Quote Originally Posted by ranker View Post
Ugh, this is a no win situation for me at all. I'm a gamer and it's the reason why I splurged a ridiculous amount of money on my system. You can see my fully detailed system specs below. The ironic thing is that I had the exact same motherboard but with 7900GT's w/ XP and it worked perfectly. Once I upgraded my CPU to a 6700 from an 6600, my 7900GT in SLI to 8800GTX's in SLI, I was greeted with the snap crackle pop problems. I don't think its the motherboard's chipset as it WAS working in a previous build using the same motherboard. The X-Fi also had no problems in my original NF4 build I had for the past 2 years as well.

My BIOS is the most current revision (EVGA rocks as they put out their 30th BIOS update already). I have all the most up to date drivers installed as well for every component. I've also RMA'ed my motherboard 3 different times, thinking it might have been a bad/faulty southbridge as well.

I don't see how switching PCI slots will do anything at all and sounds like snake oil to me. Even if it would help, I can't as I'm running SLI and my waterblocks block the bottom most PCI slot.

Reducing master volume to 50% has helped reduce the frequency of it a tad bit but i still get it every now and then.

The problems are exacerbated when two different sounds are being played such as while gaming and using Vent at the same time or while listening to itunes and using ventrilo at the same time or any other combination.
That's why I said send the Card back.

IMHO, the extra stress did it. Not just the extra power drawn from two 8800s but the extra bandwidth they eat up. One is routed through the South Bridge or MCP. Pull one of your cards (the secondary) and see if the SCP stops? I know a guy who had to invest in a 750 watt PCP&C PSU and his problems cleared up, yet another did the same thing and nothing changed.

Yes and those checks/interruptions the PCI-I bus makes, makes the BUS slower/higher overhead, when more devices are enabled (more calls/checks). As one guy tried to point that the PCI BUS has 133MB of bandwidth the latency is a bigger problem.

I wonder about this on the new AMD boards since their Cross-Fire is routed different that nVidia's.

ATI/AMD Layout

nVidia 680i Layout

Intel P35

Instead of 8 + 8 for its 16X PCI-E total, it splits up like 12 (6GB) + 4 (2GB). that's still a lot of bandwidth.