GTS's in SLI on Striker Extreme...why so low scores?

[r3zon8]

Ive finished my build and ive got all the parts on the table..

i installed everything properl and eventually got the SLI ready System balloon popup so i enabled it..then rebooted machine..and it said i was now in sli mode.

so i ran 3dmark06 to see how much better my score would be, but i ONLY went up from 11110 to 12555 ....this just seems to me like a real low bump in performance considering the price for the second card.

so my first question, i assume the SLI did do something considering my 3dmark score went up right away. but does it seems kinda low???

second, how can i overclock these cards in SLI? i was using rivatuner before to OC my single GTS, if i apply the new clock settings in RivaTuner, will it over clock both cards? or do i have to set the clocks twice in two different windows?

when i had the single GTS setup i was able to push the card to 650/860. that coupled with a slight overclock of the cpu gave me a grand total of 11777. this is just 800pts shy of my new SLI rig...something seems wrong right???

any help is appreciated guys.

[K404]

CPU bottleneck?

[jimmyz]

two cards doesn't mean twice the performance. your bottleneck simply moved from the gpu to the cpu.

[mdzcpa]

What CPU are you running? Like mentioned above, you need to power SLI along with some serious CPU.

As for overclocking, the setting will apply to both cores. Be aware that overclocking in SLI tends to be lower than with a single card. So you overclocks will be lower.

Where you will see real gains with SLI on the GTS cards is in games where you crank up the eye candy and max out AA and AF settings. You'll be able to do that at high resolutions without killing your FPS. That's really only where SLI shines IMO.

[stealthbomber]

It helps to post full spec details first.

For SLI GTS you probably need at least a 2.67GHz+ C2D processor, any budget C2D chip overclocked to around 3GHz should be more than fast enough.

Most likely a software/driver config problem somewhere...

[r3zon8]

Sorry for the inadequate first post guys.

initial build:
P5W-DH
Q6600@350x9=3150
Single eVGA 8800 SC GTS @ 650/850
was able to pull off max of about 11700 3dmark06


after reading through many posts ive learned that its very difficult to push a high FSB on current quads with most boards out there. Which is why when running quads most people get QX's so they can just push the multiplier up and only worry about keeping the cpu cool.

with that in mind, i arrived at my current build:
C2D E6700@350x10=3500 on air
Striker Extreme
xms2-800 444-12
2xeVga 8800 GTS SC GTS @ stock clocks

with this setup i am currently at about 14700.

Now, before i used nTune to overclock the GPUs, my 3dmark score was 14100. So after ntune i only gained about 600 clocks.

I also learned that the SLI setup really likes a high CPU clock speed over quad core. im assuming thats because most games/benchmarks like 3dmark are not really optimised for multi core machines so a high Ghz reigns supreme.

Before i swapped out the q6600 for the e6700 on the striker extreme based machine, is when i saw my 3dmark scores only go from 11k ish to 12,5k-ish..thats when i made the original post. after only dropping in the e6700 and pushing it to 3500, my scores immidiately went to 14k+.

i understand what you guys mean, the SLI will start to shine where a single card begins to let up. i guess i have just been looking at it the wrong way. IN any case, i think i should invest my time into getting my e6700 as close as i can to 4ghz. this should provide me with a much higher gain on 3dmark, vs trying to OC the gpus.

[adamsleath]

yes; the cpu speed makes a big difference...which is why i want a faster one :hehe:

...or a 3d benchmark / games that utilise 4 cores better

using 158.19 drivers atm (158.22 no good)

[alpha0ne]

Could it be bad drivers ???

I'll bet your using 320MB cards ???

[r3zon8]

Could it be bad drivers ???
I'll bet your using 320MB cards ???

Thats also the reason why i initially went with the Q6600, i assumed that in the next year or so we will begin to see multi-core optimized games, so i figured the quadcore setup would future-proof my system for whatever games come at me on the next years. but i guess high scores NOW mean more to me LoL

I was using whatever was on nvidias site yesterday around 10am.

Ive seen many users running 'tweaksrus' drivers, should i give these a try?

Yes, i am using the 320MB cards..got a real good deal on them.

[alpha0ne]

A lot of ppl seem to think Nvidia have crippled the drivers for the 320MB cards, I undecided ATM :confused: