Could a stock opteron 175 be bottlenecking my 7600gt's in SLI? When running some of my games like CS source I notice some sort of stuttering going on. I have the AMD patches for dual core installed and stuff. just I feel I'm lacking in performance. Any suggestions?

Got all the la-*test*-('") patches for the games etc?.. I cant see 2x 7600GT's bottlenecking the opty.. Is your RAM running at stock timings?

everything is updated, and running at stock settings. I just feel counter strike source shouldn't be a problem for my system.. Am I wrong?

What exactly are you seeing that makes you think there is a bottleneck? Also, make sure you are actually in SLI. SOme of the drivers "disengage" SLI without letting you know. Bring up the control panel and make sure SLI is still selected.

You should not be even close to bottlenecking a pair of 7600's with a 175. I'd look to updated video drivers or a game patch before I started worrying about the hardware.

could be cs's server. some of the online games i play have bad servers and give a lot of stutter.

I didn't think bottlenecking would be going on here. I'm just running out of ideas. The thing is, one 7600gt is performing pretty well just as good as when I have them running in SLI. But thats only when I play games. Cause when I 3dmark05 it with SLI enabled it scores much higher. Then when I play games one card performs just as good as two. The current drivers I have installed for my cards is the 84.XX drivers, cause anything higher then that cause's that christmas tree effect. Its not crappy servers either, cause I play on one around my neighborhood, and average 20 ping there. Also both cards peform the same when I use them seperatly. To be honest I've never really been totally happy with this setup, I figured it would perform much better then it does.

dub-
You never said what you are seeing that makes you think there is a bottleneck. ALso, are you selecting the game in profiles on the Nvidia control panel? FOr SLI there are set profiles that will optimize the SLI cards for any particular game or benchmark./

The thing I notice is that, lets say a big explosion goes off, my game will like pause for a briff moment then continue on normally. This is only at 1024x780 too. I've tried the sli profiles too, same deal.

Tough to say where the stoppage is but that sounds like the CPU and/or RAM is getting behind. Have you tried overclcoking the CPU a bit to see if that pause goes away?

I havent done any overclocking yet. Gonna maybe start that soon. Hopefully that will clear up some of this nonsense.

Sometimes just a couple of hundred MHz is all it takes. Same thing for the cards. This is getting dated but it will explain the basics of what is going on when you overclock, the dangers and why, and how to do it and why it works. Read that article a couple of times and then start a new thread. We'll get you safely overclcoked on the CPU, RAM and GPU and see if that clears up the problem. You have good cooling and a good chip, albeit not a super overclocking CPU, and there is no reason not to take advantage of the potential in the chip. Add 300-400 MHZ and boost the RAM frequency a little and your system will be a lot faster and do more for you.
http://asustech.15.forumer.com/index.php?a...2&st=0#entry624

Right on merc, I will read that article, then start a new thread. Until then, talk to you later. thanks