Widescreen Gaming Forum

Well, around a year ago I decided to go for a multi-monitor setup, and this morning I finaly achieved my goal. Many thanks to the fine folks here that have shared information, and given me pointers back in the day.

My setup (in the begining):
Cosmos Case
i7 920 (not OCed at the moment)
Asus p6t6 WS Revolution MM
Corsair 1000w modular power supply
6GB of RAM
BFG GTX 285 OC
Nvidia GeForce 210 (to drive the third monitor using SoftTH)
3x Dell E2009W

This week I added:
A BFG GTX 285 OCX (pickup off of e-bay)

My original goal was to go for TH2GO set up, but ATI came out with EyeFinity, which had me put my plans on hold and see where things go, i am an Nvidia fan, so when they announced they were doing surround with SLI i decided to wait it out.

As we know the beta surround drivers game out recently, and I downloaded them and installed them (along with the new GTX card)

Well it did not go all that smooth, but I got it working.

First issue was my MB reset my BIOS when i installed the second card, i had to reset my RAID up (not that hat just anoying). I got all booted back up and installed the Beta drivers.

Next I got "out of synch" from my monitors after rebooting, to fix that I booted into safe mode and removed all Nvidia software, then rebooted and installeded the Beta drivers again, that went smooth enough. After reboot I was able to set up surround.

But I had one monitor that lagged/artifacted a little when games started (it would clear up after a few secconds). it happend to be the one hooed up to the seccond GTX xard by itself. In doing a scan of my MBs user manual I discoverd that the 16x PCI-E slots alternated and I had (for the sake of an air gap) had put one card in a 16x PCI-E and one in a 8X PCI-E, so I relocated the seccond card up one slot so both are now in a 16x slot. I ended up having my BIOS reset again, and need to uninstall/reinstall the beta drivers.

I no longer seem to have the issue with the solitary display.

I am up a running with 2x GTX285 SLI with Surround, using the 210 as a dedicated Physx card now.

It does leave me with a couple of concerns, Given that the two GTX are so close together what do I need to watch for? the Nvida tool so them idling at 55c/50c respectivly is that good/bad?

Also there was a slight clock diffrence between OC and OCX version - they are working just fine - but I am asuming that they just run at the slower speed of the slowest one, is that correct?

And lastly given that they are closer together, the SLI bridge I have that came with my MB now has an arch to it (it is a flexible ribbon cable-like plastic) is this something to be concerned about?

Hopefully I will get some picture and upload them to share in the near future.

Thanks WSGF for introducing me to multi-monitor gaming. :rockout

It does leave me with a couple of concerns, Given that the two GTX are so close together what do I need to watch for? the Nvida tool so them idling at 55c/50c respectivly is that good/bad?

The cards have an auto shut off at 110c, 50c is warm, however mine used to sit at similar temps, then up to nearly 85c when on load, this worked fine for the 7 months that I used it untill I upgraded to a 5870 E6.
My setup also had another gfx card in the slot directly below so thus some less airflow.

Also there was a slight clock diffrence between OC and OCX version - they are working just fine - but I am asuming that they just run at the slower speed of the slowest one, is that correct?

Correct, they would run at the slowest speed of the 2 cards.

And lastly given that they are closer together, the SLI bridge I have that came with my MB now has an arch to it (it is a flexible ribbon cable-like plastic) is this something to be concerned about?

Nothing to be concerned about :)

_________________
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GTX285 2GB here : idle @55°C room temp : 29°C

Thanks guys that puts me at ease.

I have been trying out various games through out the holiday, and i kept getting lockups/unresponsive video driver errors (it is a beta driver, so i figured it was par for the course). I had a Gforce 210 i ws using for dedicated PhysX, in reding some of the fourm posts here and over on Nvidias site i decided to allow the driver to choose PhysX device and my problems all but went away (the drivers picked the SLI cards)

From my game testing this weekend of playing:

WoW works great with bezel corrected resolution.

Champions Online also works great, had to turn some detail level down, but I expected that

Star Trek Online also worked great with the bezel corrected resolution

Lord of the Rings Online, great looking game in surround, had to turn details down some but it too worked with the bezel correctred resolution.

Fallout 3; would not work for me in the bezel corrected resolution, but it would run in 5040x1050. the computer terminals looked like poop. For some reason i could not read the baby book in the first area. Also my mouse had a really high sensitivity side to side. I noticed the thread on this site for this game I will go out and revisit this game later.

Torchlight; i love this game (I can't wait for Diablo 3) but the list of resolutions in the option screen is so long I cannot select the highest resolution(no scroll bar on the resolution selector), that said I can play in othere selectable triple screen resolutions.

Unreal Tournament 3, supports the custom resoluion with bezel correction, but the game seemd off, almost as if it was a zoomend on the middle of the screen (vert- i guess) i see there is a tweaking thread on this game a well, if i feel froggy i will go bak and tweak this one as well.

physX can be the source of crashes that's for sure since in Sacred 2 for example it will make the game more susceptible to crashes
only got one card though ...

