8800GT requiring RMA?

Seems like the CPU is bottlenecking. So is the RAM

Seems kinda low to me. I get 13,500 marks with a Q6600, 4 gigs of ram on Vista 64.
Card is OC'd to 700/1750/975. Exact same card as yours btw.

Wait till you get the rest of your rig because you can RMA it anytime... if you buy the RMA plan they'll cross ship you a card too.

The CPU and Ram are definately bottle necking. Notice while your drooling all of the 11000+ 3Dmark scores they all are C2 duo or C2quad. I havent seen any 11000+ with a AMD.

i have a similar system-amd opteron 175 dual core @ 2.2ghz with 2mb L2 and an asus a8n-e based on the same nvidia nforce 4 ultra chipset with 2gb of ddr400 ram from transcend. and a 8800gt 512mb card.i have been playing all my games(doom3,medal of honor airborne,testdrive unlimited,nfs,hl2,cs source)the settings in my control panel are 16x AA and 8x AF @1280x1024 and my games look gorgeous and are silky smooth when it comes to gameplay.

hehheehhe my overclocked x1950 pro gets 6138 3dmark 06.... mine was so cheap!!! compared to 8800

Right on roadrunner... VEgie the 1950 series were good at one time but do suck now... and your score isnt based all on that card... it's a lot to do with cpu and ram. I got a wopping 7800 score on 3dmark with my 8800gt and i am running an old 3500+ o'clocked. So before you start bragging about that score tell us what you've done to make your cpu/ram faster... As that score would be really good if you had the same CPU as I did.

I wanted to underclock my video card so it doesn't run so hot. Why run it faster/hotter than it can even go due to the cpu/ram. And I was thinking of my other system, the one I installed the 8800GT only has 1-GIG of PC3200 RAM not my overclocking 2GB-4400 RAM.

I have no problems running Medal of Honour Airborne, Battlefield, Half-Life, Call of Duty 4. Its way better now than my old SLI 7600GS cards. I just wanted to make sure there was nothing wrong with the card because I have 30days from NCIX to exchange it. (evga manuf. is longer I know).

You have to understand that 3Dmarkis simply LAME when used to compare systems with different setups. Check you performance while playing your favourite games using FRAPS. My totaly lame old system that sucks, gets terrible 3Dmark scores but I manage to play Bioshock, Lost planet, Hellgate London (simply awful!) and now Crysis (low rez 1024x768 with most at med, and few at low) with good average frames of about 30-40 fps! And that with med to high settings enabled at 1280x960 (except crysis). If your ok with the performance, screw the 3Dmark points!! Oh, also I must say that unless you want so save some electricity money and keep your card cool (i have mine constantly underclocked for those reasons), DO NOT underOC your card! It's just dum.

I just bought a couple PCI antec slot blower fans. The overclocked card was the only one I could buy at the time and it will be fine when I run it in my updated system Q6600, 4GIG G-Skill RAM on Gigabyte P35 DQ6 board for Christmas.

I have heard of people underclocking their cards until a better solution comes out for cooling ie HR-03 GT I think. So I thought I might as well do it here until I get the new parts but I guess its a dumb idea.

I just tried my buddies 8800GT card in mine.
Tested them in SLI, my results are a little better but not by that much.

I just got my evga 8800GT Superclocked 650mhz card and installed the 169.09 drivers. My 3DMark 06 scores for default settings are as follows:

SM2.0 Score : 3582
HDR/SM3.0 Score: 5155
CPU Score: 1700
TOTAL = 8840 (OLD SCORE NO SLI 7649)

My CPU/RAM/MOB are definitely slowing them down.

Can wait till Christmas to get the new parts. Current games still run fine coming from a console only gamer.