Bad Mobo?

[bmwhite88]

My PC specs

Abit AN9 32x mobo
750 watt pc power and cooling psu
4 gigs corsair ddr2 800
2x bfg 8800gt 512 mb
amd 6400 proc
Xfi Xtreme gamer
64bit Windows Vista

I recently added another 8800gt to my rig to set up SLI. With the 8800gt came a host of problems. First I began to experience severe static and crackling sounds over my USB headphones and standard 2.1 speakers. To solve the problem I bought an Xfi Extreme gamer sound card and a new pair of 5.1 surround headphones as I thought the Realtek card that came with my mobo was bad. The new sound card did not fix the problem. I found that when I pulled the second 8800 out of SLI the audio problems went away. I suppose this is a problem related to my mobo and I was wondering if anyone can verify this. Also when in SLI I can see no noticable peformance increase in any of my games. The avg fps in the World in COnflict benchmark remains at 25 fps with all settings maxed with single and multi card setup. I have enabled all SLI features so I suspect it is caused by a busted PCI E slot. What do you guys think? Should I buy a new mobo? My problems have persisted from XP to a clean install of 64 bit Vista.

Thanks

 

[bmwhite88]

I am kind of looking for an excuse to switch over to intel with a new mother board but my audio problems seems to stem from SLI and if SLI isn't even worth it then I may just sell my second 8800 and keep my motherboard for a while longer. Comments? Has anyone here added a second 8800gt and noticed a performance increase in Vista? Right now I see a zero percent increase when I enable SLI with two 8800gt's? There don't seem to be any bios settings or jumper settings to enable SLI on my mobo so SLI was active when I ran my benchmarks.

 

[bmwhite88]

Is it worth buying a new motherboard to use SLI? Thinking about a low end intel quad core the Q6600 and the ASUS P5Q Pro LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX mobo. Anyone know anything about the ASUS mobo?

 

[evilshuriken]

The problems you are having could be due to one of many issues. Sound issue could be an IRQ conflict. About SLI performance, you could have a CPU bottleneck(I don't really know the performance one would get out of that CPU so I could be wrong), or maybe a driver issue.

[strike]If you cannot find a fix for those problems and decide to go with intel, that mobo/cpu combo will do nicely I think.[/strike]

**My bad, I somehow managed to let the fact that he needed an SLI motherboard go right over my head.

 

[Pazuzoo]

A P45 board would not work with sli, only boards with nvidia chipsets will work with sli.

 

[johnnyq1233]

What you could do is start up the task manager and go to performance tab and leave it run while running the game for a minute or two. Then exit the game and look at the graph...If your hitting above 80% then you're most likely maxing out your processor..
Hope this helps.