Checking your second video card
Hey everybody, I want to show you a little something on checking your 2nd video card. If you are running 2 video cards and you’re running a SLI and cross fire, you don’t see fans working. Like this one here? You might he wondering if this 2nd video card is working? Or not someone basically show you how to finally test that.
Crossfire & SLI
But to begin with you are running cross fire and maybe running SLI it’s going to be pretty similar. Two video cards running a AMD obviously. You can see the 1st set right there humming along. The 2nd video card right here you can see those fans. They are just sitting idle. So first thing is to make sure that the operating system. This second card is installed and working in SLI. Of course I am going to go through some basic things here.
For example, we are going to go to the device manager. Take a look at that which is going to be pretty basic you probably know about that already. We are going to go to this place, we’ve got two cards there so it’s okay fine. We’re good to go with that. The other thing is we are going to go to our AMD catalyst over here. We are going to open that up we have the little icon open that up.
Looking at Performance and Crossfire
We are going to performance and we are going to see cross fire there. So we should look at that and we should see that checked off. If it’s disabled you check it. If it doesn’t basically engage you know the cross fire is not working this would just not be selected. It will give you an error you know or just say stayed disabled. So that’s the other option there. Then of course the final option is you want to say is why is this device isn’t spinning. Is it working or is it just sitting there?
And I am going to show you how we did that. I have local stress test software none of them would kick in the video cards even some graphic local test. I found a software that you can use for this. Of course if you got a heavy duty game you can just run one of your games. If it has enough requirements that will make it run it will get that kicking. So I’m going to show you here with this. It’s PastMark Performance Test you can get this online. It also has a trial. Not going to run all the test but I am going to run the 3D test.
We are going to go test here. We are going to go to 3D graphics. Some of the others just won’t kick it in, I’m going to run them all. So this is going to start this video here let me show how this is off. In a few minutes…seconds. One of them is going to turn on which then is going to lead you to the next question. Why is one fan on and the other one is not?
Looking at the tests
So I think the lighting there is good. I can see there it stopped and the test is going and you see one kicked in. The other one started to spin and stopped. Again, I’ve seen all kinds of you know forums with this kind of stuff. Sometime you are scratching your head. It is working a full speed, you spent a lot of money on this are you really getting all the juice that you want out of here? You don’t see that working it actually stopped again, so you see.
So I’m going to tell you what to do there you can see if the other two going to stop running. Basically when you work on cross fire SLI the main video card is using the secondary one as a backup so if there is not enough demand on it it’s going to let it sit and nothing is going to happen. So I am not going to go through this whole thing, I am going to show you what test that I was able to run that actually forced the second one to kick in and we quit this.
Additional test time
See if I can get out of here, none of these are going to kick it in and hopefully I could get out of here…maybe not. It’s going to want to run all these tests unfortunately none of these are going to kick in the second fan looks like it’s going to be a long a video but if you did a Google search and want to know how to really verify check your fans are working. Both video cards and you spent a lot of money and they are not kicking in this is going to be the video for you.
Advanced Settings
So when you back actually it’s finished, we got rid of that…here you go we are going to advanced, we were here running a test but this don’t give us too much flexibility it’s going to run a standard test. So we are going to advance, 3D graphics then here we can adjust some of these stuff so I’m going to grab this resolution it was actually at the max but yours might not be at the max. Taking that to the max, I’m going this 9x complex, I already moved this up the standard it was like 3/4 plains and less 3s was maxed out.
Watch the fans
Plains in 3s maxed out, this time it also for that second fan to kick in and it needs to run and get hot. So we maxed everything out right here, right here, maxed out the resolution, we are going to run this test. So here you are going to see this first one kick in right there, again the second one does like the initial kind of half start up spin. You can see the second one is just sitting there right now but it might take a minute or so because this is going to stress it out for like 2 minutes so it will eventually start creeping up in temperature.
You saw that little jiggle there almost, was thinking maybe I should crank up here it’s getting a little warm and I said maybe I’ll wait. Another attempt and I can understand how somebody is going to look at those and say this second fan is not working and there you go. We are 2 minutes into the video basically cranked up all the graphics, you can see that both fans spinning at full speed.
So that’s going to take whatever doubts you have if it’s cranking or not and of course you run a game you should be able to pretty much do the same thing just a little bit more user control. You know test versus playing around with a game and going to try to max things out. Alright guys so that’s what I wanted to show you how to verify that that second card is actually working, your cross fire is engaged in your in your operating system and you are ready to game. Thanks for watching.
See our helpful video on how to upgrade your video card