Video card do I plug in my monitor? 1st one? Does it matter which DVI port?

and last 6) what kind of performance should I expect. From the research I've done it looks like 2x 460OC beat 1x 580GTX in most games. OCed 460gtx is on par with 470GTX.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Grooveriding]

Just plug the card in, install bridge and boot up. No need to mess with drivers or do anything else. When you boot up go into drivers and activate sli. Overclock stability is just play games and if you don't crash you're good.

 

[Vdubchaos]

Thats what I was thinking.

They make things almost TOO easy. I remember my first 939 SLI board (which I never used SLI on) had a chip i had to flip to enable it hehe

 

[videopho]

3) What kind of video card tests should I run to make sure SLI is working correctly?
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Do this prior to installing a 2nd card.
Benchmark your single gpu first using some game that comes with it i.e. Metro2033, Mafia2 to name a few. Write down average/min/max frame rate for that game. This is just to get an idea how a single card performance looks like.
Once you have enable SLI for the 2nd card. Do the same benchmark once again.

Be prepared to see how your new frame rate look like.

 

[stahlhart]

3) 3DMark Vantage and/or Unigine Heaven should be useful also.

 

[Blitz KriegeR]

4) I might be overclocking when BF3 comes out, what do you guys recommend as far as Video Card Stability software goes?

Correct me if I'm wrong but don't the cards need to be clocked identically to play well in SLI? IE, OC both of them or neither of them?

 

[MarkLuvsCS]

Correct me if I'm wrong but don't the cards need to be clocked identically to play well in SLI? IE, OC both of them or neither of them?

I don't believe you can clock them independtely, or at least software wise. Afterburner automatically sets clocks for both GPUs whenever i set speeds. Running 3dvantage / 3dmark with SLI running is a good way to see if its stable. I like to have Afterburner its On Screen Display, showing FPS , GPU 1+2 Temps, GPU 1+2 utilization, then GPU 1+2 memory usage. This allows you to easily see if SLI is being used, and how well.