Just ordered a new GFX card.

ASRock and ASUS are the same company. ASRock has always been the lower end of ASUS, but ecently has tried stepping up their game and made some good boards. On the the ASRock boards was used to set a world record for processor speed last generation.


Rubius, your performance limitation could be caused by a couple things, in order of likeliness:

Most likely: the 590 SLI chipset is complete crap. Never ever buy an Nvidia chipset, they dont even make chipsets anymore cause they were so bad. Also, this chipset has PCI-E 1.0 slots, so that would be a bit of a limitation. the 590 SLI chipset came out in 2006, the PCI-E 2.0 spec didnt even come out till 2007, therefore you have PCI-E 1.0 slots. The question is if the limitation of slot bandwidth is greater than the limitation of interconnect bandwidth. Even if total bandwidth is not exceeded, a PCI-E 2.0 slot and card still provides a bit better performance over PCI-E 1.0 since the lanes themselves operate at 5GHz in 2.0 mode and only 2.5GHz in 1.0 mode. Thus your latency is lower when using a 2.0 slot. This latency decrease can only really be seen and measured though if you have an interconnect and processor capable of providing enough data to the graphics card faster than the PCI-E 1.0 spec has for latency.

fsb speed is limiting you in that it doesnt have enough bandwidth for your graphics card. Are you running 800MHz FSB or 1066MHz fsb? Even at the top speed, you only have 8GB/s total system interconnect bandwidth. This is total shared bandwidth, meaning everything on your system takes from this pool and that is total data, not each way.

Processor speed is bottlenecking your graphics performance. Being that it cant supply the graphics cards with enough data as quickly as needed. This may be possible, but more likely the fsb is limiting the amount of data your processor can send to your graphics card. You should have something like a 3.4GHz dual core to provide enough data to the graphics card without bottlenecking it. or at least a 3GHz quad. But a CPU of this speed would be severely limited by an 800fsb interconnect and still probably a substantial limit on the 1066 fsb. That is one of the great things about hyper transport that AMD has had for so long, and the new Intel QuickPath that Intel took from AMD, it is a serial direct connection. Meaning it has full bandwidth both directions, not a total bandwidth one way.

RAM speed. Are you running DDR2-800 or DDR2-1066? 1006 is probably fine, but 800 speed might be a little bit of a speed limitation.



Basically, your graphics card is too good for your system.

in a way, but that isnt exactly true since 3D Mark doesnt use a game engine that games run on. So it cant show you a cards real performance in a certain game, it can only provide synthetic numbers that can only be compared to numbers from other cards in the same benchmark. So in a way, it gives you a way to compare cards, but doesnt give a representation of those cards performance in real games. and when the comparison method is heavily favored to one side, it cant give a true comparison between cards anyway. That was what I was getting at.

 

ewww. Nvidia raid controller? The Intel controller is WAY better performance. Although for a storage RAID on big mechanical drives you probably wouldnt notice a lot of performance difference. but the ICH10R has really good performance, especially in small random files. Small randoms are the majority of Windows reads and writes, so that is where you see performance gain the most on an OS.

Also, I updated the CPU section of the previous post to say how fast of a CPU you should have not to bottleneck your new graphics card.


You would probably get much better performance if you used that newer board, and overclocked your CPU and the fsb as much as possible. If you could hit 1333 fsb then that *could* solve your bottleneck issue with the interconnect. and really an OC to 1333 is not that much, people used to push 2333 MHz on the FSB back in the days of this board.

 

Let me apologize in advance for ruining your day Rubius

This is Windows 7, default 6970 clock speeds (from a flashed 6950):






I suppose that ^^^ is definitive proof that you have a bottleneck in other parts of your system?
I think that is *just a little bit* better than your 12.5k score

 

If only ATI didn't suck balls in many new games they would be much better. Sadly many games are designed around Nvidia architecture. Thus, even a lower card for Nvidia can be better than a higher card for ATI as seen in the demo tests for the 560 TI.

 

Put in the Q6600 and see how much the score changes.



Also, if you want a direct comparison between your 8800GTX and the 6970 in my system, you can mail me the card and ill ship it back after I run the benchmarks.

 

Did you run any benches though with the new board and the quad processor to see what the difference is?


Intel does, and designes the reference design for a motherboard socket and chipset whenever a new one comes out, but Intel generally makes some sucky motherboards. No overclocking options at all in most cases. And the boards tend to be more expensive than the competition, with less features. You have never heard of them because they are just that bad.

 

Its odd that the drivers were crashing, most people dont have issues with them anymore. But unless you are using more than 4GB of memory it doesnt matter to be running 64-bit anyway so whatever
(Or if you want to use more than 4GB in x86 Windows 7 then PM me for how)

Its good to see everything is running much better now, and that you were able to overclock as high as 3.6GHz. Thats a nice dual core you have there And it is good that you can see definitive proof that it was just processor speed that was holding you back, and now that problem is solved



Something you should try though is to turn down the CPU multiplier (make it run slower) by 1 or maybe 2 settings. Then raise up the FSB some more. Try and get back up to the 3.6GHz mark with the lower multiplier. This will give you a higher interconnect speed than what you are currently running and that should help even more. Just be careful about the RAM speed, you may have to drop the RAM divider down a notch as well and then it is a balancing act of getting the RAM speed back up as well as the CPU speed.

 

Your scores seem very low to me. I dont know what the average for your card is, but even Rubius scores higher than you. Rubius got an X1751 score with his computer. I feel like with your SB processor, you should be higher than Rubius and much closer to my score. I run the same speed as you but just have the 2600k instead of your 2500k. RAM speed is the same as me too.
Youll have to ask Rubius what my scores were. I sent him both performance and xtreme scores. Messages dont get saved in my outbox so I cant just pull the numbers up. Just guessing here but I *think* I got somewhere around X1900 points? I cant remember what my P#### score was.

Are you on Windows 7 service pack 1?
64-bit OS?
Possibly your OS hard drive holding you back, although I dont really see why it would in anything but loading time... But it is the only part of your computer that is "low spec"