Major 3870X2 Performance Issues

One thing with ASUS motherboards is that they usually get released with a crappy bios, are you getting stutters and lock ups ingame?

Could be worth a bios flash among other things, my p5b deluxe wouldnt overclock the cpu past 2.1 ghz without updating the bios. Now its fine.

Had the same issue with a 3850 and it turned out to be a bad MB. My nephews PC went from a 1650 to a 3850 and had shutters and lag. Turned out the MB was going bad. Sometime going from one card to another a reinstall of the OS is needed.

Did you run a driver cleaner to see if any of the old driver is sitting in the registry?

I have all current motherboard and video drivers. That does not seem to be the reason why. Although I am not sure if my motherboard is pci express 1.1. If someone were to be kind enough to tell me what kind of pci slot I have?
Mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131014

One thing to note with this motherboard, use the latest chipset drivers from nVidia, don't use the ones from the Asus site. The only thing you should be using from the Asus site is the latest bios update for the board. Also, make sure you have the onboard video disabled in bios.

It doesn't matter, as PCI-E 2.0 cards will work on PCI-E 1.x slots.

I'd make sure that you cleaned the Nvidia drivers properly. A format will definitely make sure of that.

Also, as people have already mentioned, try updating the BIOS.

The motherboard yuo have mounts an Nvidia Geforce chipset, wouldn't that be the case why your ATI HD3870x2 Graphics card won't work!?

First of all I have personally done alot of research to see which would be best for me the new 3870x2 only works with PCI express 2.0 and it still needs a crossfire ready motherboard (or non NVidia) to work properly.

your performance issues is that your forcing 2 GPUs through only 16 lanes to a north bridge not designed to take that.

A Motherboard with PCI-Express 2.0 which is like running 32 lanes with 2 GPUs and a north bridge like a X38 or similar then it will give you better response.

Even though the cards are backwards compatible, some motherboards do not work properly with PCI-Express 2.0 cards.
Most of them do, but there are a few exceptions here and there.

Yes, old drivers will cause problems. Most likely they will be in the form of Hardware Interupts and DPC's. This will cause a single core of your CPU to peg at 100% usage and not go down. That will cause a HUGE performance drop... you need to clean all that old stuff out as suggested numerous times above.

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I dont think your getting it. Having the latest drivers doesnt help if you also have old drivers installed on your harddrive.

Yes, old drivers will cause problems. Most likely they will be in the form of Hardware Interupts and DPC's. This will cause a single core of your CPU to peg at 100% usage and not go down. That will cause a HUGE performance drop... you need to clean all that old stuff out as suggested numerous times above.



All that is true but by what he described in his original issue it seems more of a video card and mobo not working properly

You are kidding right? The 3870x2 is compatible with PCI 1.1 or 2.0 and it DOESN'T need a crossfire MB. It will work with ANY MB. That means Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Via, SIS. Its 2 chips on one PCB and recognized as one card. It has Internal Crossfire.......

Please do more research as yours is Flawed

Franky I would love to know where you got all of you information from because you are grossly wrong. A PCI-E 2.0 doesn't have 32 lanes, it has 16 lanes that run at a faster speed, from 8GB to 16GB transfer speed.

Example, "PCI Express Base 2.0 specification doubles the interconnect bit rate from 2.5 GT/s to 5 GT/s in a seamless and compatible manner. The performance boost to 5 GT/s is by far the most important feature of the PCI Express 2.0 specifications. It effectively increases the aggregate bandwidth of a 16-lane link to approximately 16 GB/s. The higher bandwidth will allow product designers to implement narrower interconnect links to achieve high performance while reducing cost.

http://www.pcisig.com/specifications/pciexpress/base2/

Almost everyone knows that there isn't a graphics card on the planet uses more than PCI-E 1.0 bandwidth, thats a fact. Time to do somemore research there.