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Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay
I'm pretty sure my PSU is an Antec TruePower 850Watt. That's off the top of my head but I recall spending some money on it as I like to have a good power supply.
Interesting comment on cards of that vintage dying. The problems I describe in my OP, does that sound like a dying card?
As for heat, I bought a Cool Master case that is supposed to be awesome for cooling. I do notice that the exhaust coming out the back is really quite hot but figured that would be normal considering the size of the cards.
That actually raises another question. Looking at my MOBO's PCIe slots. The first one says something along the lines of pcieX16, next ones down says pcie x8 and the last one says pcie x4 or something like that. When putting in cards in an sli configuration, should they be installed one right below the other or should they skip on pcie slot so there is a gap between the 2?
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I have no real stats to back it up aside from noticing a lot of posts about dead or dying 8800 series cards (both G80 and G92) line dying in a lot of hardware forums that I visit. I personally had an 8800GTX die. One day it started benchmarking at about 50% of the performance that it used to have and it also started running about 30° C hotter than it used to and I always made sure the heatsinks were clean and clear. I also had two friends recently who had 8800GTs which constanty crashed in Starcraft 2 until I told them to try underclocking it as that is also a symptom, that it won't even work at factory speeds.
Because of these experiences, all with Nvidia cards dying, I expect the latest Fermi lineup to also die at some point so I am avoiding them for now and will stick with ATI.
On your motherboard you want your cards in the 16x and 8x lanes (16x and 8x are almost the same performance). Putting a card in the 4x slot will cause too large a performance hit even though it may seem that there would be more room for cooling in that way, many motherboards were seemingly not designed for that in mind.
In the future, whatever card you buy, I recommend you stick with a manufacturer that offers a lifetime warranty (EVGA for Nvidia, XFX for ATI) so if you have these issues again, you can RMA them.