Torchlight; i love this game (I can't wait for Diablo 3) but the list of resolutions in the option screen is so long I cannot select the highest resolution(no scroll bar on the resolution selector), that said I can play in othere selectable triple screen resolutions.

You can manually specify your res in C:Documents and SettingsApplication Datarunic gamestorchlightsettings.txt ;)

Thanks for the tip on torchlight, I will try it when I get home tonight.

As for an update; I kept getting driver errors, windows system log was saying the video driver stoped responding, and was recoverd, I always noticed when hit append becasue my screen would go blank.

I finaly removed the Gforce 210 I was using for a Physx card and the errors have all but stopped, with the exception of one game; Crysis. I am not ruling out Physx still, as the drivers defaulted to runing on the SLI cards. I may look into disabling Physx all togther.

When I play Crysis in DX10 mode after about 10 min or so it will crash (the game not windows), I can play it all day in DX9 mode. I was wondering if fact my cards were on the same 12v rail on the power supply had anything to do with my issues, so I rewired a little, to no avail on Crysis DX10 mode.

At this point the other games I play are error free, and the updated drivers (WHQL RC) feels more stable (no real proof just a feeling).

I have also fired up one of my old favorites, Red Alert 2, with the INI edit info it worked in three screens.

Well, I have loaded the WHQL release of the Nvidia drivers;

WoW still plays like a champ.

Using changing the settings in the settings.txt gets Torchlight in 5040x1050 rez (resets to 1024x768 if i try the bezel corrected resolution).

Lord of the rings online started having load issue, I could get to the character load screen, but when I log in poof lockup, I needed to hit reset. Started the game in failsafe mode, and creeped the resolution up to the bezel corercted resolution and I played it for about 15 minutes and logged out.

Star Trek Online also crashed on me, but I got into the options via game safe mode and enabled vsync and disabled AA it was verry playable in the bezel corrected resolution.

UT3 plays just fine, but is a discusting unplayable vert-

Crysis still crashes on me, but will play just fine on one screen in sli mode.

I get an occasional crash on the game Alien Swarm (free download from steam) Almost alway at the screen where I pick my Character, now this is in tri screen mode, single screen not an issue.

I am starting to think is is a Vsync issue, I notice my monitors are set to 59Hz on their properties (Dell monitors) even though they are acording to the site capable of 60hz. In the case of WoW I can specify 59Hz and it runs great and on others I can specify Vsync which has a degree of succsess, but not 100% (as is the case for Crysis). I tried to manualy set the refresh rate to 60 on the monitors properties, but it goes back to 59Hz. Who knows this can be a red hering.

WoW is my main game, followed by STO, then LOTRO (why yes I am an MMO fanatic) so I guess I am good for now as WoW plays like a champ. But I am still troubleshooting the chrashes/lockups in other games.

Lord of the Rings Online works if is login in as a single screen resolution and step it up to surround, but crashes if i start it surround...

Ok I have played with it some last night;

Rearanged the cables so that 2 monitors are the GTX285 flagged #1 by the OS and one on the card flagged as #2, and on the #2 card it is on the DVI port furthest away form the MB (as shown in the diagram during the setup) before that I had 2 monitors on the #2 card and one on the #1. A side note is that no matter what 3 I selected I could setup the surround desktop and play WoW, but most other games crashed.

I also used a driver cleaner to clean up in safe mode after uninstalling the drivers, this way I know I am getting a clean install.

Results after the re-cable/clean re-install of drivers;

I can start almost every game, Crysis Warhead in med detail wil run in DX9 mode for 15-20 min and then i will get a video driver crash. It crashes in dx10 mode fairly quick < 5 min and sometimes sometimes when I go to load a game, In either mode i can get the menu up just fine.

WoW still plays great.

Alien Swarm is 50/50 sometimes it just works, other times it crashes when i go to select my character.

Torchlight works great

LOTRO is working, however i did not hang out that long; I disabled the DX10 effects.

StarTrek online was working only played for about 15 min before logging out.


I have found a surefire way to crash the driver using the Sun Village Screensaver. Using largely the the devault settings just making sure that the desktop resolution is selected (in my case 5040x1050). Bring up the screensaver poperties and hit the preview button, in less than 2 min the driver will crash. at which point I can hit the escape button and get back to the desktop.

At this time I think there is an issue with the NV surround WHQL drivers where the 2x GTX285 cards are concerned.

Specifics on my card set-up:
No over clocking (other than factory)
On the motherboard (asus p6t6 ws):
BFG GTX OC in the 16x/8x blue PCIE slot closest to the CPU (identified as card #2 in the OS/drivers)
BFG GTX OCx in the 16x/8x blue PCIE slot in the middle (identified as card #1 in the OS/drivers)


Here is loking forward to the next driver release, I will just play WoW in surround untill then.

Ok gents I did some more poking, I may have found my soulution, I downloaded the MSI afterburner software and downclocked the OCx (702Mhz) to the same speed as OC (666Mhz) and I was able to play Crysis Warhead in DX10.

I will do more testing tonight before I declare victory.