Video card )660 Ti) isnt working as well as it should HELP!!

[fronkey]

As usual my GTX 465 wasn't good enough for what i wanted graphics, luckily enough i had another lying around. I SLI'd them and saw just about 0 performance gain. I was thinking my card was on the fritz in the first place, so i caved and went and bought an Nvidia 660 TI. Installed, saw strangely just a small gain in performance, not as much as i know it would. I gave my old card to a friend, and it was running games on high or ultra settings when it was only at 20-25 fps on my computer on those settings. My old card is as good or is out performing my new one. Im thinking it's at this point hardware related, but have no idea.

All my drivers are up to date on this computer, as well as reinstalling new graphics drivers a few times.
Everything in my computer is less than 6 months old except the PSU is about a year old.

Please help, there has to be a fix. I cant believe it can be the card at this point.

Windows 7 OS
ASUS Crosshair V Formula
AMD FX-6100
Corsair H-80 Liquid Cooling
Kingston hyperx khx1600c9d3k2/8gx 8gb
Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti
Patriot Pyro SSD
WD 500GB
1200w PSU

 

[Phyrexiancure]

Are you overclocking your cpu? Your set up look pretty decent, but your cpu could be holding you back in lightly threaded games. 3.8-4 Ghz is were you want to be at for decent performance without needing a new heatsink. Also try turning off anti aliasing in your games and reseting catalyst control center to default graphics settings.

 

[fronkey]

Ohh, ya i've tried over-clocking my cpu myself to 4.3. tried not over clocking, let the mobo overclock itself. Everyway to overclock or not overclock. Water cooled H-80. Does not overheat either

 

[fronkey]

Im thinking that my Processor isnt powerful enough, or is dying and needs to be replaced..

 

[Phyrexiancure]

Im thinking that my Processor isnt powerful enough, or is dying and needs to be replaced..

Its more likely going to be a issue with settings than some hardware error since that's more common. If your processor is working properly its performance is good enough for your gpu.

 

[fronkey]

So which hardware error? This is where i am lost, i dont know where to begin to try and fix this.

 

[fronkey]

Also, and i dont know if this is relevant or not but i had 3D working on my old card. Then suddenly stopped working. And when i replaced the card, still wouldnt work..

 

[iam2thecrowe]

if overclocking the cpu yields no gain in performance then that is strange. the fx 6100 is a poor gaming cpu though. you would have to get it to 5ghz for it to match a stock i3 2120 in gaming. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-overclock-crossfire-ssd,3098-13.html ("FX-6100: A Surprising Processor Bottleneck" ) a must read for you.

 

[-Jackson]

Wait, catalyst control center?
I'm pretty sure you mean Nvidia Control Panel..
Are you currently overclocking the card? The CPU is unlikely to bottleneck your performance that significantly, even if it was running at stock speeds, hell, most games should run well on stock speeds anyway.
Try running some benchmarks like 3DMark and see how that goes.

Edit: You did say you saw zero performance from your previous SLI set-up right? You might have a faulty PCI-E slot. Also, did you plug your 660Ti into the first PCI-E slot?

 

[Phyrexiancure]

i3 performance is situational, in threaded games like battlefield 3 64 player maps the fx cpu wins through mass core superiority. If you look at the guild wars 2 benchmarks they show an example of this. Tom's represent something like a fx 4200 and it outperforms or is equal to an i3 in the same price range. Though they don't do a good job of representing this since the the price comparable processors are in different graphs.

 

[smorizio]

make sure your mb bios is up to date and use cpu-z and check to see what the mb set your ram speed up. it may not be running your ram at the right speed. also use gpu-z and check that the gpu is read right and the pci-bus speed is reading right. with sli or crossfire both card bios/speed and id most time have to be the same to work as a pair.

 

[fronkey]

With heaven, and everything maxed out 1080p tessellation extreme, anisotropy 16x, i mean everything maxed, 32.9 fps score of 829. I dont have much to compare that to. but for a 300 dollar card, ii would imagine everything to be a little higher, well fps wise. MB bios is up to date, and i use cpu-z and my ram is says 1600 on the box but the bios has it set for 1333. ill try that for sure. Pretty ready to just buy a new processor. in the process of reading the forum on my processor right now