Just bought a couple thingies and made a new comp a while ago, after some tests and tring a few games, i noticed average/bad perfs on most of em, this being really not satisfying at all imo.
Antec P182
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
Asus P5Q Pro
2x1 Gb DDR2 PC8500
PSU Corsair HX 620W
2xSapphire Radeon HD4870
2xSamsung Spinpoint F1 SATA 1Tb
Creative SB X-Fi Xtreme Gamer
Asus DRW-2014S1T
Win XP 32Bit SP2
(Screen is Iiyama Prolite B2403WS)
Most of the time i get to play without AA/AF or at low level.
Some of the games i tried and what happened:
-The Witcher: even at reduced resoltion, no AA/AF, massive stuttering, game being far from playable. The Only alternative i found is Crossfire Off+D3D Overrider to get Vsync+3Buffering. The game now runs ok even at AA2x, but still, could be more fluid, even at non-native res.
-Mass Effect: FPS are 50-ish, not really fluid as well, AA2x at best, dont have the feel of having a recent rig and a second GPU.
-Crysis (lol y): Playable (did the 2 first levels, prolly get crappy later) 40 ish fps, no AA/AF ofc at 1920x1200, does not make u wanna play much.
-CoD4: Finished the game, a couple lil stutter here and there, 's pretty good at 1920x1200 mid AF/2xAA
-HGL (doesnt rlly count, this game is a mix of bench+trial imo) Lotsa slowdown in some areas, mostly in streets and some passageways in station where fps go down to ~35 easily, happens randomly: massive fps drop like ~2-5FPS a few secs after eack kill for a while. Settings: mix of High and Med, no very high AA/AF low again
-Devil May Cry 4: Runs almost perfect (from what i played) AA4x/AF8x
-Lost Planet: Cant keep it at 60FPS, drop at 35-40 if a huge boss shows up or to much snow effects around, no AA here either
-GRID: Looks awful at 2xAA
A big stutter show up somtimes (once per race+- ) -GW: Without VSync it's a flickering mess, fixed with it but when tiurning around it's far from fluid, blurry and annoying. The D3D+CF off trick fixes this a bit (Seems unstable though, alt-tab can make it crash)
Enough Crappy Perfs:
So, i ran some benches as well
3DMark03: 89k
3DMark06: 11k-ish
3DMark06 (Cf ON): 14-15k only
Notes:
-No O/C, every bios stuff being on auto, except Speedstep being turned off, the 333x9 and 1066ram speed entered manually.
-Win Xp 32 Bit, SP2, uptodate except SP3
-Bios updated to 1104 thru EZflash Utility
-Chipset driver uptodate (900.1009)
-Direct X uptodate (9.0C ofc)
-Catalyst Driver 8.8 Official (all this was the same when i was running 8.7 or 8.6+fix at that time)
-Crossfire active (used the Shader Test to check) displayed as disabled in GpuZ, but seems to be a common bug So,
with all this i'd like to know about my next move
I know the P45 is 16x -> 8x/8x with Cf setups but still, i cant believe the perf drop can be that enormous, especially with Witcher, where turning it off makes it playable (supposed to be improved cf in 8.8 Cats, duh)
Atm, i have the X48 change in mind but i could use some pointers before changing something in there (i'd rather skip the part where i have to get rid of those cards for a single gpu)
Also maybe i could use some O/C for the E8400, i guess that could reduce a possible bottleneck for 3Dm scores, but that wont fix my perfs i guess.
Thx for helping me fixing this nuisance
(/hopes Rahja is around
)edit: fixed, noscript ruined me post ^_^
