hideous underperformance of new gaming PC`

OK. I have a problem. I am a first time home system builder. The build seems to have gone OK (except for 1 thing - more of which later - i don't think this is the problem). I have fairly high spec BUT games (bioshock let alone crysis) are a slideshow on reasonable settings. My 3Dmark score is 1120 when comparable systems are 10 000 +.

Full system specs as follows:
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3
Intel Q6600
OCZ Technology 2x1GB PC2-6400 DDR2 Platinum
Inno3D 8800GT OC 512MB
Corsair 520 Watt, ATX, EPS12V, PS/2, Modular Power Supply
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit OEM DVD
Seagate Barracuda 7200.1 500GB 7200RPM S300 32MB
Gigabyte 3D II liquid cooling kit
standard dvd writer, monitor etc.

All non-3D applications seem to be working fine (e.g. web browser) so I am of the opinion there's a problem with my 8800GT that restricts its performance but doesn't fully kill it. The driver I have is up to date (forceware 169.25) and I have clean installed this with no impovement.

(Yes, the 8800GT does have an auxilliary 6-pin PCI power supply and this is plugged in. Looking at the GPU status in windows, the power state is D0 which I believe is normal and with no restrictions?)

Any suggestions would be appreciated - I am at my wits end



PS - the one complication that occured was that in the 1st day of switching the system on for the 1st time, the controller for the fan on the Gigabyte 3D II liquid cooling kit went puff - literally, with a smell of ozone etc. However I believe that the problem was there before this happened with bad perfomance in bioshock. I returned it and re-installed the cooling system, with nothing else untoward happening.

Have you downloaded CPU-Z to see at what speed your 8800gt is running ? Some of the 8800gt's have some problems with some boards regarding the PCI-E lane speed. It seems some of them default to 1x lane speed instead of the standard 16x. This is due to the 8800gt being PCI-E 2.0 and the P35 motherboards are PCI-E 1.x. If that is your problem look on Gigabyte's website for a bios update. This would be the first thing I would check since your hardware config seems to be pretty good.

According to CPU-Z the link width is indeed 16x.

very oddly though under the CPU tab when I started CPU-Z up this time, the multiplier is switching at random between 6 and 9 ( and hence core speed from 1600 to 2400 MHz). This was not happening when I have checked this on previous occasions!

No, I have not tried overclocking - I was aiming to get it working normally before cranking it up!

Updated DirectX?

I'm sure it was, you just didn't notice it. That is C1E, it can be disabled in the BIOS but there is really no reason, because it's not your problem.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] multiplier

A long time ago I had one 8800GTX that would run fine with the drivers that came from the factory but whenever I tried to upgrade the driver to any other version, the card would go into safe mode and run horribly slow.

Turns out the card had a bad voltage regulator that was being triggered by a the newer drivers. Apparently Nvidia thought no one would bother to upgrade their drivers or something?

If your card has a bad voltage regulator or something similar it will go into safe mode on boot up and run like crap. Sometimes I would get a pop up warning on boot up but not always.

Also try unplugging the card and moving it to another slot and see if that makes a difference.

sorry - that should read "the psu is not supplying power ..."

Corsair PSUs are very good.

Download Rivatuner v2.06 and go under monitoring and tell us the results on the graph

StaggerLee - sounds like you have hit the frickin nail on the frickin head as the saying goes.

I will be taking this up with Corsair and/or the vendor. It seems madd ghey that PSU and GPU manufacturers haven't got together sooner to sort this 5H17 out.

Thanks so much for your help


Silverion - I have got RivaTuner 2.06 but can't see any monitoring or graphs??? possibly i'm being dumb...

OK, results of the hardware monitoring from RivaTuner 2.06:

Graph 1 - Core Clock \ ROP domain, MHz: scale from 0 - 1500; @ 648 MHz
Graph 2 - Core Clock \ shader domain, MHz: scale from 0 - 1500; @ 1512 MHz - i.e. more than the graph allows, and has a warning sign on graph scale
Graph 3 - Memory clock, MHz: scale from 0 - 1500; @ 950.40 MHz
Graph 4 - Core Temperature, C: scale from 0 - 200; @ 50 MHz

These results are rock solid when running only firefox

i ran 3Dmark (generally running the various tests @ 2 - 5 FPS) and none of those graphs budged in the slightest - all flat horizontal lines

It might be that your video acceleration is at software and not hardware.
On XP it would be right click on desktop -->properties-->settings-->Advanced-->Troubleshoot--> Drag the hardware acceleration to full.

Well, here's a depressing follow up...

My adapter from Enermax was waiting for me when I got home. It's basically an extension of the main ATX connector for the MB with a molex hanging off of it with 2 wires plugged into one of the molex pins.

I tried it out, and I'm still screwed. Maybe I'm missing something, so I'm going to follow up with Enermax but I could just have a bad video card (possibly the motherboard, but I doubt that). I just scored 1100 in 3DMark.

My problem aside - you could still be having the PSU issue, as it seems pretty common.

One thing you should check - are you getting the NVidia power warning when you boot? Most people are reporting that they get a message about the card lowering its performance because it's not getting enough power. I for one don't get that message, which may be indicative of a fried card instead of a PSU issue.

Lastly, I don't think I saw this posted as I scanned the thread...there are Vista hotfixes for game performance here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/windo [...] fixes.html

One of them states that vista basically reserves FAR too little memory for directx and essentially starves the graphics system of memory. Funny that they couldn't see video cards and games consuming half a gig of memory when they were developing vista - only the most resource hogging OS of all time.

So, give that a shot. It did nothing for me, but maybe you'll fare better.

I know I did...don't know about the OP. I think the P35 may also be part of the Vista install, but I can't remember exactly.

Either way, I had all the latest drivers ready when I installed. BIOSes are all updated, on the MB and Video card.

Also, in case it isn't clear...The rest of the system runs great. I didn't even notice the graphics problem for a week because I was busy overclocking the CPU, which is totally stable at 3.1 GHZ on stock voltage. The OP seems to be saying the same thing. I was so confident that I went ahead lapped my cpu and heatsink thinking I had a great system going, then went out and bought Crysis to see what I could really do with this box only to find that I was in the crapper.

He told us the graphics is running at the right clocks

not if you ticked the "dont show this message again" box though im not sure if there even is any (i think i saw one but im not sure)
i would try uninstalling gfx and mainboard/chipset drivers and only install the drivers that came with the hardware to see if it makes any difference.

Try changing your ram to another brand i have seen this before in a system i built for gaming.

Hi everyone. Problem solved. I am now so so happy - 3DMark06 score of 11500.

My graphics card came with a 4-pin peripheral connector to PCI-E cable. However, since my PSU came with its own PCI-E socket and cable I thought it best to use that. When today I randomly decided to try the 4-pin peripheral to PCI-E, it worked right away.

I am guessing that means that the PCI-E sockets (there are 2 - I tried both) on my PSU are either bust or never meant to handle the load of an 8800GT OC.

Thank you everyone for your time on this. StaggerLee in particular - man, I hope you manage to solve your 5hi7 - don't let it get you down!!1

chairmaker out