3dmark score low = not enough juice?

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Furious911

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Mar 15, 2008
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Hey fellas I have a friend running an E6750 system with 2 8800GTs in SLI and it seems like hes getting lower scores with SLI then when he has it turned off, and sometimes the screen will go black, well once that I know of during Crysis. Is there a way to see if hes using all his power up, an app or something to measure that? He wants a 1000w psu but I'm not sure if his 3dmark issue is really power related, i know hes not getting a more power needed pop up type thing that I've heard about, any ideas?
 
You didn't tell us what his current power supply is, which is the most critical bit of information... but I seriously doubt thats his problem.
 
It could be that one of his cards is defective that he gets a lower score with SLI enabled. Time to do some troubleshooting and a RMA

BTW rarely will PSUs cause performance problems. Stability problems yes but not performance.
 
I believe hes rocking some 650Watt thing, I also know hes tried each card individually and they seem fine. Hes also got like 6 fans and lights.
 
amazingly, i think i am the friend that is having the problem. I ran across this last night and realized that this is exactly the problem I am having... So let me go into this a bit further, my current specs are:

asus P5N32 SLI SE Deluxe
Intel e6750 2.66 GHz
4Gb DDR2 Matched corsair 800 MHz
Antec 650 Trio 650watt (with 19A on each of the three 12v rails)
BFG 8800 GT OC running stock 650MHz X2
2 - 500GB WD Hard drives 1- 80 gig WD hard drives all running SATA
Samsung sata DVD buner
Windows XP media center

Thats all i can think of to list that may be of help. Also have an Antec 900 case so 6 fans, one of which is a 280mm(aprox) and three are led. I also have the most current nforce chipset drivers and mobo bios running. My geforce drivers are the 169.25, also most recent.

I ran each card individually and scored 3dmarks of 9782 with each card but get an 8350 in SLI mode so the cards run great on their own.

the only other thing i can think of is that I have a faulty board and the second PCIe X16 is not running properly.

hmm. bout to order new psu, mobo and q6600 cpu, lets see if that makes a difference.

mike
 
oh yeah.. not sure what this means but both cards have a different bios version?? could that be it? they are the exact same models, just slightly different bios version.
 
mikeh3488 said:
oh yeah.. not sure what this means but both cards have a different bios version?? could that be it? they are the exact same models, just slightly different bios version.
Click to expand...

Depends on the specs. I believe they'll both run at the lower of the two specs.
 
It could be your driver revision. Are you getting higher fps in actual games with sli enabled than single card? If you are, then maybe 3Dmark just does not care for your driver revision.

Also make sure the sli bridge is securely plugged in.
 
I havent checked FPS in single card mode but thats a good idea. I do know that running the crysis demo in SLI would give me 60fps in medium, but highest (not maxed as that is reserved for DX10 as you guys may know) would get up to about 25fps which I would expect to be higher with two 8800gt oc's.

I also made sure that the bridge is in properly and also reversed it just incase for some reason that would make a difference but none.

also, occasionally in sli mode only, the screen occasionally would go black or sometimes just freeze, twice in crysis at the high graphics level, once in Age of Empires III, twice in 3dmark06 and a few times playing WOW, forcing me to restart. This is what led me to believe it may be underpowerd. Asus tech support said it was definitely a power issue as they showed me needing at least an 800watt with 21A on each 12v rail to power what i have... but then they hung up on me becuase i asked if it could be an irq conflict which insulted his 3 years of board testing intellingence. In another forum I read that each 8800 card requires a combinable 28A on the 12v rails so total 56A(?), I have 3 12v rails with 19A on each so thats 57As(?). Im not sure how exactly that works but that seems close especially if something else is pulling amps off the 12v rails. I really dont know enough about wattage and amps to even say this is the problem.
 
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