EggXpert

thats what i thought, but definatley has not been the case.

formating and reloading right now.

id like to shoot for a new board even if it means new ram at this point, i want the best performance.  

 so.. Q9550  what board is the best option to run this chip with SLI (i am a crysis fan and already have 2 cards ) 

thanks

You'll need to find a 780i to work with your current ram.Right now the egg has only an open box board for sale. I don't advise getting one as you don't know why its returned.

Other option would be an 790i board and redo the ram to ddr3

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813141009

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sparker366:

You'll need to find a 780i to work with your current ram.Right now the egg has only an open box board for sale. I don't advise getting one as you don't know why its returned.

Other option would be an 790i board and redo the ram to ddr3

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813141009

getting closer to firing up world of warcraft on the fresh install, defraging the hard drive before i do the test. 

thanks for the info..  what ram do you recommend?  

 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220434    ?

First off anything over 1333 is considered an overclock and you would have to go into the bios and set the speed timings and voltages. If you are comfortable with that then you can get 1600 ram but I see no need to spend the money on the 2000 ram. Which btw is really for the p55 1156 i5/i7 platform and not the 790i platform as that is an older platform

GSkill 1333 Cas 8 ram 79.99

GSkill 1600 Cas 8 ram 89.99

The good thing with going ddr3 now is when you make the move to the p55 i5/i7 platform in the future you will have not have to buy the ram and the gpu's unless something amazing comes out that you must have in the gpu market.

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thank you very much for your help,

the parts are on their way.

do you recomend another fresh OS install when the parts arrive? also can you recomend a decent air cpu cooler for 3.0ghz on that quad core..

i have a thermaltake cooler, but one of the clips is broken and i cant find where to buy a new set anywhere..

Are these decent numbers...  (still waiting on Mboard and ram)

 3D MARK 06

SCORE: 16466

SM 2.0: 6976

SM 3.0: 9401

CPU: 3123

Are you sure you have SLI enabled?

Was that at 3DMarks default resolution?

Those GTX260's should be kickin my 8800GT's around like there not even runnin.      ( 8800gt's in sli score )

Course ..... then again ....... its just a benchmark and not a very accurate measurement of performance. In Crysis on very high settings @ 1920 x 1080 resolution I get avg 35 FPS.

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ya its enabled in the Nvidia control panel..  just did a complete drive format and OS re install due to crappy framerates.. guess that didnt fix it...

 ya i have the freeware version, i cant change any values.

cant view your score for some reason.. just gives me a default page.

Weird, link shoulda worked, score was 18056.  Looking through orb and benchmarks, your score should be around 23,500. Ensure SLI is enabled in the nvidia control panel.

29-33 isn't bad if it was in the forest I guess, allot more to render, but you should be doing better. Course if your on an older main board with 8x slots your probably being bottlenecked on the PCIe buss.

I'd wait on the new board and retest.

Considering that 2 x 8800GT's perform just about the same as a single GTX260 you "should" be getting about 1.5 times the performance of mine in SLI or better.

(you did download the latest drivers for your chipset and cards right?)

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EVGA 750i E173, E8500, BFG 1000 watt supply... im raiding in wow tonight and my display driver keeps crapping out on me, screen goes blank and i get a little triangle on my task bar that says "your display driver stopped working and has recovered" i am not over clocking my cards, only using EVGA precision to increase the fan speed.

this is the main reason i formated my hardrive to try and resolve the FPS problem and the driver issue....

not sure what to do at this point, hopefully the 790i ultra, Q9550, and the DDR3 ram will help when it gets here on thursday...

and yes, i got the latest mother board and video card drivers directly off the nvidia website..

as far as chipset... isnt that downloaded though update?

thats what im saying :D i just downloaded them from the EVGA website, and the URL on the link for the motherboard driver package was Nvidia.com 

http://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/nForce/15.25/15.25_nforce_winvista32_international_whql.exe

i dunno :D  but the link goes to the Nvidia webste.. as i copied the one i clicked on here

http://www.evga.com/support/drivers/default.asp?switch=2

well doent look like i can link directly to it.. but you know....  mainboard ,  750i, vista 32 bit .. yada yada..

IDK about a new BIOs flash, point I was making is I've read a number of posters with the E173 using Q9550s, so whatever prompted that EVGa lack of support person to tell you something as ridiculous as it doesn't support it, is worthy of another call and confront. Why should you be eating a Q9550 b/c their board won't run it, when it has no issue with allot of others.

