Here it comes.....8800gtx

CivilServant

Flaccus wrote:

Lets hope for some good feedback on the beta bios but the pci latency tool is a red herring as the OP on the evga thread points out. Nothing to do with X-Fi at all. Cracking across all types of sound.

Another thing I did not like about this board was the chipset fan - even at 50% which is lowest you can set it to it was too noisy and chipset still got too hot, with hot air venting up towards cpu. Asus striker looks like a better design. Then again Asus tech support is total pants and at least EVGA are actively engaged with forum members on solving issues.

Quad core installed last night...benches soon

Quad core should net you about 1500 extra 06 points. No games currently on the market support quad core, so gaming wise the fps will remain the same. Benchies are will be the only place it will make a difference and serious multitasking. Seen some Alan Wake footage a while back using quad core technology and damn it was good. About that time, would be right for an upgrade.

Also heard that sli cracking noise can be solved by reinstalling all the mobo drivers, etc and reinstalling DX9 last, even if you already have it installed, do it again. It should work. So you have 3 potential workaround/solutions for the problem, blue slot, pci latency and DX9. Pretty good chance of getting it to work imho.

gline

my 2 POV cards still say staus - picked

i hope they ship today

KamiKazi

when is the ASUS 680i board coming out?

gline

a parcel arrived from komplett today :eek: i cant wait to get home , hope its the cards

You Suck!

when is the ASUS 680i board coming out?

Friday according to most sites, Heres a preview:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=123227

Sounds good, but im still not sure what to do yet, kinda scary jumping at a new board.....

Flaccus

Well if the Asus board is out and gets good reviews, can take a Tuniq Tower and has no sli issues I will be buying one for sure

Then hopefully a 2nd G80 in the new year.

I assume we can mix and match G80 brands as they are all off the same reference design ?

Gline - did your cards come ??
<edit>Looks like the bios fix works but you have to be careful to use dos to do it. Doesn't work if you flash from windows
http://www.evga.com/community/messageboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=21597</edit&gt;

Flaccus

CivilServant wrote:

Quad core should net you about 1500 extra 06 points. No games currently on the market support quad core, so gaming wise the fps will remain the same.

I do lots of divx encoding I understand quad core helps big time. I also dabble with 3DSMax so hopefully it will help render time. Other then that there are some improvements though minor in Quake4 which I have yet to really play and Valve seem keen to use multiple cores.

gline

Flaccus wrote:

Well if the Asus board is out and gets good reviews, can take a Tuniq Tower and has no sli issues I will be buying one for sure

Then hopefully a 2nd G80 in the new year.

I assume we can mix and match G80 brands as they are all off the same reference design ?

Gline - did your cards come ??
<edit>Looks like the bios fix works but you have to be careful to use dos to do it. Doesn't work if you flash from windows
http://www.evga.com/community/messageboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=21597</edit>

nah it was shipped today, so 1-2 days il have it hopefully, though anpost as slow as hel last few weeks

gline

happy days, got my 8800gtx's yesterday and installed them

my rig is VERY tightly packed with pci and pci-e cards, id say the gfx's are gonna get really hot.

i flashed the bios to the latest beta that is supposed to solve the audio issue and flashed the firmware on my pci-e scsi raid card

and installed windows, thats as far as i got though as i am in work now and had to get some kip, so no drivers installed

i have to say this is by far the most trouble free build i have done so far

cpu is @ -20 degrees C and i think i can tweak that to maybe -30 or more through the vapochill software, the evga mobo is actually pretty sweet, bios is excellent

i still dont fully know what the sli memory feature is on the mobo , il have to read into it more.

so maybe tonight or tomorrow night im gonna install drivers and try benchmarks.

THEN for the overclocking doubt id be able to oc the gfx cards at all due to heat, but the cpu should oc very nicely @ -20 or -30 degrees

il keep you posted, maybe a few pics too

Flaccus

Cool. Can't wait!!

Some interestin tips on this 680i mobo
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=124363

gline

Flaccus wrote:

Cool. Can't wait!!

Some interestin tips on this 680i mobo
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=124363

thanks man, really helpful, will read that in work now

yeh i cant wait either, mightn't be until monday i get a decent few hours on it im hoping for 4ghz if possible

Flaccus

Hopefully you will be able to overclock the G80's too. I had no problem using Ntune with it on my Bad Axe. Should be fine on the EVGA. It does seem to be a bit buggy if you are going to use it on your motherboard though. So I would stay away from auto-tune.

How are you cooling the chipset ? That fan is really noisy and at min. setting which is 50% speed in the bios does not cool enough and is still noisy.

I wouldn't bother with the sli memory crap. For lazy people. Just tweak the memory manually. Also in unlinked mode you will run it way way higher and it won't affect performance. SLI memory was just an effort that Nvidia made to invent their own Jedec standards.

One thing is the voltage on the cpu...there is a setting somewhere in the bios for leaving it at default or auto. When you do this and overclock, the the voltage goes way up. Which is why people were complaining of very high temps when overclocking. Best to set it manually.

As for sound - are you using onboard. No EAX I believe. Or did you manage to get your scsi and sound card in there

Will be interesting to see how your psu handles all this plus sli.

gline

Flaccus wrote:

Hopefully you will be able to overclock the G80's too. I had no problem using Ntune with it on my Bad Axe. Should be fine on the EVGA. It does seem to be a bit buggy if you are going to use it on your motherboard though. So I would stay away from auto-tune.

How are you cooling the chipset ? That fan is really noisy and at min. setting which is 50% speed in the bios does not cool enough and is still noisy.

I wouldn't bother with the sli memory crap. For lazy people. Just tweak the memory manually. Also in unlinked mode you will run it way way higher and it won't affect performance. SLI memory was just an effort that Nvidia made to invent their own Jedec standards.

