9800GX2 poor performance

Hi All -

I recently built a new rig and for graphics I baught a PNY geforce 9800GX2. It seems that I'm getting poor benchmarking performance (3DMark06 = 11500 marks and 3DMark vantage = 8500 marks). Based on what I read and people who have built similiar machines, I'm thinking there is a bottleneck somewhere. Does anybody have any suggestions? My specs are as follows:

DFI LANPARTY LT X38-T2R motherboard
Intel QCore 9300
Intel X38 NB, Intel ICH9 SB
8gb DDR2 1066 patriot memory (its only running at 800mhz)
PNY Geforce 9800GX2 (stock)
Vista 64bit with SP1
Latest NVidia drivers
Latest Intel drivers

Vista performance reports the ICH9 running in compatibility mode and says install the drivers, however I have the newest Intel drivers and it seems okay - this could be a vista issue. I'm not sure if its really in compatibility mode. Vista performance also asks I install the GX2 drivers but they are installed. I havent been able to resolve those issues - but I'm not sure there really is an issue there. I have the latest vista 64 drivers installed.

One of the clues that there is an issue is the fact that 3DMark06 performance does not change based on multi-GPU or multi-display. Obviously it should be using 2 cores for one and 1 for the other, so I'd think there should be performance changes.

I've disabled search indexing in vista as it destroyed my I/O performance.

Any suggestions would be appreciated... (does anyone know of different drivers I should be using or settings I need to tweak?)


Thanks!

Hello and welcome to the forums mate

How is your gaming performance? what FPS u get and what resolution do u play ?

Dont count 3DMARK 06 as an very imporant factor, the most important factor is that u play games @ good settings and get a good FPS

Hi guys - thanks for the welcome and the quick responses.

grieve - I'm using a Hyper 880w PSU so the board should be getting plenty of juice. As for the driver, I'm at work right now so I cant check but I do believe I downloaded the latest driver. I will have to double check.

I actually havent had a chance to do any research in my games yet. I just built the rig and the first thing I wanted to do because I was curious was run both versions of 3DMark and since FPS looked low for my setup and my score seemed really low - I was kind of like, whats going on??

Later, I will try a variety of games and if the performance is still on the low end, I'll see if I can post some more info that may be able to help.

He has single 9800GX2 and GPU-Z shows 512MB RAM for 9800GX2 :
http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=351319

The 9800GX2 has two gpus, each of which has 128 streams and 512mb of memory. GPU-Z sisplays the specs for ONE of the gpus

http://forums.slizone.com/lofivers [...] 19379.html

From what I have read, the 9800GX2 architecture is comparable to 2x 8800GTS cards on top of each other. The gx2 is composed of 2x 512mb cards (when added together you have 1024mb gddr3)

You have 1 9800GX2 and it shows 2 9800GX2s?

can u plz post a screenshot?
thanx

Ok thanx for that,but i have seen many that its reporting SLI isnt enabled but i dont think thats an issue