8800GTS Slow?!

[TheHighHat]

System:
X7DAE 5000X chipset
2 x Xeon Dempsey 2.66GHz (4 cores + 4 SMT virtual cores)
4GB FB-DIMM @ 533MHz
256 PCI hole
8800GTS (Leadtek)... was 7900GT
620W PSU

Software
Windows XP Pro x32 (with some nLite enchancements)
nVIDIA 97.72

3dmark2001: 21000
nVIDIA demos: Smoke, Adrianne, & Froggy run *very slow & choppy*
3dmark2005: first 2 scenes about 30fps... last 2 about 2fps *barf!*
3dmark2006: uber slow 15fps at best

I have not tried any games yet.... but I dont know why it is so crummy... the 7900GT did better.

Any thoughts?

[GeniusPr0]

did ya use driver cleaner? or did u just install over the 7900s... or is it a reformat

[SlieTheSecond]

What brand and specs of your PSU?

[Lfctony]

Yep, definitely a problem there. Motherboard drivers are installed I'm guessing. Try falling back to the 97.02s.

[TheHighHat]

PSU is AeroCoolZERODBA ZERODBA-S620 EPS 12V (dual 12V rails, modular)

This is a fresh XP install. No other VGA drivers installed. Only nVIDIA 97.72

[Redeemed]

PSU is AeroCoolZERODBA ZERODBA-S620 EPS 12V (dual 12V rails, modular)

This is a fresh XP install. No other VGA drivers installed. Only nVIDIA 97.72

Hmm... do you know how many amps the second rail has on your PSU?

[TheHighHat]

Hmm... do you know how many amps the second rail has on your PSU?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817331002

20A & 18A

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Also, I do not quite understand how the current would cause such poor performance and yet still enable the machine to run.

nVIDIA monitor reports GPU core at 512 MHz & GPU memory at 792 MHz.

Supermicro mobo monitoring tools (X7DAE) say all voltages stable & normal.

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Thoughts?

[Redeemed]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817331002

20A & 18A

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Also, I do not quite understand how the current would cause such poor performance and yet still enable the machine to run.

nVIDIA monitor reports GPU core at 512 MHz & GPU memory at 792 MHz.

Supermicro mobo monitoring tools (X7DAE) say all voltages stable & normal.

Okay, even if you were to underpower the GPU- you wouldn't know it untill you did something that would stress the GPU.

When you are just at the desktop, the GPU is essentially idle. Thus, it really isn't consuming much power at all. But once you fire up a game with lots of eyecandy, the GPU has to work much harder- thus requiring more "juice". Just like when you stomp on the accelerator of your car, it'll consume more gas a lot quicker than if you were to gently and barely press down on the accelerator.

I'm thinking the PSU might be to blame. Dual rail PSUs really do suck for one reason: the first rail is always 100% dedicated to the CPU. This is pretty dumb as the CPU will never actually need that many amps- but that is just the way it is. So, that leaves only the amps on rail2 to power the rest of your system.

If you happen to have access to a PSU that is single, Tri, or quad-rail and has higher amps that you can devote to the graphics card- try that.

Otherwise, it very well might be a defective card... or something else.

[TheHighHat]

Hmm.. good points.

All I can say is that even if I fire off eight threads of high vertex (GPU bound) & high texture transfers (GPU bound) and a game and benchmark the harddrive... the most system tasking set of events I can do simultaneously... nothing bad happens.. so I think the PSU is handling the load well....

I have read that the 8800 can be CPU limited... but the Xeon Dempsey is a strong performer even at the low end.

argh... I guess the card could be faulty.. but are there any other signs or tools that would make this more clear?

[Redeemed]

Have you altered anything in the driver control panel? Also, I would recommend using the latest drivers. See if those fix anything.

Being that the GF8 series is new, these drivers are bound to have some bugs for a while. It'll take time for the drivers to fully mature to what we are accustomed to.

I'd recommend updating to the latest drivers, and see if that fixes anything.

[TheHighHat]

I tried benchmarking with the default control panel settings... no good...

then manually tried various other configurations ranging from highest performance to best quality, including the control panels "high performance", etc., slider settings... no good...

all software & drivers, up to date with latest versions...

still dog slow...


I may try a bios update, but there shouldn't be anything significant there at this time... bios is stable & fast... perhaps a clovertown update at most...


the goal ironically is not gaming performance, but for scientific computing with the stream processors... but i need to know it is working properly somehow...

