9600GT in Sli with E6550?

Doubt it. See your 9600 GT and get a GTX 260. It runs circles around dual sli'd 9600 GTs. And yo won't have to worry about SLI stutter, heat, or fan noise.

Do you mean it's doesn't exist? Sli stutter is a myth then?

It's not the millisecond time differences between alternate frames being rendered by the two GPUs?

True some games you don't see it but I personally have experienced it on Crysis, both in single and multiplayer modes. After disabling SLI, the problem goes away.

That's the problem right there, a badly coded pile of crap, not some so called 'micro stutter', I have been running an Sli set-up for over four years and two rigs and the first time I heard of this 'micro stutter' was when Crysis was released and now it's being bandied about by people such as yourself as something that affects all and everything SLI when it's only one piece of dross that is so 'ahead of it's time' that when the hardware that is supposedly able to handle it gets developed let alone produced and sold to the public no-one is going to care because it will be so old you will be laughed at for even mentioning it.

i don't think that the cpu would be an issue,it's overclocked to a pretty high frequency so it should be able to handle the upgrade fine,of course a newer cpu would have higher core speed and more head room for over clocking but for gaming you would be fine with what you have it's your prerogative really

Actually 2 9600 GTs would slightly outperform a GTX 260. 2 9600 GTs are very comparable to 2 8800 GTs, which falls in between the GTX 280 and GTX 285. For raw performance the 2 9600 GTs will do better and cost less. Also micro-stuttering is a very rare phenomenon that apparently only happens when someone uses an anti-mulitple GPU argument.

I'll agree that Crysis isn't perfect. Obviously I'm disappointed with my SLI rig for a few reasons:

Too noisy and sucks up power (Go Green) when I'm only in 2D. I couldn't afford to build a stand alone SLI rig just for gaming and since we can't game 24/7 (some of us anyway) the thought of those two gaming cards not doing crap seems like a waste.

Everything else equal, my GTX 260 scores higher than my 2 9800 GTs. I paid $150 for the GTX 260 that I use on a non-sli mobo - less than $225 for both. Just for wanting to try sli, I paid over $350 for the 2 cards and mobo only to go "Huh?" after the single card beat 2 cards that cost more. Not to mention a bigger PSU too.

When I do game on the SLI, I have to set the fans to 90 sometimes 100 percent just to keep the GPU temps below 72 C. I'm thinking I'm killing the fans or the cards because side by side they're being punished by heat and I can't help but think I'm shortening their lifespan and they could have "lived" longer as single cards.

Realize this isn't focus on the OP. Sorry.

What do you think of this pseudo-scientific article about micro-stutter?

Or it's a case of a rig with mismatched components.

How much onboard cache does that CPU have?, overclocking the crap out it is not going to compensate. There's an old adage from the drag racing world that sort of applies here "you can't beat cubes" or in this case onboard cache, if that rig was running an e8400, e8600 or a Q9550 or suchlike with those cards there would be no 'microstutter'

does anybody know the answer to my question please?

ye i do, why do you ask that?

well i am buying one off my friend that is exactly the same as mine except from the cooler, so that should do the job

thanks

Do you know anything about 'Asus P5N-D' motherboard by any chance?

lol, ok thanks

I have the same gpu in sli and the same cpu

It runs great, really smooth, above 60fps in almost every new game.

no, at stock speed

I´d probably should!!

No worries dude, and yes, my mobo was one of if not the most expensive 680i's here in the UK it was getting on for £400 when first released and I had to wait until the 790i was released before it came down to a price I was willing to pay, the build quality is top notch though and the main problem with the 680i boards was manufacturers skimping on the boards to offset the price they had to pay for the chipset, thus a lot of boards failed. Abit didn't but they went to the wall.