trevorama

Sup all

I have attached watercoolers to my 8800 gtx's, with them purring at 40c i figure it is time to OC!

i installed rivatuner and i will be using it to over-clock my system

i ran ATI-Tool stable for an hour with these changes:

Core clock locked with shader clock. core clock from 575 to 621
Memory clock from 900 to 950

load temps- 45c, zomg i love water cooling.

This is a pretty modest overclock, but in games like Age of Conan, i have not seen any real improvement. is there a good Graphics benchmark that i should be using? i hear 3dmark pretty much only tests your CPU. i want to test to see if upping these clocks is actually improving performance, because i cant really see any difference.

is there anything that i should be checking in bios that could be restricting the performance of my cards?

my CPU is over clocked from 2.4 to 3.2, ram is at 1067 with 2gig, could these be holding back the graphic rendering?

should i check voltages? i looked at some of the guides and i cant seem to find many of things they mentioned. i did find PCI reference clock, and upped it to 105 however, which eliminated some artifact issues, but besides that, i have not done Anything in bios, any tips?

thanks for the help guys!

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vectorvtec73

Hey there! I've used ATItool to do my o/c'ing, and sure there's a little bit of a difference, but from what I see it's never huge. With two of the best cards on the market Sli'ed, at this point it's going to be hard to see any difference, overclocked or not. It'll likely be another year before a game will come out that will remotely push those two cards together.

Also remember if you're getting over 75FPS, or something like that, the human eye will not detect any change. Meaning, 80FPS will look exactly the same as 180FPS.

3DMark does test the graphics cards just fine, one thing I use just to see what's out there and how I stack up is Everest Ultimate, cause after you benchmark you can see where you rank among other PC's.

One sidenote to think about -- One thing I've ran into with a high end video card like an 8800GTX is mobo's that can't handle it. I've had a Gigabyte and now an MSI that can't handle what the card can do, and subsequently I experience severe FPS drops in single player games. I could overclock all I want, use RivaTuner to tweek, and it wouldn't change. Out of all the mobo's I've had, Asus is the only brand that's been able to handle anything I throw at it.

I do want to know though -- What on earth watercooling system are you using?? With my GPU hooked up and my CPU on air with a great box, I'll still run 55 full load, 48 idle.

-Philip.

trevorama

thanks for the reply, the problem isnt that i want to go higher than 75fps, the problem is i cant seem to get the FPS above 30-40 fps i want to get it to at least 60, but over clocking my CPU and vid cards doesnt seem to be having any effect on my FPS

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trevorama

i am using a motherboard that is supposed to be able to run triple and quad sli it better be able to handle 2 3 year old GTXS!

hehehe

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vectorvtec73

Oye you should get a ton more than that in any game! As an example from my experience -- With my Asus M2N-E, Raptor X, and 6400+, I'd get a solid 100FPS in CoD4. With my MSI, Velociraptor, 6 gigs of ram instead of 4, and 9850 black edition, I get about 40 with drops to about 15 in CoD4.

yes, it's night and day, and my MSI is supposed to be more powerful than the old Asus I had! If you overclock them and only see little improvement, I'd first make sure your hard drive is working to it's fullest extent. Your CPU is a solid chip, and I don't know much about intel mobo's so I can't say much. But I would say there's a good chance you may be having the same issue I had, your mobo can't handle what you're throwing at it.

Try this -- Yank one of the cards out, and keep the other in the x16 slot. I'm not sure about your mobo, but most of them slash the cards to x8/x8 instead of having them x16/x16. Try it with one -- If the performance is exactly the same as having both cards, try the other. If it is again exactly the same, I'd say look around for a different mobo, try to find someone with your exact system. It sounds nuts, but going from my Gigabyte to an Asus did miracles. I was selfish though... wanted a quad core and sold my Asus.... bad move .

-Philip.

vectorvtec73

Remember though -- The Gigabyte I had was supposed to do the same, and it couldn't handle one card! One thing that set off the light bulb in my head about it not being able to handle the card was that my old eVGA 8800GTS actually ran with higher fps than my GTX -- Makes no sense whatsoever, but once I kicked over to that Asus, all the issues went away.

vectorvtec73

last quickie, gotta hit the sack -- Please keep in mind I'm not a computer genius, it's just a hobby. I'm speaking merely from personal experience since I've had a very similar issue to yours. I'll try to check back again tomorrow, best of luck!

trevorama

well that sucks

with one card in i get the same performance as i did with both cards in and SLI enabled. there has got to be somthing i can do in my bios to boost perforamnce!

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vectorvtec73

Maybe there is. You might want to check the website, but at least with this MSI, the performance was the same on revision 1.3 as it is on 1.5. There isn't much to explain this issue, but I'm feelin for you because it's frustrating as hell and the only thing you can do is try a different mobo(at least that worked for me). If you know someone with a compatible mobo sitting around that you could literally borrow and drop your system into, try it out!

If you start looking for another mobo that could handle what you're throwing at it, I'd look Asus. I've had Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI. The Asus's were crazy good out of the box. The Gigabyte and MSI, I did tons of tweaking with little to no change. Look around at different forums and try to find someone with your exact system, but a different mobo, or maybe post something until the Intel Mobo forum and ask is someone has a similar makeup to yours.

Best of luck figuring it all out!

-Philip.