One thing is the voltage on the cpu...there is a setting somewhere in the bios for leaving it at default or auto. When you do this and overclock, the the voltage goes way up. Which is why people were complaining of very high temps when overclocking. Best to set it manually.

As for sound - are you using onboard. No EAX I believe. Or did you manage to get your scsi and sound card in there

Will be interesting to see how your psu handles all this plus sli.

i will be ocing everything manually as usual
i managed to fit, 2x gfx + scsi + xfi in, havent tested it though.
i should be able to crank the vcore a good bit up on phase

as for ocing the 8800 gtx's... i doubt it, they are running dead hot already as there is no room for them to "breathe", il try , but im not expecting anything good

Flaccus

Managed to get my 3dmark06 score up to 12372 at 660/1060. Games seem rock solid as well with no artifacting. GPU fan hardly speeds up, and all case fans at 1200rpm max, including CPU fan. Also got my memory running at over 1000mhz which isn't bad for 6400 stuff.
<edit>Seems my memory bandwidth score never got captured. But it was up around 7800 which is pretty decent</edit>

http://img174.imageshack.us/img174/227/3dmarkji7.jpg

Flaccus

gline wrote:

i will be ocing everything manually as usual
i managed to fit, 2x gfx + scsi + xfi in, havent tested it though.

Check this out
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17654565

The new beta bios you flashed your mobo with fixes sound crackling with sli but absolutely kills performance to the point where 1 g80 is faster then sli. Might be better off restoring your bios and trying the 2nd g80 in the 8x pci-e slot. Then again if you install the beta bios with a floppy (doing it in windows works but no fixes are applied), then reintall the mobo drivers and chipset drivers, sli performance might be unaffected.

gline

i installed it with a dos floppy, and then installed windows etc

had a problem lastnight, went to install xfi drivers and pc froze, wouldnt bot back into windows, not even to the boot menu for windows, so had to reinstall. will finish it off when i get home tonight or tomorrow

awhir

you work on sundays :eek: :eek:

gline

awhir wrote:

you work on sundays :eek: :eek:

once a month i gotta do a weekend, i dont mind double pay and 2 days in lieu

Flaccus

Beats coming in the odd Sunday or 5am tommorrow morning for NO extra pay

Let us know how you get on.

gline

Flaccus wrote:

Beats coming in the odd Sunday or 5am tommorrow morning for NO extra pay

Let us know how you get on.

will do, i think theculprit is the scsi card, might need to do a bit of messing around with it

gline

well all is well for now, no crackles with sli enabled and xfi all installled, but thats only playing music, il try games out in a day or 2

#i just need to get my hands on a vapochill serial cable if anyone has one that i can borrow

build is stable on stock speeds anyway, but gfx are running @ 70degrees idle, LOL
il have to try sort something out there

Flaccus

So far so good so. Hope you get the cable sorted.
By the way, where did you buy your Vapochill case ?

gline

Flaccus wrote:

So far so good so. Hope you get the cable sorted.
By the way, where did you buy your Vapochill case ?

i bought it on adverts

bad news i ran a 3dmark 06 and immidiate shutdown when i clicked start, it didnt display anything... could be anything causing that il look into it tomrrow

Flaccus

Did you reinstall the video driver after adding the 2nd card. SLI is very buggy on 97.02 and you are supposed to reinstall the driver.

Anyway if I was you, I would uinstall the driver alltogether, shutdown, remove 2nd card,run drive cleaner pro in safe mode, reinstall the driver and rerun 3dmark06. Remember if you just remove the 2nd card without reinstalling the driver it can crap itself as 92.02 is very buggy. If 3dmark06 works for you with one card, then add the 2nd card, reinstall the driver again. And run 3dmark06. If it craps out this time, then your psu does not have enough amps for the job, which would not be surprising considering all the gear you are running including that vapochill.

gline

Flaccus wrote:

Did you reinstall the video driver after adding the 2nd card. SLI is very buggy on 97.02 and you are supposed to reinstall the driver.

Anyway if I was you, I would uinstall the driver alltogether, shutdown, remove 2nd card,run drive cleaner pro in safe mode, reinstall the driver and rerun 3dmark06. Remember if you just remove the 2nd card without reinstalling the driver it can crap itself as 92.02 is very buggy. If 3dmark06 works for you with one card, then add the 2nd card, reinstall the driver again. And run 3dmark06. If it craps out this time, then your psu does not have enough amps for the job, which would not be surprising considering all the gear you are running including that vapochill.

i just installed all hardware then went installed windows and all drivers, bios is showing good 12volt voltage etc, il have to fiddle around more and see what the story is

might be a psu issue, might have to run 2x psus

gline

ok found the culprit, 12v rail was @ 10V :eek:

so to fix this i went to peats and bought a 550watt ocz modstream as a secondary psu, will run vapochill + 1 gfx + 1 or 2 other devices off this

might not get to try this for a few days, il let you know how it goes

Kintarō Hattori

gline wrote:

ok found the culprit, 12v rail was @ 10V :eek:

so to fix this i went to peats and bought a 500watt ocz modstream as a secondary psu, will run vapochill + 1 gfx + 1 or 2 other devices of this

might nnot get to try this for a few days, il let you know how it goes

Sigh are you some kind of MORON gline!!!!

gline

eo980 wrote:

Sigh are you some kind of MORON gline!!!!

?????? eh??

Kintarō Hattori

You know you should have told me you were going to pop to Peats and well you know....

gline

eo980 wrote:

You know you should have told me you were going to pop to Peats and well you know....

yeh i know man i know..... but it was a REAL spur of the moment thing, i was in town and i thought, what the hell il buy a psu.

geez i should just setup a tab in there or something

they didnt have rj12 connectors or a serial cable though