Is my q6600 bottlenecking my 2 9800 gtx in SLI or is my SLI not set ??

[grieve]

I dont think it is the Q6600.... It can handle three 8800 Ultras, why would it suffer from two 9800GTX?

 

[truehighroller]

The higher your clock overclock,, the better your video score will get because the cpu helps the low end of the fps. If you crank it up to 4ghz it will jump alot..

 

[truehighroller]

I scored a way higher score then that with my Q6600 @ 4.17Ghz and my 8800GTS 512 @ 820/2000~/2200~ in an overclocking contest for giabyte not to long ago with my P35 DQ6 motherboard. I scored 16,400.

 

[Granite3]

You prolly only have 2 cores active of the cpu.

Mine did this when I upgraded to the Q9450 from the e6750. (680i, same bios)

Enter the bios, find the cpu area, and enable the additional two cores.

If you have Speedfan, check it, you should have 4 horizontal performance bars, one for each core. If it shows just two, bingo!

My Q @3.2, with 2x 8800 GTX's hits just over 17k on 06.

 

[truehighroller]

He could look in the performance monitor of taskbar to I beleive and I beleive cpu z tells you as well how many are being used. Good point though.

 

[grieve]

My system is
q6600
xfx 780i SLI motherboard
2 9800gtx
4GB OCZ DDR2 800
PC P&C 750w PSU
Window Vista Ultimate 64bit

I wish people wouldn’t post XP scores! It is useless in this tread...Of course his score sucks compared to XP.

Randalldaigle might as well ignore all posts that don’t have Vista comparisons.

In Fact randalldaigle you should run Vantage and get a score that only Vista users can compare too.

 

[randalldaigle]

I'll check the cores setup tonight. Again thanks guys.

 

[imitebewrong]

You need to make sure you have the Vista updates so SLI will work. You cannot get them from windows update (althought i think they are included with Vista SP1) Go to the microsoft site or google "Vista SLI Update"

BTW Grieve my q6600 3.0ghz with a single 8800gt 3dmark06 score was 1386 on VISTA... so there is definitely something wrong here....

 

[randalldaigle]

.....as in 1 thousand 386?? Or 13 thousand typoed?

 

[pifive]

Very simple my friend Randalldaigle.

If you look at the Nvidia SLI certified PSUs. http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone_build_psu.html the Silencer 750 is not in the list for 9800 GTX SLI 2 Card. I do own a Silencer from PCP&C and its awesome but for your extreme rig configuration a Turbokool will do it and improve your scores.

I hope this gives some light to your issues

 

[righteous]

I have noticed that also having a higher memory frequency helps a decent amount.

But yeah, my q6600 is a bottleneck even at 4ghz with 2 3870x2 cards.
Of course it gets my shader scores to like 8k+ and 12k+ in 3dmark, but I can overclock the cards and get nothing extra out of it which tells me it's still not near enough.

If you look at some of the top benches in 3dmark you can see that even at those speeds the cards continue to react to increases in core speed.

The bottleneck is definitely understated.
We could really get some huge improvements with a better processor that will vlock higher or work with all 4 cores all the time.

But for now a q6600 as fast as it is, will never be enough to keep 4 gpus working. I know that much. maybe some of these future 8 core chips will improve things once all these dufuses start heavily multi-threaded stuff using all cores.

 

[randalldaigle]

Was my q6600. I bumped only to 2.6 (only 200mhz) and my scored jumped almost 2000 points. All cores were enabled also. Thanks again. Time to take this cpu to above well above 3 now.

 

[pauldh]

Why is 3dmark06 so important. it is very CPU dependent, especially at default settings. It's a waste of a benchmark for SLI 9800GTX.

In actually gaming, the Q6600 is outstanding. If you OC it to 3.5GHz , it is pretty much as good as you will get for gaming.

OC the Q if you like, crank the res and eye candy, and play some games like SLI is meant to do. Leave the 3dmark shootouts to those who can't crank crysis at high with fsaa like you and I can.

 

[randalldaigle]

I agree with you about 3dmark. I was just using as an indication of some sort of difficulty. It definitely helped me pin point my problem.

 

[Mite_a]

I've been going over and over this for a couple days now and I can't figure it out. Here's my issue. I've got 2 9800 gtx in SLI and can't seem to yeild any performance benifits out of them. In 3dmark06 my score in 12000 with 1 or both 2 running. Seems too low for one card to be honest. In Crysis I do see minor benefit in fps when doing in game counts but the looped time demo there is a small drop actually. I'll post this which I posted in another forum if you guys wouldn't mind reading it for me.

First I did a benchrun with SLI again
For 3dmark I got a whopping 11803...ouch
sm2.0 - 4377
sm3.0 - 5783
cpu- 3366

Obviously that sucks big time for 2 9800 in SLI.

I then took out one card and did another run.
The score was 11325
sm2.0 - 4500
sm3.0 - 5209
cpu- 3285

I then put the card in to PCI-E slot three and it booted up fine but told me that if I'm not running SLI to put it back into slot one. So I did cause I figure it knew better than me and didn't seem to wanted to do anything else anyway. Seemed normal though.


Your CPU needs to be overclocked to atleast 3.6ghz if you dont want to bottleneck those cards
you should be getting at least 15k with those cards

I swapped that card out for it's handsome twin and he put out an A for effort score of....forgot my drumsticks....
-11215
sm2.0 - 4437
sm3.0 - 5169
cpu- 3265

So as you can see these two cards pretty much tied for last place out of a 2 man sprint.

I then tried my Crysis benchmark. And played the opening sequences in SLI and with each card individually.

SLI did give me a small boost in certain areas. For the Assault Harbour scene in 1680x 1050 all setting on high no AA it gave me a 10-15 fps boost in the opening scene where the guys are sitting around chatting about how cool the suit is and in general gave me a few extra boosts or 5-10 frames here and there with many scene pushing virtually the same count.

I then did the opening scene of the game and was getting 50 to 60+ fps at the same res and detail level but with 4xAA turned on. Essentially getting AA for free from what I was getting before. On the Assault run I essentially free 4xAA over the single card scores.

So the SLI is making a difference just not as much as I'd expect considering how low the score with one card is to begin with.

I'm thinking I'm bottlenecked by the q6600 at stock perhaps.

Other interesting notes.

-3dmark refuses to acknowledge my 2 cards
-crysis benchmark heading shows MGPU. It recognizes both cards.
-Nvidia control panel recognized both cards but tells me I have 512 meg of video memory. Maybe it won't combined the total for both cards.
-SLI visual indicators often look bored. Bars go from full length to maximum shrinkage like Castanza just getting out of a cold pool.
-I redid a 3dmark run with the cards rearranged and got 12097 (total), 4368 (sm2), 6205 (sm3), 3269 (cpu)


My system is
q6600
xfx 780i SLI motherboard
2 9800gtx
4GB OCZ DDR2 800
PC P&C 750w PSU
Window Vista Ultimate 64bit

and I just got the newest driver for my cards.