Advice on installing a third 980 card

[p_delray]

Going to go for a third 980 card and looking for advice on installation. I have two 980's working fine so what will I have to do to install the third? I know I need to install the extra molex power connector but what other things are there that could cause a problem if not done?

[Chino]

Installation is pretty much straightforward. Just make sure you're using the recommended PCIe slots for a 3 way SLI configuration. The extra molex power connector is optional when running 3 GPUs. But I recommend you to populate it.

[p_delray]

Thanks Chino, one question, the two cards I now have are super clocked and the new third card will be standard clock - will the two I have now downclock to match the new card or will the new card upclock to match the other two? If the new card downclocks all of them I could set super clock to all three in Afterburner.

[Nate152]

Hello p_delray

With the NVidia drivers of today they can run the gpu's at different speeds, your superclocked cards won't down clock to your new cards speed, that was in the older days. You can use afterburner to clock your new card to the superclocked speeds if you wanted.

[p_delray]

Thanks, I have it installed and now want to clock all stock numbers with no overclock on any card. I took a look at my afterburner display and not sure how to set it up. The core and memory are adjustable but the shader bar is not.

[Nate152]

Are you wanting to overclock the stock card to the superclocked cards?

[Nate152]

If you want them all to run at stock speeds there should be a Defualt button somewhere on there. I use precision x so I'm not sure where it will be but it should be there, just click Default and click apply.

[p_delray]

Thanks, I really need someone familiar with Afterburner because I have tried default and also tried to set up on card as master and link the others but the new card still shows different clocks

[Nate152]

Your new card will show different clocks and it should be showing a lower clock speed.

Unlink your cards, select your new card and overclock it to the speed of your superclocked cards.

[p_delray]

Thanks Nate but I am ready to ditch this damn afterburner software. I tried down clocking one card and it clocked down to 1000 (wanted 1126) and no matter where I set the clock slider it stayed at 1000 for that card. I then linked them to see if the new card would match and it did not. The new card just clocked down proportionately to 900 somthing.

So I said ok and hit reset but guess what ,, nothing reset. The card that I messed with the down clocking stayed at 1000. To get back to where I was before adjusting this wonderful software I had to select a card I did not try to change and then link that. I am not sure what is wrong with Afterbummer but it will not clock down and it will not reset.