Originally posted by: quattro1
Dont worry about setting the rendering mode to auto. If you have never touched it, its fine. No need to ever mess with it really.
Once you enable SLI int the driver control panel you are fine.
This isn't true for my experiences with SLI. NV has not created a profile for rthdribl, so it defaults to single card mode. You can easily tell this by the fact that GPU1 heats up considerably when rthdribl is launched, but GPU2 stays at the same temp. This was the case the last time I had an SLI rig, which was about 2 months ago. This may have changed since then.
For instructions on how to create a profile:
http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_appprofile_howto1.html
This is actually useful to know when you own an SLI rig anyway, since it's almost inevitable that you will need to create a profile for something at one point.
edit: IMO, the best "stress test" for a video card is to loop the Canyon Flight benchmark in 3DMark06 or play Oblivion. These two things specifically really seem to put video cards through their paces.