Varying Benchmark Results with 8800 GTS

It's definitely not the PSU, I guess it has something to do with the german grid or our PSU's are manufactured in another way than yours.
I for one can run two 8800 GTS in SLI with my 400W PSU without any problems.

Have you tried reinstalling 3DMark06?
Or maybe using another driver?
Which OS do you use?

 

a 400w psu is no where near enough for an sli setup

 

IMO.. depending on how well your windows install is.. I think it's your memory.. 1gig of ram is borderline now a days..

if it's a freah install of windows, and doesn't have a long line of extras loading on startup, then it's somthing else like what others have suggested above

edit.. 400watt PSU is pushing it though

 

First of all, always shut down youre anti virus program when benching, that alone can vary youre results. Second, never bench when just booted, as many services use more resources at the beginning. Wait atleast 30-45min to be sure. Try these two things, and see what youre results are. And I agree with some people on this thread, it could be youre psu too. Even if its officially enough, in real life it could be its not enough. As for an example, I had a Silverstone 600W for my G8800gtx at first, it wasnt enough even as it should have been. Now with my thermaltake 750 it runs fine, but with the 600w it was very unstable. So just because the recommended values are there, doesnt mean they apply for everyone. How many harddrives do you have, raid?, any other pci cards than sound?? Many USB devices connected?? All those things draw power, and if any of those devices are defected they can draw more power than they should, which means you dont see it any other way than poor performance otherwise.

 

Ok, since the memory could have been a bottleneck i got myself some new kingston hyperx rams, 2x1gb running in dualchannel.
now i did a lot more benching.
even tested the effect of benching right after bootup and after 30mins wait , and with / without antivir.
results were all the same (+/- a few % tolerance) regarding bootup and antivir, so in my case that really doesnt matter.

installed driver is fw 158.22 whql
now for some scores:

3dmark06 1.1
Total 7652 - 7804 - 7793 - 7454 - 7788 - 7785 - 7777 - 77678
sm2.0 3439 - 3634 - 3622 - 3288 - 3617 - 3617 - 3605 - 3600
sm3.0 3650 - 3648 - 3645 - 3649 - 3645 - 3652 - 3634 - 3633

here we can now see a good correlation between total score and sm2.0
as you can see sm3 is almost constant, so sm2 is definetly the problem.
in this batch of results there are only 2 runs that have strange scores, thats 7652 and 7454.
another strange thing i noticed was, that when i also run the feature tests the score is almost identical each time, if those tests are turned off the scores tend to vary a lot more.

more scores:

Doom3
1024 UHQ, 2x FSAA - 145.5 fps

3D Mark 05
11408

3D Mark 03
26944

Aquamark 3
90265

here i only listed 1 of each since they are all about the same each time i run the benchmark since ive got my new memory.

so the problem seems to be a combination of 2 things.
1: shortage of memory, which is now taken care of
2: crappy programming in 3dmark06, since all other benches are good now.
(btw i also tried older versions of 06 as well and reinstalled the newer version etc etc...)

 

If games perform nicely, who really cares about the 400 point fluctuations in 3dmark 06 :S

 

hej Ac1d|BuRn
i feel your pain

i had the same problem on my old P4, and i think it happened after i brought a 7800gs+ that needed extra power, and then my PSU (450w thermaltake 1.5 years old) had a failure, broke one of its fan wings. Only difference between your problem and mine, is that about 1/4 games i started had this VERY bad slowdown, like it was running on a 1ghz, and it was a 3ghz.

I tryed almost everything, like under/over clock, without changing. even tryed to removed any harddrives and cd drives.

So without knowing for sure, it could be the PSU has damage itself somehow, and therefor it cant give the needed power at times.

Maybe you could borrow a PSU from a friend or something to test it out?

hope you get it fixed

cheers

 

Overclock your CPU and you will get 2000 more