Odd Results with 8800GTS 320MB SLI. HELP!!

Yes im going to go intel quad at the end of the year as the prices are to high at the moment and very little makes use of the quad cores but that will change soon some games now take advantage supreme commander being one of them.My poor old amd has served me well but it no longer cuts it anymore and is holding back my system.When i bought my card i had the future in mind that i will be upgradeing cpu soon and dont wont to have to buy another card when i do.My old tagan 480 psu ran it ok but i just upgraded to the enermax to be ready for quad and maybe another 8800 for sli.If i was going to keep my amd then i would of bought the gts 320 mb card but i got the gtx so as not to hold my future upgrades back.

 

like i said bottleneck is overated. It rates but people seem to blame everything on the cpu ... so again it gets overated. These guys are never satisfied even if the was a quad core running 5ghz they still tell you it will be a bottleneck for 88gtx sli. God knows how they workout how much its bottlenecking and what is the right specs for a cpu for it to not restrict 88gtx sli. So tell me what speeds does a cpu have to be not to bottleneck sli ? Just to be safe i will Guess 8core 6ghz. Im sure some will still say this will bottleneck. LOL

 

You musn't always see the bad side of the story!

If you're bottlenecked now, you'll still have amazing performance. Even better, you'll have the same performance in future games as well.

Why? Well, when newer games come out that are much more demanding, the bottleneck will simply disappear and you'll still have superhigh FPS.
Don't worry about the CPU. It was a strong one and it still is.

Don't listen to them every-week upgraders. They say "Buy this" , "But That" but it isn't necesarry.

Also the 320MB thingy, don't worry, reviews have shown that the difference is minimal to NONE.

Anyway, don't just stare at some synthetic crap 3dmark05 produces! Throw your cards at some demanding games and you'll be surprised of their power

 

WE Got TOO Many Bottleneck Fanboys in here

 

your argument would be valid if save for the fact that he wasn't running an amd 3800+ at only 2.5ghz. do you honestly believe that at 2.5ghz that cpu has any hope of letting those cards run at even close to their potential?

 

The op has sli 8800 and a amd x2 3800 and asked why its not performing as he thought it would do.It is very clear to all that have read this thread that his amd cpu has no hope to feed sli cards fast enough to reach the potential of sli 8800 and this is why his scores are low.So please then if its not the cpu thats bottlenecking his sli 8800 fill us in with your reason as to his poor performance.If you think that we are bottleneck fanboys and the cpu makes little difference then why is yours overclocked to 3.6

 

well why not overclock his CPU to 3.6GHz if he can?

Anyway, I can't imagine that being CPU bottlenecking...it's just waay too much, I know that he would be quite a bit bottlenecked butthat's just too minimal a gain by going SLI than is realistic...I'd have to say it's a driver issue or something...or maybe even a defective piece of hardware...I could probably believe it more if he was using a single core CPU, but the X2 3800+ @ 2.5GHz is faster than an X2 4600+ which isn't insanely fast but is still a really good CPU. What drivers and OS are you using? I think you should try other drivers..or maybe nvidia just hasn't released any good 8800 SLI drivers yet, that's probably it..

 

ill second that,the more workload you put on your graphics card the less significant the cpu becomes in either am2 or core2 duo. when it comes down to it, once you crank all yoru settings its your graphics card(or cards) that makes or breaks your experience on either ddr2 platform because frankly, they both kick ass and everypiece of software is smooth as alyssa milano's a$$. so get off 3dmark and enjoy the real world apps this hardware is ment to toss around effortlessly.

 

i bet my pants that any system with sli cards with a good enough cpu will blow away an extreme cpu oc with a single card at any game. Forget benchies welcome to the real world.

 

I find that a very interesting statement as i am saveing up atm to buy a quad 6700 but also need mb and ram.My current mb is sli and it would be much cheaper to buy another 8800 gtx than new cpu ect.If it results in a faster game rig with sli for less money id jump on that.But everything ive read and heard a faster cpu for my rig would give better performance.My amd x2 4600+ only just shows a small gain between a single 8800 gts and a single 8800gtx because the cpu just isnt fast enough to feed the extra performance a gtx card is capable of.Im sure adding another gtx for sli would give next to nothing performace wise with my cpu and id be in the same position as the op.Here is a review of 8800 gtx in sli with a amd x2 4800+ http://www.legitreviews.com/article/421/7/As you see they scored only 9600 points in 3dmark06 but i know a single card fed by a e6800 scores 10700 this is a qoute from the conclusion of the review.As you can see in our testing the 8800 GTX SLI is bottlenecked by the CPU in nearly every test we ran. This is where the added cost that I mentioned in the beginning of the article comes in. Even running on an Intel Core 2 Duo is going to hold a pair of these cards back in most tests.Here is another quote from the call of duty test.In Call of Duty 2 the 8800 GTX SLI system doesn't show the same advantage that it had in our other tests. It's very likely that the CPU is bottlenecking performance here.

 

you are correct in assuming that, you would need to play your games at 2560x1600 with 16xaa and 16xaf to even begin to stress an 8800 sli set up. a single 8800gtx is more than capable of maxing out every game at resolutions of 1600x1200 with 16xaa. when you add another to the mix with say for instance a 3800+ x2 at 2.5ghz you will only be getting maybe 10 or so fps more even though you effectively doubled your graphics processing power. why? because the cpu has no hope of providing data fast enough to both of the cards to net any real gain. sure you can play your games at 2560x1600 with 16xaa with a 3800+ x2 and sli 8800's, but the point is most people can't because their monitors don't go that high and if you can't raise the resolution to those levels it really matters for squat what the cards are capable of because they will never be pushed hard enough at lower resolutions with a slower cpu. a faster cpu will get you more fps in games not just bigger number in benchmarks.

 

macdaddy scores 11825 3dmark06 with his conroe at 3.6 and a single 8800gtx then if you check that review in my last post they scored 9600 with a amd x2 4800+ and sli 8800 gtx.Then says that cpu bottleneck is overated.Ill leave the rest of you make your own conclusions.

 

Well with my little system I score about 16'000 on 3DMark '06. This is with me OC'ing the CPU to 3.2 ghz. I have been told that I could get it to about 20'000 if I spend more money on cooling for the CPU but I'm happy as it is. I am currently pootling through DOOM 3 at 1600X1200 with my setup and have it at Ultra High with Vsync (which just eats performance like you would not believe) and 8xAA and it runs just so silky smooth so far (120fps min). Will crank it upto 16xAA tonight to see how my cards handle it. One thing I have learnt from playing with Sli rigs though is that the performance you think you should get will not be accomplished (speaking purely from benchmarks). So, for the amount of money spent I would say beef up your CPU and stick with one GPU for now as Sli is a bit of a waste of money.

 

ive seen a few people having problems with the 320mb 88's in the past few days, so sit tight mate and wait for better drivers, to cope with cpu limitations use a higher resolution and crank up the settings it should see off that slight bottle neck.

 

dude i said in game play, forget benchie. real world thing not synthetic stuff. Sli 88gtx will kick the pants a single card even if the other guy has a superior cpu. But bearing in mind at least you have to have a decent cpu that to me is at least amd x2 3800 at least

 

a sli 8800gtx system run with a 2.5ghz amd 3800+ x2, will barely if at all put out more frames per second in games than a single 8800gtx system with a core 2 duo at 3.6ghz. sli 8800 is wasted in resolutions lower than 1600x1200 with a slow cpu.

 

Overclock like crazy.