Dissapointing results with Geforce 7950GX2 with Asus P5B-VM

[Ray-zor]

Last week I recieved my new system which (a.o.) includes a C2D E6700, 2x1GB G.Skill, X-fi XtremeMusic and a Club3D 7950GX2 working on an Asus P5B-VM powered by the Enermax Liberty 500W.
After a week of rearanging components and installing XP Pro, I got around to some benchmarking.
To my dissapointment 3DMark06 only gets to a score around 4300, whereas it should be well above 7000. Looking at the SM2.0 and HDR/SM3.0 scored, they are about half what they should be. It almost makes you think only one of the GPU is used, doesn’t it. I noticed a lot of programs (for instance the nVidia drivers and RivaTuner) only recognise one core and half of the memory. However, I’v seen that a lot of people experience this, yet still have good results.
I’ve tried many different BIOS and driver settings. Allthough as far as frequencies and voltages go, I left them default/automatic because I would not know what I’m doing. MulitGPU mode is enabled in the NVidia console (driver). I have flashed to the latest BIOS (version 0405) and tried different nVidia Forceware versions. All without any results.
Is this motherboard just limiting the 7950GX2 or is there more I can do?

For those who have seen this post before: yes I've posted it ealier this day @Sudhian.com :)

[dogbyte_13]

i thought you needed a SLI board to operate these cards?

[Dan_D]

i thought you needed a SLI board to operate these cards?

No you do not.

[dogbyte_13]

so it will work in SLI mode??? sweet mother of god!! i need one of these in my next system or when will the new 8000 series come out? cause im projecting either january or february for a new system.

[Dan_D]

so it will work in SLI mode??? sweet mother of god!! i need one of these in my next system or when will the new 8000 series come out? cause im projecting either january or february for a new system.

It will work in SLi mode. SLi is done completely internally on the 7950GX2. The other thing is that the motherboards have nothing to do with SLi or Crossfire. Those two technologies simply leverage something called peer to peer writes which are part of the PCIe specification. Nothing special is going on there. The drivers are the main sticking point to making SLi or Crossfire work on a given motherboard.

The G80 (rumored to be called the 8800GTX) is set to release in November. So I'd wait until then to buy a video card.

[dogbyte_13]

Thanks Dan!! you da Man!! anyway how do i get a job like yours? because working at Vonage as an Advanced Technical Supervisor sucks!!

[sleepeeg3]

So short story, it sounds like this board is unsupported.

Most boards that support the card are SLI boards.

[Ray-zor]

Thx for the replies. Unfortunatly after two days of testing and more testing I still haven't found a definate cause, let alone a solution. I've read more then one cry for help about similar issues on the Net, but all of them involved other motherboards. Some got their issue resolved by a BIOS upgrade, but must are still struggling or no answer/reply was given.

As far as I can tell it's either one GPU-core that's broken or the P5B-VM is just not letting a second GPU into its system. And to be honest , I'm leaning towards the later explanation. That leaves me to the next dilemma, shall I replace the 7950GX2 with a ATi X1950XTX or ask for a replacment 7950gx2. At the moment I'd go for the ATi, but what if Asus puts out a new BIOS that suddenly support muliti-gpu....
Ah well, we'll see.

[Ray-zor]

I'm confused. Even more then normally ;)
I was planning on mailing the store about a possible switch to another vidcard. Seemed like a good idea to provide some more benchmarks than just 3dmark06. So I did the in-game tests from FEAR, CS:Source and HL2: Lost Coast. And waddaya know, they where pretty much on par of what they should be! Most of the times, that is. During further testing accsionally the fps-score went down 30%-60%. 3Dmark06 still always gives the same low score everytime though.
I'm beginning to think it's caused by the 3D profiles nvidia so genrously provides and allows you to set per application. But that's still a bit of a mistery to me. A free app names "nHancer" supposed te be a handy util in changing those profiles, so I think i'll look in to that. On the other hand, I read in some fora that GX2 doesn't use profiles.

So in short, still in the dark as to what is happening but glad that the games I tested so far run like they should.