Brand new self built pc has major framerate issues, possibly cpu issue

my processor is a i7 960 (3.2ghz), i have 12 gigs of ram, motherboard is a evga x58 ftw3, power supply is 800w and the harddrive is 7200rpm 32mb cache 1 tb.

I just built this computer, installed windows, got the geforce drivers set up and now some games have much lower framerate than they should. (starcraft 2 for example has 40-10 fps on ultra, and the benchmark setting that iv looked up says it should be at 200, and i have sli cards, the benchmark used one), and tf2 runs just as slowly as starcraft 2 (borderlands also runs slowly) . However, avp runs perfectly well with 60 fps (the cap for the game), on the maximum settings in dx11 mode.

I have also tried each card individually to see if it was the psu, but the framerate issue persisted.

The cards are definetly set for sli, and i doubt my issue is the psu due to the fact that individual cards didnt run better. The drivers for the card are the newest, but i also tried the older drivers that came with them and those drivers didnt effect it either.

By now im thinking something may be messed up the cpu, as iv heard sc2 puts alot of its power on the cpu.

Can anyone help? this is driving me crazy as i poured all my savings into the system and cant afford to give up

I would first check that you have each of your RAM modules in the correct 3 of 6 slots for tri- channel operation...

YOu might also get most current X58 chipset drivers from EVGA, and make sure the SLI bridge is thoroughly seated.

You might run/check/compare a few CPU benchmarks, just to make sure your CPU is not clok throttling downward due to heat issues, and/or check that your assorted BIOS settings are correct.

^ Good advice. Have a look at what your CPU does under load, and see whether the temps and clock speeds are as expected.

Use MSI Afterburner's OSD settings to view the gpu clock speeds in-game. Verify the card(s) not running in 2D profile. I've been noticing this issue in some games recently.

I went into nvidia's control panel, and customized the game's profile by setting to max performance.

Also at some point just deleted the two user profile settings for ntune in C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\NVIDIA Corporation\nTune\Profiles:

sysdflt.nsu and usrdflt.nsu and rebooted.

I can't remember in which order or which resolved the issue, I was just troubleshooting in a more casual mode.

There should be a way for the software to log periodically the GPU speed/load/temp/etc into a text file for review. If you aren't reaching your set speeds, this is where to look.

Getting stuck in 2D limits my GPUs ability in half (400 core versus 775 core, game FPS drop nearly half).