Hey Guys,

Moment of truth.  After about a week and half of trying to get 3-way SLI to work in my rig. And then coming to decision of RMA all 3 cards.  The replacement cards have arrived.  To make things interesting, I changed as little as possible for this first big test.  I simply turned off SLI, shutdown, installed the 3 new cards, booted, enable 3-way SLI.  (no driver un-install, no changes to my already stock rig)  Drum roll. ....  and....  everything works now!  No more flicker or blank screens in any games or benchmarks.  Got 20K on Fire Strike right out of the gate.   I watch all benchmark runs carefully looking for any signs of flashing & blank screens and I saw none.  I completed about 2 hours of tests, everything is working very well.

Now I still can not tell you what's going on with my original 3 GTX 980 cards, which all continue to work solo in any PCI slot and in my case any 2 cards will always work in 2-way SLI.

It's time add these to a water loop (ACX fan design has poor cooling in 3-way)  and play some games.


 
Z77 - ASUS Maximus V extreme,  8GB of Ram,  Core i7-3770K,  Corsair AX1200i power, 2 Samsung 840pro 256 GB in Raid zero, Dual boot Win 7 and and Win 8.1,  21:9 monitor (3440x1440 res)  LG 34UM95-P 34"   3-way SLI - GTX 980 Superclocked ACX 2.0

Boegner
Hey Guys,

Moment of truth.  After about a week and half of trying to get 3-way SLI to work in my rig. And then coming to decision of RMA all 3 cards.  The replacement cards have arrived.  To make things interesting, I changed as little as possible for this first big test.  I simply turned off SLI, shutdown, installed the 3 new cards, booted, enable 3-way SLI.  (no driver un-install, no changes to my already stock rig)  Drum roll. ....  and....  everything works now!  No more flicker or blank screens in any games or benchmarks.  Got 20K on Fire Strike right out of the gate.   I watch all benchmark runs carefully looking for any signs of flashing & blank screens and I saw none.  I completed about 2 hours of tests, everything is working very well.

Now I still can not tell you what's going on with my original 3 GTX 980 cards, which all continue to work solo in any PCI slot and in my case any 2 cards will always work in 2-way SLI.

It's time add these to a water loop (ACX fan design has poor cooling in 3-way)  and play some games.


 
Z77 - ASUS Maximus V extreme,  8GB of Ram,  Core i7-3770K,  Corsair AX1200i power, 2 Samsung 840pro 256 GB in Raid zero, Dual boot Win 7 and and Win 8.1,  21:9 monitor (3440x1440 res)  LG 34UM95-P 34"   3-way SLI - GTX 980 Superclocked ACX 2.0

Congrats! Finally you got them work ! It seems the hardware problem of the previous batch of 980s sc ? I guess not sure because your 3 new cards are working fine with your same set up ( old rig). Did you buy them on newegg ? May I know what was your justification for your rma them ?Thanks. A lot for your sharing !

Boegner
Yes, I did purchase them from Newegg.  But I did the RMA process through EVGA tech support.  My justification was this post and that 'Koshelkov' had done this same 3 card RMA process with good results.  Tech support was just as curious about if this would solve my problem, Hence, they were helpful in making this happen.  

EVGA should find a test to identify a bad card for a SLI setup. I doubt all 3 of my original cards were bad, maybe just one, but which one I was never able to figure out. 
 
 
Z77 - ASUS Maximus V extreme,  8GB of Ram,  Core i7-3770K,  Corsair AX1200i power, 2 Samsung 840pro 256 GB in Raid zero, Dual boot Win 7 and and Win 8.1,  21:9 monitor (3440x1440 res)  LG 34UM95-P 34"   3-way SLI - GTX 980 Superclocked ACX 2.0

Thanks again for your respond!, anyway too late for me to file RMA with EVGA because I just RMAed them on new egg with 0$ bulk shipping back on my newegg Primium account . Will ship it on Monday and I guess receive them back sometime after holiday ! :-((.