Of course, they'll probably have you flash it again. Just for chips and wiggles, but they should replace it, provided you're 100% sure it isnt the CPU, (which we'd know would be rare.)

ok, after days of messing with this, (still waiting on the 790i ultra and DDR3 ram from new egg to show up the end of this week)

i tried again today to see if i could get the quad core to work, now i did absolutly nothing other than unplug, take off heat sink and swap out chips.. this time i turned the computer on and off several times.. on the 4th time the post didnt freeze as they had done many of the times i had tried in the past, so i quickly hit delete and went to the bios, set optimal defaults, F10 and saved.. and it booted...  O.o

but, it gets better.

in computer properties it listed Q9550 4 cpu's.  in my core side bar widget it showed only 2 cpu cores.. in the hardware manager it had listed 2 cores, now it gets good... one was Q9550 and the other was... E8400 .. so, i uninstalled the "E8400" directly in the hardware manager... rebooted..

same thing, i uninstalled it again, rebooted.. same thing, i uninstalled it again .. rebooted...same thing, one more try rebooted.... finally worked...

now, 

Q9550 2.8ghz  OCZ flex II  running at 1000mhz 5-6-6-18 2T (which is the timings one of the OCZ reps told me to use on the OCZ forums, but he recommended 1066mhz , it wont post at 1066mhz at all i have to reset the bios.. not overclocking the CPU at all the bios wigged out last time i tried to bump up the front side bus mhz just a tad and spent 2 hours trying to get my computer to work again, had to re install the old e8500 boot the computer, then re install the q9550 before it would actually boot with the quad core in it.. wtf

and to be absolutley positively sure.. i used driver sweaper today and uninstalled ALL of my Nvidia drivers for the motherboard and the display adapters... then i went directly to the EVGA website downloaded the motherboard drivers there, (which downloaded them directly from Nvidia btw) then i went to the BFG website (i have BFG 260 GTX's) and that link once again actually shot me to the Nvidia driver download screen, re downloaded the display drivers... restared the computer. and did a 3d marks test... as follows.

now it gets better

3Dmarks06

Score: 14823

SM 2.0: 5456

SM 3.0: 7337

CPU: 4193

that sucks...  im either doing something way wrong here, or theres something wrong with this motherboard...? 

Flex II   5-5-5-15 1T 800mhz

14843

5483

7364

4154

list of things i have already done (not necessarily in order of occurance)

1. upgraded from dual 9600's to a single 260 GTX

2. upgraded from a single GTX 260 to a dual with a 1000 watt power supply

3. upgraded from OCZ PC2 6400 titanium to OCZ PC2 9200 FLEX II

4. upgraded from E8500 to Q9550

5. deleted old display and mother board drivers, and ran driver sweaper several times

6. completely formated the hard drive and completely installed new OS

7. verified ram timings with the FLEX II on the OCZ forums from an OCZ rep 5-6-6-18 2t 2.1v @ 1066mhz (will not post with these settings, have to reset bios)

 8. verified SLI is working using SLI on screen display tool in Nvidia drivers.

9. FLASH bios on motherboard to the latest version listed in the EVGA forums.

 10. returned video cards for fresh new ones at the store UN OPENED boxes..

if there is something i have missed and have not done, please tell me so i can make it right.. if there is something i have done incorrectly please tell me so i can make it right..

i have dumped way to much money into this with actually worse  result .. if anyone can offer any productive advice i would greatly appriciate it. i should be seeing a 3Dmarks06 of over 18,000 i would think.. based on the information provided to me by other members in this thread...

thanks

ok i got the XFX 790i in from New Egg today.. now more problems, the system just randomly shuts off on me.. i am on my 2nd windows installation today, because of this thing shutting off completely .. just shuts down randomly.. and it screwed up the windows updates then wouldnt re boot anymore, so i had to re format and try again...  and its still doing it..

 i have the Ram set to the manufactuers specs..  but at the native frequency..  8-8-8-24 1T  1.65v   1333mhz.. did not touch anything else...

anyone have any clue what is going on?  i have checked, re checked, re checked and checked again all my connections..

ok for whatever reason it just quit doing it.. so thats good, got the OS installed and all the service packs... sp2.

currently instaling wow and aion ...  everything seems to be running good so far, at least as far as i can tell with installing the games... will post back later after i get all these game updates installed and finally try the games themselves.