My SLi issue and what seems to have solved it.

Question

I've had my new xpower  motherboard for a few weeks now.  From the very first day everything has worked with one exception.  When I put a second GTX 460 Hawk on the system for SLi problems began.  The first thing I noticed was the computer would take a long time to boot into BIOS.  Some unusual codes would be displayed.  Once booted up, sometimes it would reboot right away.  Other times it would seem stable until I tried to do something.  Doing something would cause graphic drivers to crash and then recover and then crash and recover again.  Sometimes this crash / recover cycle would result in a hard reset. 
4 out of the 6 load indicator LED's on GPU 2 were always lit even when there was not supposed to be a load on the card.  The other two lights would flicker.  GPU 1's LED's would sometimes indicate a load and sometimes would not regardless of the actual load.  Once in a while things would stabilize well enough for me to actually play a game.  In Skyrim, I would get random crashes where the screen would go black, the GPU fans would slow to minimum speed, the sound would cut out, then there would be a pause.  After that the game would recover right where it left off as if nothing had happened.  Eventually the computer would crash and I'd have to turn it off and start it up again only to have a new set of random crashes and errors. 
I removed the second card and messed around with the computer with only one card in PCIE slot 2.  This worked better but not perfect.  I saw strang FPS drops in games at random times.  Even turning all settings down to their lowest wouldn't fix this.  My FPS would drop to 4 to 9 frames and hang there for 10 minutes.  The cards usage as displayed by after burner would only be around 10 %. 
Anyway, I was poking around the Internet, trying to find a way to describe this problem when I found a small bit about PEGO - Gen X.  This BIOS setting allows you to set your PCIE slots to a specific speed.  You can set them on the xpower motherboard for PCIE 1, 2, 3 or Auto.  Default is Auto.  So, GTX 460 Hawk's are generation 2 (PCIE 2) graphics cards.  I assumed the motherboard was "automatically" adjusting slots 1 and 5 (where my cards are plugged in) to PCIE 2.  Now it may have been doing that but at the very least not consistently if at all.  I set the PEGO - Gen X to Gen 2.  When I booted up the machine it was fast.  On both cards the LED load indicators only showed two lights.  Now I'm able to do things without any crashes or FPS drops.  Games are smooth.   Skyrim's FPS Is between 30 and 120.  The problem appears completely solved.  The thing I don't understand now is why the Automatic setting wasn't working.   

Answer 1

Contact Bose. I have seen several posts from people having trouble with Bose devices.
Barry