8800GT SLI not performing as I expected. Is it my PSU?

[Pentacore]

So just last night I got my 2nd eVGA 8800GT 512MB and hooked it up and enabled SLI. After posting in another thread and asking if my PSU was sufficient, I was told that my garbage Rosewill 600w PSU would not cut it. I was stubborn however and just wanted to see what would happen so I put in the 2nd videocard and ran Crysis. I know probably a dumb thing to do but I couldn't resist. Crysis was running in "very high" settings at 1680x1050 but was very sluggish and actually ran rather crappy.

So my question is, was it running crappy because my PSU was not supplying enough power, or is Crysis that much of a demanding game? I'm hoping its the PSU and getting a new, SLI-certified PSU will give me good results.

My last question would be what PSU would you recommend I get? I was just going to pick one from the SLI Zone's certified PSU list but there are so many choices. I was thinking of going with a Silverstone 750w. Thanks in advance!

My system specs are:

Q6600 B3 2.4Ghz OCed to 2.7Ghz
4GB Ram
2x320 Sata RAID0

 

[geoffry]

Did you install the SLI drivers?

Also, that silverstone PSU will definitely be enough for 2 8800 GTs.

 

[Pentacore]

Originally posted by: geoffry
Did you install the SLI drivers?

Also, that silverstone PSU will definitely be enough for 2 8800 GTs.

Yes I completely uninstalled the Nvidia drivers, flashed each card seperately with the latest BIOS from eVGA's website, then installed the latest drivers off Nvidia's website. After they were installed and I rebooted, I got an automatic popup in the systray that said this computer is capable of SLI click here to enable it. So I did this and enabled it in the Nvidia control panel.

I'm really hoping there was just not enough power. I'd be pretty disappointed if 2 8800GTs in SLI were not enough to run Crysis smoothly at high resolutions.

 

[CP5670]

Yes, that Crysis performance is not surprising given the settings you're using. I'm using a GTX 280 on a mix of high and very high settings (most things on high except the texture-related settings) on 1280x960 and the performance is not where I would like it, frequently dropping to the low 30s during fights, especially in the later levels. Having everything on very high is much more demanding than even that.

This game simply runs poorly on pretty much any current hardware. Most other games should work better.

 

[WA261]

Im betting on the 8800's being the problem.

 

[Pentacore]

Originally posted by: CP5670
Yes, that Crysis performance is not surprising given the settings you're using. I'm using a GTX 280 on a mix of high and very high settings (most things on high except the texture-related settings) on 1280x960 and the performance is not where I would like it, frequently dropping to 30 or less during fights, especially in the later levels. Having everything on very high is much more demanding than even that.

This game simply runs poorly on pretty much any current hardware. Most other games should work better.

Damn wow that is a bit depressing. Would an inadequate PSU however manifest itself via dropped frames or sluggish performance or would it not have such visible effects?

 

[CP5670]

Originally posted by: Pentacore

Originally posted by: CP5670
Yes, that Crysis performance is not surprising given the settings you're using. I'm using a GTX 280 on a mix of high and very high settings (most things on high except the texture-related settings) on 1280x960 and the performance is not where I would like it, frequently dropping to 30 or less during fights, especially in the later levels. Having everything on very high is much more demanding than even that.

This game simply runs poorly on pretty much any current hardware. Most other games should work better.

Damn wow that is a bit depressing. Would an inadequate PSU however manifest itself via dropped frames or sluggish performance or would it not have such visible effects?

A bad PSU is much more likely to result in instability and random reboots than performance-related problems. I doubt it has anything to do with that unless you're getting poor performance in other games as well.

Also, if the framerate is already low, the multi GPU microstuttering may be making things appear more choppy than usual.