Did you find a way to make it work on the x99 rampage ? I have the same board. I rma all 3 cards, I hope this is gonna work when I get them back :(

I have the same problem with Gtx 980, as soon as I sli the 3 cards red-screen flickering and crash, well same symptoms as you guys I'm not a happy camper lol! I only had these cards for 2 days now, I did a lot of testing yesterday with only one card and was happy with the result, but as soon as I started doing 2 and 3 way sli and problems started, can't even play any games, I'm using the x99 Rampage, anybody with more ideas is appreciated!

Thanks, Zordrack I just tried that 344.80 still same thing it probably help a little because I don't get this error from Cinebench 11.5 and R15.... Open GL Reference Test Failure! Errors in Rendering are Displayed as red pixels, the difference with reference image is too great.     The result is invalid for testing with.

Wow this is crazy. Glad that the new cards worked.

Zordrack
The new cards ? What do you mean ?

The new ones that were exchanged.

I was thinking like you before. The thing that made me wonder about hardware problem is that some people made their sli setup work just by rma their cards.

I think that some cards are defective when they have to work in sli. Seems like an intermittent problem maybe... I don't know how to explain it.

This can't be a driver issue because a lot of people have a successfull sli setup running. Boegner and Kolshelkov solved this issue just by rma their cards and they still use the same driver.

How to explain that the same issue occur on different motherboard model/chipset ?

I think this issue is specific to the gtx 980 no matter the system it is used by.

That's really sad because this is a high range card and I had nothing but problems since I decided to upgrade. For the money I invested in this I'm really disapointed.

If they get enough rma about this issue maybe they will start working on a real solution !

Hey guys !

I got my cards back this morning from newegg. I couldn't wait to test them so I went back home during my lunch time.

I added all 3 cards at once and I booted into windows. I launched 3dmark firestrike and it WORKED !!!!! No black screen no crash. I scored 1488 I think.

I did not have much time to test but I tried really quick Farcry 4, Crysis 3, Unigine valley and everything ran normally so far so good.

I'm 99% sure the problem was a defective card. There's no way to tell which one was because they were all working fine by themselves and in 2 way sli too for me.

I can't beleive how much time and energy I lost with this troubleshooting my pc...

I'll post again when I have more time to test them.

That's interesting! I will get my 3 replaced ones end of today , hope they work in 3 SLI , that is waste lot of time and work.

Did any of you that are using the 3 way see a big performance spike compared to using 2way sli?

Hi Folks,
I have no idea what was happened , Just quick update that I've just installed the new 3 exchanged cards after back from work( same set up and config before RMA first 3 cards) , so " boom " 1 shot they are working perfectly in 3 ways SLI  , no flickering - crashing when getting in game ( very happy now ), but I played BFBC2 it hit 70 dgr C temp , is it seem so high temp ? also do a quick 3Dmark11 Extreme its score is X15251(stock clock) . As you folks mentioned that pretty sure there is one bad card of the 3 but we couldn't know how to determine it. Hope that in the future EVGA will have the way to find this problem so save customers time.....

Zordrack

vinhus
Hi Folks,
I have no idea what was happened , Just quick update that I've just installed the new 3 exchanged cards after back from work( same set up and config before RMA first 3 cards) , so " boom " 1 shot they are working perfectly in 3 ways SLI  , no flickering - crashing when getting in game ( very happy now ), but I played BFBC2 it hit 70 dgr C temp , is it seem so high temp ? also do a quick 3Dmark11 Extreme its score is X15251(stock clock) . As you folks mentioned that pretty sure there is one bad card of the 3 but we couldn't know how to determine it. Hope that in the future EVGA will have the way to find this problem so save customers time.....

Gratz !

70 °c under load is normal. It can goes up to 80 °c... 90 if you overclock. They are made to run at that temp. You'll need to watercool it if you want lower temp.

That is correct. Watercooling can help lower the temps in multi-SLI configurations although additional air cooling can help somewhat. 

Dude congrats! Looks awesome! I jealous:-))
Finally we are all get them work so this holiday I can enjoy my toy !!!