Help with 7600's

M

Maverick2002

New member
Hi all,

Just to let you all know I’m not very clued up about PC components so the information I have is very basic, but if I need to get more information in order for you to help let me know where to look and I’ll get it.

I recently re-built my PC, formatted the hard-drive and re-installed windows. I’m using all the latest drives etc but I’m not sure if my process of installing them would be causing the symptoms I’m experiencing.

My system (very basically )

ASUS P5ND2 SLI MOBO

P4 3.6GHz

4GB of DDR2 Ram (excessive but i do allot of rendering)

2 x BFG 7600 GT OC in SLI mode

250GB hard drive

Hiper 580w TypeR PSU

It seems to be running games etc very poorly, is there anything in that spec that screams "underpowered" and would be causing a performance bottleneck? I used to have a BFG 6600 GT OC (but it blew up) and that seemed to run things better.

I have also noticed that when-ever windows media player opens, or video/music plays the screen will flicker black then settle when the app is running.

I've tried all the steps in kempez' guide with no luck, i've also contacted BFG who suggest a replacement. I'm reluctant to do this as i dont believe there is a fault with the cards (i've tested them individually, both perform the same - not much difference in SLI mode though).

Am i just expecting to much from them, i assumed 7600's in SLI could run most of todays games on pretty much full (or near enough) but it een struggles with Empire at war's menu page (with the crazy space battle in the background)

Should i just cut my loses and upgrade them to 7900gt's?

Any advice would be great, thanks for reading.
 
First off welcome to the forum.

Now, I dont have expericance with SLI but to me it sounds software side. Have you made sure that you enabled dual card setup in the bios, using the most recent drivers (i head there were problems with the newer 7series cards and anything but the latest drivers) and then tweak the SLI settings till they perform best.
 
Have you set the jumper on the board for SLI? Have you got the SLI bridge?

And enabled dual card support?

When you install the nvidia drivers do you get the pop-up saying SLI is enabled?
 
Kempez said:
Have you set the jumper on the board for SLI? Have you got the SLI bridge? yup

And enabled dual card support? yup

When you install the nvidia drivers do you get the pop-up saying SLI is enabled? yup
Click to expand...

:(
 
Kempez said:
You don't happen to have vsynch enabled do you?

What version of nvidia's drivers are you using? 84.21
Click to expand...

I have tried it with vsynch both off and on, and dont see much of a difference.

Could it be that i seem to have loads of PCI management devices listed in the hardware monitor, or the fact i'm running it on a 27" LCD TV (now that sounds really bad, but i have changed the resolution down to something more sensible than 3600x720ish)
 
Yup, i've done a re-install (thats what added all the PCI management things).

I've also noticed a couple more things it could be, the drivers i installed weren't the international ones, i got them from the US download site by mistake - not sure how much effect that would have though?

Also, the nforce4 drivers may not be the latest.
 
Just updated the drivers to the international ones along with the chipset drives......still can't get the empire at war menu screen to run smoothly :(
 
It may be that empire at war isn't quite geared up to SLI. Have you tryed other games, benchmarks etc? and what rez are you running?

Is it just the menu screen that runs bad or the whole game?
 
Ham said:
It may be that empire at war isn't quite geared up to SLI. Have you tryed other games, benchmarks etc? and what rez are you running?

Is it just the menu screen that runs bad or the whole game?
Click to expand...

My desktop is at 1360 x 768, and i've tried the games at various resolutions which produces little or no improvement.

Its poor on most games, oblivion as another example and Black and white 2, and the sims 2 aswell. Even old games like C&C:Generals seem to stutter....
 
If you can afford it go for teh 7900GTs. As i would have thought they are much better in general.
 
I wouldn't say just jump into an upgrade. There has to be something not working right here. SLI 7600gt should be enough to handle pretty much anything but of course not at its highest res/settings. One of the things that I ran into with my 7800GTs were they had different bios versions on them. Once I flashed to the same bios I still had some freezing and stuttering problems. It was suggested that I run some benchmarks on them individually and figure out if there is a difference in score. It turned out that one of the cards was under performing the other (3dMark05 score difference of about 400 pts) and causing problems. RMA'd the low card to get a new one and haven't had a problem since. I would suggest benching each individual card first to find out what is going on.
 
I've just downloaded 3DMark06, will try it when i get home. Any ideas what kind of scores i should be getting, for a single card and for SLI?
 
I'm not quite sure what you will be getting. It has been awhile since I tested my other cards and still haven't run '06. When I was talking to the techs they said anything over 100pt difference would mean there is a possible problem with the card.
 
Got the results to the tests, what do people think?

Card 1 (single):

SM2 - 878

HDR - 1106

CPU - 400

3DMark06 - 2030

Card 2 (single):

SM2 - 942

HDR - 1141

CPU - 405

3DMark06 - 2107

Card 1&2 (sli):

SM2 - 893

HDR - 1314

CPU - 403

3DMark06 - 2188
 
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