Need advice..

[gudehus]

Suffering Terrible performance with my new rig..

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4600+
2 SLI Running Geforce 8400 GS 256MB 16X PCI-E Vid Cards
2gb Corsair ddr2 Ram
200GB HD
19inch widescreen montior
Windows Vista Home Basic

Its a brand new custom built computer that I just picked up yesterday from Cyberpowerpc.com

WTF is going on? Im a pretty avid gamer and I got to tell you my new rig suffers terrible performance when trying to play pretty much any pc games. Company of Heros is a slide show on medium settings, Armed Assault is unplayable at all settings.


My old rig seemed to fair alot better.

My old rig
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
1gig of ram
Geforce 7600 GT
Windows XP home

Im stuck on what to do, Iv pretty much tried all the vista tweaks there is.

Anybody have any suggestions?

 

[THEpiGUY]

I don't exactly know what "terrible performance" is, but it looks like it's suffering from the graphics card. The 7600GT is more powerful than the 8400GS.

EDIT: Ah, just read the part about 2 of them. Shouldn't make a huge difference; usually it's best to have 1 powerful card as opposed to 2 weaker cards SLI'ed. Few, if any, games get truly doubled performance.

 

[kchi55]

Well, you probably shouldn't have SLI'd 8400GS, that doesn't help you very much, it should be around the speed but not by any noticeable means better than the GT. Though your boost in RAM and processing speed really shouldn't warrant the results you're getting. Try popping in the 7600GT from your old system and see if performance gets any better, if it doesn't work, I'm not sure what the problem could be and it may have been defective upon arrival. Granted there could be a slew of problems in Vista, but I have yet been able to get my hands on a Vista OS for enough time for me to figure out tweaks or performance road blocks, sorry.

 

[Tommy Boy]

I just read some reviews and they said that this card blows for gaming. At least it was cheap. I'd rather use the 7600GT than the 8400GS. I have an XFX 7600GT and it works great.

 

[ssc456]

yeah as some1 else said its always a better option to pick 1 good graphics card instead of 2 SLI medium cards.

im still not sure u should be experiencing anything that terrible

 

[Tommy Boy]

Well, before you go and trash the cards, have you tried updating the drivers to the current ones? You could have a driver issue.

 

[gudehus]

Iv found that things run quite smoother when I disabled the DX10 features on most applications. Wich sucks cause im using two DX10 capable cards but am forced to run them using Direct X 9 only features only.

I think im gonna get rid of of these 2 cards and get 1 8600 or 8800 instead. As Iv really came to the conclusion due to responses from you guys and my own experience that the 2 8400's are truly the bottleneck of my system.

 

[Celegorm]

Try different drivers, My performance sucked using microsofts drivers that loaded durring the vista install. Updated to Nvidia's drivers and things went much better.

 

[Rudster8161]

1 7600GT is better than 2 SLi 8400GS's return them both and buy another 7600GT to get 2 7600GT in SLI