Software:

Nvidia SLI Configuration

   As far as software installation goes, there really isn't much, but it should be done right. The first thing I did after startup was notice that the current Nvidia drivers I had installed (I believe they were Forceware 81.85) had automatically detected my dual video cards and pointed me to the Nvidia Software to Enable SLI. I went ahead and checked the two boxes and immediately started up my favorite FPS game (F.E.A.R).

   I immediately noticed a large and completely invasive bar graph on the left side of my screen covering pretty much top to bottom. I was like "$!@#!@". It then dawned on me what it must be. It must've been one of the two boxes I checked off in the SLI configuration.

   One checkbox is for "Enable SLI Multi-GPU"

   The other checkbox says "Show GPU Load Balancing" and states below it that "load balancing will be shown in DirectX and OpenGL applications"

   Yea, the "will be SHOWN" got me thinking that had to be it also. So I unchecked it and fired up F.E.A.R again and it was gone....hurray.

Test Sessions:

   However one thing I didn't mention about SLI and F.E.A.R for me just yet is the fact that for some reason I get a screen freeze while exiting the game now. It ran perfectly fine with one card, now I went to two cards and, although it'll fire up and I can play it just fine, when I go to exit back to desktop, it freezes up my computer and I have to hit the reset button! Talk about driving me crazy right off the bat.

   Since F.E.A.R was the only game I tested so far, I decided to fire up some of the other new games I have installed. Quake4 was next and guess what...it ran perfectly, including back to desktop. Hmm. That makes me scratch my head a bit.

   So I fire up DOOM3 and same thing, runs perfectly (gorgeous) and no problems at all.

   So I continue to fire up other games. UT2004 was next and ran just beautifully. Half Life 2 was next and also no problems.

  Here's some UT2004 screenshots I resized from 1680x1050 resolution down to half size so you can get a better view of them. UT2004 is still one of my favorite games. What a gorgeous game. FPS can be seen in yellow at lower right of screenshot.

   At this point It's pretty obvious it's something to do with F.E.A.R and not my system. However I decide to completely reinstall the 81.85 drivers (which I recommend anyway). It didn't help the F.E.A.R freezing situation.

   I then decided to reinstall the entire F.E.A.R game and that didn't help either. You can imagine all this trial and error and lots of hard reboots for this ONE GAME was really ticking me off now....heh.

   I decide to leave it be for now and run some other benchmarks and see what this new found graphic horsepower is doing for me.