Has anyone else here tried these 6GB cards in SLI? I am having nothing but problems.
Of the first 2 cards I received, 1 was bad out of the box. When SLI was enabled, any game that I would run above fairly low resolutions would cause my PC to hard shutdown/reboot itself. Trying each card individually revealed that the 2nd card was in fact bad, and so I returned it via RMA for a replacement. Fast forward to yesterday (5/13/2014) and I got my new card in the mail. Low and behold, it does the same thing in SLI. The caveat this time is that both cards work fine individually. If I have them both in the system, and I disable SLI, the system works fine also. Only when SLI is enabled, and I try running a game (Metro Last Light is a good example), the game will load fine, and start up, but once you get past the opening CGI and the game actually has to render something, the machine hard reboots itself. This is 100% repeatable.
Troublelshooting attempted: 2 different SLI bridges, 3 different power supplies (also tried daisy chaining various combinations using an Add2PSU adapater, no joy), running each card individually, running each card in various slots on my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 Socket 2011, supports 4 different PCI Express slots). I have the latest motherboard chipset drivers installed, and updated to the latest BIOS which is only 2 months old from Gigabyte (released 4/30 I think, revision F7). The issue is not heat. My cards aren't even running long enough to get hot. They're running idle around 38 degrees. My CPU is not overheating either. Some other info that I think is relevant is that I have used several dual-gpu configurations in this machine in the past with no issues.
Setups in the past:
2x AMD HD7970 3GB (reference)
2x AMD HD7970 Sapphire 6GB cards (use more power than these 780's do)
2x AMD R9 290x Sapphire 4GB cards
2x GTX780 EVGA 3GB Reference cards (use the same exact power requirements as the new 6GB ACX cards)
All of the above setups worked fine. I believe the issue at this point is drivers. The latest full release driver from Nvidia doesn't even work with these cards. It will tell you you don't have any Nvidia hardware in your machine. The only driver that will even install is the latest Beta driver (337.50 I think is the version). With that installed, I can game on either card individually up to 4k resolution just fine (obviously we get some slow down at 4k, but thats expected), but as soon as SLI is enabled, and a game starts to render, viola, the machine hard resets itself.
My system:
i7 3930k w/Corsair H100i cooler
2x 120GB Kingston SSDNow! SATA III SSD's in RAID 0
2TB Western Digital Caviar HDD
Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 Socket 2011 motherboard
Antec Quattro TruPower 1000w modular PSU (also tried daisy chains with a gold certified 650w Silverstone, and a 450w FSP PSU)
CoolerMaster HAFX 932 Full ATX tower
2x EVGA GTX780 6GB ACX cooled video cards
SoundBlaster Recon3D PCI express audio (removed to see if this was the issue, it's not)
16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 RAM (all tested good)
LG Blu-Ray burner drive
Shimian 27" IPS 2560x1440 LED monitor
Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium w/all latest updates
If this is the wrong place to be posting technical questions, please advise/moderators please move the post. Any help would be apppreciated. All the tech help line can suggest is to RMA the card again, which at this point I don't think is the problem.