Sort of Long Post/Story/Ramble Warning.
So, after a night of drinking over the weekend...I put some bids on 3 GPU's...and I ended up winning 2 of the 3. Thankfully not all three, since I do not think my bank account would have liked that at all. I ended up winning a Gigabyte GTX 780 GHz Edition and a Zotac GTX 780 AMP! Edition, with the losing one being a EVGA GTX 970 FTW+. I did get both of the 780's for pretty good prices, not great...but I certainly did not over pay for them. I also bought another 8GB kit of Ripjaws 1866 RAM and a EVGA SuperNova 1000 G2.
Basically, the booze assisted me in spending a few hundred bucks...year Red Breast Whiskey!
Now on to the fun part of installing the new parts...
Turns out that two out of the box OC'd 780's do not like each other...at all. Or the current 350.12 Driver and Skyrim do not like each other...
In SLI, Skyrim was hard freezing on me after 7 to 12 minutes of game play, and force me to do a hard restart. After making sure it wasn't any of my minor mods or the new RAM kit, I uninstalled all files associated with Skyrim (expect game save data) and clearing my Steam config file, I re-installed the whole game through Steam. Which an 11.6GB download on a 3 Mbps DSL connection took a little over 14 hours in total. Playing the game with no mods installed gave me the same results as before. So, I decide to remove the the Zotac 780...and I made in through 20 minutes of game play with several fast travels and random fights without a lock up. I have done more testing today after work with both the Gigabyte and Zotac, and if I have not had any more problems, I might be selling off one or both 780's and both 670's...use that money for a single high end GPU. But that depends on how a single 780 handles Skyrim with some 2k texture mods and an ENB thrown out it, along with the copy of GTA 5 I got a Best Buy (see internet speed for why I did not want to download a 65GB file through Steam) over this past weekend.
Skyrim preforms with no issues now. And I then ran a benchmark in Valley again so I could more easily watch what was happening with the GPU. Valley Benchmark with the single 780 improved by 3 to 9 FPS and the score went up by 300 to 600. The core temperature also dropped by a lot, with idle dropping by around 10C (39-42C to 30-32C) and under load by around 20C (77-80C to 57-60C). I never had any thermal issues with the Zotac, so that is why my priority was the Gigabyte. Three benchmarks were ran one after the other, and after a quick 20 minute session in Skyrim.
I am going to wait to see what happens with the 980Ti (maybe a Titan X if the cost is not much different) and how much more VRAM they are going to add to the 900 series cards, if any, before I make my final decision on the 780's.
And yes, 3 Mbps DSL is the fastest available in my area...for now...I should hopefully have 1 Gbps Fiber in the next few months...and at that point, I will be cancelling my TV Service.
I just though I would share my little adventure for anyone who may need the information.