Is my system running optimally?

[Wrecked]

Hey, I thought I'd ask the community. I recently built a new system, and I'm not sure it's running up to par. This is it:

Asus P6T Deluxe V2
Intel I7-920
Corsair 6 GB triple channel kit
(2x) EVGA GTX 295 CO-OP Edition in Quad SLI
Corsair HX 1000W Modular power supply
Xigmatek Thor's Hammer Direct Heat Pipe heat sink with 120 MM fan attached
NZXT Panzerbox (Case)
LG Optical Drive (make not important)
(3x) 1 TB Western Digital drives in raid 5
Running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 edition as O/S

Now, I plan to overclock the processor, but want to see if it is stable at default 2.76~ GHz, which so far it seems to be. Windows 7 boots fast, and operates quite nicely as far as I can tell. I have installed all drivers to their latest versions as far as I can tell.

I have Quad SLI enabled (though it doesn't seem to help on my benchmark, I wonder if the benchmark is simply old? and should use vantage...), and for a quick test, I ran this through 3dmark06 the latest version, at only 1024x768 no AA just to see how it would compare to my old system on those settings.

As it ran however, I noticed that certain points in many scenes, especially in the 1st 2 tests that dipped below 60 fps, even going so low as 32 fps. Turning SLI on or off through the nvidia control panel seemed to make no difference, and gave exactly the same result through all tests. The score I eventually came up consistently is around 18500. Keep in mind again that this is at 1024x768 and would likely be worse at native resolutions...

Now the benchmark might just be too old to be accurate with this kind of setup, but I'm thinking the score is still too old. I have a friend running a system with a 4800+ and a 8800 GTX that gets 12200, and that is almost 2 generations hardware back now.

So I have 3 questions:

1. What score should a system of this caliber be getting from this? Or what benchmark would be recommended that I get an accurate comparison?

2. Is it because DX 10/11 was installed, and now I need to do another type of test? Or would there be another problem I'd be missing?

3. Now, one somewhat unrelated, I did at one point try to overclock the CPU in the BIOS, but I'm not able to change any of the settings in the AI Tweaker section. Any suggestions?

Replies to any of these questions would be helpful.

Thanks!

 

[dndhatcher]

You cant use DX11 with a 295, only DX10.1 and below.

Going at low resolutions takes the graphics card power out of the equation. Its probably a single thread benchmark so you are like benchmarking a single 2.6GHz core with no graphics card.

You need to benchmark at 1920x1080 (or higher) and see what happens. Also thats just a benchmark and does not really give you much indication what game play will be like. Probably a good idea to install your favorite game and compare that.

You do want to overclock that i7 or you will not get the full value of those two massive graphics cards. There is a guide for i7 overclocking in the overclocking forums section.

 

[Wrecked]

Thanks, I will try all that you have suggested, and I saw the I7 overclocking guide on the forums, but don't know how to actually change the values in the BIOS of my motherboard, they don't seem to want to let me change them.

Regardless, anyone else have an opinion?

And thanks a lot dndhatcher.