Some observations from my build

Question

      Well, after scouring through the forums here I dove in and built a new system.
I was somewhat apprehensive after spending a few hours reading through the posts here.
But, I do realize this is the place people come to when they have problems, hence the majority of posts could tend give the wrong impression of certain products.
      Anyway….I would just like to let anyone who cares know my build went off without a hitch (sort of).
Installed the board, CPU, one stick of memory, video card and booted up. Got a few lines of text on the screen, then shut ‘er down and installed the hard drive. Hit the clear bios button and restarted. Got a checksum error, entered bios, checked every thing, saved and exit.
        So far so good. Loaded XP. Checked all the devices, loaded the drives.
Still good.   Installed the second memory stick, and the second video card. Windows told me I was good to go with SLI & two cards. Updated the x2 driver, applied the “hot fix”, installed the 81.98 driver…….still good.
        Now…..I don’t overclock, or play games any more. (time) but I do sit at a computer a minimum of 8 hours a day, doing cad work and renderings. I don’t run all the benchmarks most folks here do, but I do have a sort of benchmark related to the work I do. It involves some rendering, with and without shadows and some Pov-Ray, and there is a web site where others using the same program post their times after doing the same test scenarios.
         Now it gets bad. My old system was a P4 2.8 GHz with 1 GB ram and 1- Geforce 6800 GT.  The new system as seen below, basically gets the same scores as my old system. The worst part is the scores are exactly the same when using 1 video card or 2. So…. Obviously I’m a little disappointed after spending all that money and ending up with pretty much what I had as far as performance goes.
I know it’s still early, and hopefully I’ll see some difference in the ”real world”.
           On a final note, I believe most of the problems I see around here are related to power supplies.
I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with the MSI board, even for an early revision.
I’ve built a new system about every two years (I’m an old guy) and have tried most of the major boards. I think you can’t go wrong with MSI, and ASUS seem good too.
   Thanks to all the posters here at this forum. I feel I was ready in case some problem did arise, and I did learn quit a bit. And lastly, if you’re having a problem, check the power supply.

Answer 1

I have a very similar system
I see a significant increas in FPS  in sli. around 15-30% depending on the app.
Also In 3dmark 05 i was hitting 7k, then with sli i would easily do 12k+
in 3dmark 06 i would do 4knon sli and 7.1k+ in sli.
try downloading the X3http://www.fileshack.com/file.x?fid=8198
run it as a benchmark in sli and non sli. You'll see real world performance gains there.
Remember as a wise Bavarian once said.... 3dmark06 sucks. it cpu speed dependant. for video card rendering it does a good job.  You'll also see significant increase in rendering depending on what drivers you use and if your applications make use of dual cores.
drivers past 81.98 make use of dual core cpu's weather or not the application does.  Keep in mind the cpu may not actually render faster, it allows you to be more productive while it's rendering.   I have not had a chance to see if i will render in light wave or maya any faster in sli or non sli. I imagine i would as it is purely graphical hp that will achieve that.
Another thing to consider is agea's physix chip/pci card they are suposed to come out with.... that will take some of the load off if your program can make use of it.
I am going to put mine in sli and see how long it will take to render one of my 142 image pano's that i have.