(thanks for engaging this discussion by the way... very helpful)

[Bman212121]

Hmm.. good points.

All I can say is that even if I fire off eight threads of high vertex (GPU bound) & high texture transfers (GPU bound) and a game and benchmark the harddrive... the most system tasking set of events I can do simultaneously... nothing bad happens.. so I think the PSU is handling the load well....

I have read that the 8800 can be CPU limited... but the Xeon Dempsey is a strong performer even at the low end.

argh... I guess the card could be faulty.. but are there any other signs or tools that would make this more clear?

A good way to check if it is the PSU is to use a second one to power the GFX card. If you have another ATX PSU lying around, you can take a piece of wire, and connect the green wire on the main 20 or 24 pin harness, to any of the black wires. This creates the connection to force the psu on when you plug it in. Then you can take and use either an adapter for the molex (should have came with a PCI-E to 2 molex adapter in the box with the card), or the PCI-E connection if you happen to have it. Plug that into the card from the second PSU, then try doing the tests. If the numbers look a lot better, then it is definetely the PSU, otherwise it could be a bad gfx card or something else that isn't set right.

It might be possible that you don't have the PCI-E slot set to 16x, but if the other card worked fine, usually you should get about the same performance out of the newer card, as it will go as fast as it can before something bottlenecks it.

Here is a pretty good example of how to force a psu to turn on without being connected to anything. http://www.dvhardware.net/modules.php?name=Sections&sop=viewarticle&artid=5

[TheHighHat]

BIOS update... no good.

Leadtek provided drivers (from box) no good.

Clean install with Vista... even worse.

I'll try this PSU mod... but I do not think the PSU is an issue. I have found others with the same power supply and an 8800gts/x that do not have problems...

Does anyone run with Xeon? The only thing I can think of is that the drivers are SMP safe (multicore), but not well tested in this dual socket configuration so there may some interrupts happenning when threads move to another core... or some cache coherency issues...

[TheHighHat]

OK. I tried the PSU mod with a PSU that has single 30A 12V rail. No luck.

This is taking too much effort.

[Xion X2]

Make sure you have all of your updated sound/chipset drivers. Also make sure have all of your windows updates. And check in your bios and make sure your PCI-E lane is running at 16x.

[TheHighHat]

Confirmed. All software/firmware is at the latest version. PCIe is running at 16x. (and card is in the 16x slot, just in case anyone wants to ask :) )

[TheHighHat]

Could someone run 3dmark01 and let me know how it goes for you? Especially if you have a Leadtek GTS.

[Redeemed]

Could someone run 3dmark01 and let me know how it goes for you? Especially if you have a Leadtek GTS.

I get 14046 3DMark points in 01. :p Also, that is at 1920x1440, with 8xAA (essentially everything maxed in 3DM01). Furthermore, I had FarCry running in the background (paused), IE7 open with 3 tabs as well. :p

So I guess the test wasn't too accurate. I'll try it again at default settings just to see what I get.

[SlieTheSecond]

47932

Specs are in my sig, except cpu at 3.4ghz and video at stock speed.

Installed it, ran it at what ever the default first loads are.

http://0slie0.googlepages.com/nvnewsmark01.jpg

[TheHighHat]

See... that is exactly the type of score I was expecting. Maybe 40K at the low end. And like I said in the first post... newer benchmarks are just awful.

[NoWayDude]

Those on the sig are my scores. I can not for the live of me get more of 2001. The other ones are normal scores I guess

[Redeemed]

Just tried it again with default settings. I got 20192. :p

Maybe I should just close FarCry. :o

[SlieTheSecond]

Why would you run it with Far Cry running when he is looking for normal performance to compare against?

[Redeemed]

Why would you run it with Far Cry running when he is looking for normal performance to compare against?

It's kind of a long story...

For some reason I get BSODs after about the 5th time of loading up FarCry. So to prevent these from happening- I just leave FarCry running. I recently shut my computer down, so I had to close FarCry (hoping I don't get a BSOD when I go to play FarCry next)- so I can run it again to see what I get.

[Redeemed]

24931 at default settings. This time the only app I had running in the background was IE7 w/ only 1 tab open (nVnews).

18837 w/ everything maxed (1920x1440, 16xAA, 16xAF, TAA & GCAA enabled, etc).

Seems a bit low to me. Hmm...