Is this how Tri SLI should perform?

Question

A friend of mine has just had a computer built up for him. It has the xfx 780i Tri SLI board, 3 XFX 9800GTX Black Editions, quad core, 8 gig ram (a Bit overboard I know :P). The machine scores just over 12000 on 3D Mark, and is only able to run Crysis with certain settings on very high ( 1920 x 1200 res, no Anti-aliasing). I believe that it could run better, but Im not sure. Is it running to its full potential or not? Can I better the performance (preferably without overclocking)?

Answer 1

tri sli is not useful. 3 is not dividable by 2. No matter how you split it, a computer (remember it runs on binary) cannot efficient use 3 (yet) of anything and that includes RAM unless its one 3 gig RAM chip.

Quad core is good, but there is still not many software that support full use of 4 cores.

8 RAM is too much, again, most of it would not be used and just sits there. common says says if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. we can conclude that extra RAM sitting there can have some detrimental performance effects like perhaps lower voltage? higher resistance?

so, to recap, you got 3 vid cards that cannot be used to its full potential.

you have 4 cores that cannot be used properly

you have too much RAM at the present

its obvious something is wrong.

common things to check is background programs, anti virus scans, and also your anti virus resident shield which normally, by default, is set to scan ever file before opening. This is VERY bad for your games. You need to go into resident shield options and add the path/directory to crysis in the exceptions list.

don't hope for anti aliasing. that is a huge drainer on your processing power and all it does is blur the pixels on the edges of things to make it smoother. If you have a high resolution (1440x900) or more you don't need AA because the details are already fine enough to not notice the jagged edges.

also, check that your friends harddrive is not old. It needs to have at least 7200RPM which is the norm with todays HDs and make sure it has a pretty big cache otherwise it will slow your performance.

remember, the speed/performance of the computer is determined by it's weakest link and that means you should check everything!: videocards (performance and transmission rates) RAMs, CPU (speed and cache) HD (transfer rate) motherboard, etc. etc.

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