What am I doing wrong?

[Stevethegreat]

Hi, I have the following setup:

EVGA 680i A1 mobo
Q6600 @ 9x400MHz (3.6GHz)
4GB DDR2 6400 (sync mode)
2x8800GT SLI @ 720/1800/1950
Vista Ultimate 32bit, up-to-date
Forceware 169.25 (the last WHQL version of nVidia)

As you can see my system is quite capable and should have been getting -3DMark06- scores in the neighborhood of 20K (a bit less maybe), but here I am, hardly reaching 16.5K and what's worse is that it actually performs even worse on games, notably Crysis which gets average 10FPS on the benchs (very high). Those results are a shame -really- since the card I hard prior (a single 8800GTX) was performing better on Crysis (15FPS average).

Also it is important to note that there are days I'm getting scores on the low 15K, while my CPU score is constantly in the low 4K (instead of the 5500-6000 mark that it should normally be).

Thanks in advance for your interest....

[velebrz]

syntethic benchmark is not linear with game performance.I have a q6600 @ 3.6 an 8800 ultra @700 core and 1700 shader and I get around 15.5k in 3d06 and get around 27 fps on very high crysis, so its all a bit hit or miss really.

But why on earth did you switch from a gtx to a sli gt setup ?

[Stevethegreat]

I was able to sell the 8800GTX in the price of 2 GTs, I wanted to utilize the 65nm, but that's beyond my question, no?

I know for a fact that comparable systems to mine both perform near 20k on 3DMark while they're able to play Crysis on the 30FPS territory on 1680x1050. My system seriously underperforms for no good reason and what's even worse is that it runs crysis @ 35FPS average on WinXP's very high / hacked settings. There are either "switches" -on Vista- that I'm not aware of, or Vista indeed are capable of -down to- 3x less performance than XP in certain games.

Please -anyone- that may have a clue of what's going on help me.

[revogamer]

vista is your main problem.

[WeStSiDePLaYa]

Something is wrong with 8800gt SLI. I'm also having major performance problems with it, and score worse with SLI than I do with single card.

[Stevethegreat]

vista is your main problem.

According to many Vista users most of its problems (including low FPS) have been solved and that was what pushed me to buy Vista (including the DX10 support, of course), please don't tell me now that they don't worth a dime....:(

[revogamer]

vista isnt a benching os, if your going to focus on 3dmark scores and benchmarks you wouldve been better with XP