SLI not performing, help please

[Otacon132]

I just purchased two 8600gt's for SLi and installed them.

I went ahead and enabled it on the mobo and set SLi on in the nvidia drivers


Frame rates, and performance is alot worse than if i run just 1 card, what am i doing wrong?



Specs:
A8N-SLI Premium
2gig ram
AMD Athlon 3800
460watt psu

 

[dragoncyber]

Your A8n-sli premium board runs at 8x/8x when 2 graphics cards are installed, instead of the normal 16x/16x bandwidth that most motherboard manufactuers have enabled on their systems these days, it is a limitation of the old SLI first Gen boards, not only that but you are running only a 460watt psu for dual graphics cards?? Bump up your PSU to at least 600Watts for this setup and also find yourself a A8N32-SLI Deluxe board.. with true 16x/16x bandwidth. (the Best 939 socket board available).I had both the A8N-premium and the 32 Deluxe but was running a AMD Opteron 185 Server class dual core overclocked to 2.9 ghz per core. I still have my premium board with the AMD OPTERON 185 and 4 gigs of OCZ platinum ddr memory if your looking for an upgrade just let me know..I'm looking to sell it. PS: Your Athlon 3800 Athlon isnt helping the situation either.

 

[LukeBird]

Agree with almost all of what is said above!
Although don't worry about the x8/x8 SLi, 8800GTX's aren't pushing enough memory bandwidth to really be bottlenecked by that (at best 2/2.5fps) (I'll find the link ) so two 8600GT's aren't going to be a problem at x8 SLI.