Vista - Dell Precision 670 slow frame rates with several video cards

I've had a Dell Precision 670 for several years now. It originally came with
a NVIDIA Quadro 3450 video card which died twice so I switched it out with a
NVIDIA Geforce 8800 GT OC. 512MB ram on the Geforce. My system performance
improved greatly. Pretty much running 15-30 frames per second in World of
Warcraft at 1920x1200 mode with all settings on high.

I wanted to get a better frame rate so ordered a EVGA 9800 GX2 card but saw
no difference. EVGA said it 'may' be because that card is actually two video
cards in one and split between the two monitors it's specs are actually half
of what's on the box so my original card may actually be better. So I went
and got a BFG GTX 260. No change in the performance at all. Still seeing
15-35 FPS on WoW.

BFG is confused. They are saying I should be seeing 60-90 FPS minimum with
that card on WoW and several posts I've seen show that should be the case as
well. I have tried reinstalling WoW and of course have tried every driver
EVGA, BFG or NVIDIA have with no success.

System specs:

Dell Precision 670
2 XEON CPUs 3.2 Ghz each (2 logical processors each for a total of 4 CPUs
each at 3.2Ghz).
6 Gigs ram. (2+2+1+1). DDR2-400 Registered ECC Memory Modules
2 SCSI drives (15.5K speed)
Vista Ultimate x64.
PCI Express 1.0
24" and 20" really nice Dell monitors

BFG is under the impression I should of been seeing higher frame rates with
everyone of those video cards. and blazing fast frame rates on the 260. They
suspect something is bottle necking somewhere but we can't figure out what.

Video card has been replaced, no change. Drivers all up to date, no change.
I tried removing some of the ram to make sure I did not have un matched ram
some how, no change.

Short of reinstalling Vista, they have run out of ideas. I did reinstall
WoW, no change.

Virus checkers, windows defender, indexing, spyware all turned off.

I know some computers will run in some sort of memory burst mode if you fill
up all the RAM slots, will this Dell precision 670 do that?

One person suggested the memory being ECC type may be slower and not able to
handle the speeds required. Can the memory speed or type be upgraded? Any
other suggestions?

Reposting this to a couple forums:

I've had a Dell Precision 670 for several years now. It originally came with
a NVIDIA Quadro 3450 video card which died twice so I switched it out with a
NVIDIA Geforce 8800 GT OC. 512MB ram on the Geforce. My system performance
improved greatly. Pretty much running 15-30 frames per second in World of
Warcraft at 1920x1200 mode with all settings on high.

I wanted to get a better frame rate so ordered a EVGA 9800 GX2 card but saw
no difference. EVGA said it 'may' be because that card is actually two video
cards in one and split between the two monitors it's specs are actually half
of what's on the box so my original card may actually be better. So I went
and got a BFG GTX 260. No change in the performance at all. Still seeing
15-35 FPS on WoW.

BFG is confused. They are saying I should be seeing 60-90 FPS minimum with
that card on WoW and several posts I've seen show that should be the case as
well. I have tried reinstalling WoW and of course have tried every driver
EVGA, BFG or NVIDIA have with no success.

System specs:

Dell Precision 670
2 XEON CPUs 3.2 Ghz each (2 logical processors each for a total of 4 CPUs
each at 3.2Ghz).
6 Gigs ram. (2+2+1+1). DDR2-400 Registered ECC Memory Modules
2 SCSI drives (15.5K speed)
Vista Ultimate x64.
PCI Express 1.0
24" and 20" really nice Dell monitors

BFG is under the impression I should of been seeing higher frame rates with
everyone of those video cards. and blazing fast frame rates on the 260. They
suspect something is bottle necking somewhere but we can't figure out what.

Video card has been replaced, no change. Drivers all up to date, no change.
I tried removing some of the ram to make sure I did not have un matched ram
some how, no change.

Short of reinstalling Vista, they have run out of ideas. I did reinstall
WoW, no change.

Virus checkers, windows defender, indexing, spyware all turned off.

I know some computers will run in some sort of memory burst mode if you fill
up all the RAM slots, will this Dell precision 670 do that?

One person suggested the memory being ECC type may be slower and not able to
handle the speeds required. Can the memory speed or type be upgraded? Any
other suggestions?

Your ram is DDR 400, an older speed of ram with ECC which slows down the rams preformance because it is Error Checking (suitable for servers Intel® Xeon® Processors - Overview). If I am not mistaken you're also running Xeon's which are server Processors, not designed for gaming. I am running a laptop (check my system specs) that runs WoW from 15-60 frams with just one card and 25-80 frams in SLI. I am not running the fastest Ram on the market but it doesnt have EEC. I'm saying you should run out and buy new Ram, but that I am pretty positive your Ram and CPU have a hand in your bottlenecking.

I am sure it couldn't hurt if you know someone that might have some Non-EEC Ram that you could through in to test out.

The RAM you have should be just fine. The speed of your RAM should not be slowing down WoW to that extent. I would really just suggest to install a copy of Windows XP Pro x64. If you don't want to do a format then run a dual-boot. I would really just have to tell you that it's the OS that's causing this.

Your best bet would be formatting and installing a clean copy of Vista. Update all your drivers including the chipset, and try running WoW again. If it doesn't work then install the XP x64. It might seem to be a lot of work but it may be less of a hassle than to find the specific problem which could be many things.

"David Manvell" <dmanvell@xxxxxx> wrote in
news:C62D9E93-4D8B-4E24-B06B-94753E93E0F9@xxxxxx:
First of all, DON'T cross post on Usenet. I know this is basically
Microsoft's own private Usenet, but don't do it. It's rude.

Taken from "Usenet Organization and Etiquette":
(http://www.smfr.org/mtnw/docs/Usenet.html)
Avoid excessive cross-posting (posting the same message to more than one
group). In most cases, it's best to avoid cross-posting altogether. Pick
the group which is most appropriate for your posting and use that one.
Cross-posting to a huge number of groups is called "spamming", and it is
universally despised.
I don't know, are the drives Striped, Mirrored, or seperate? Where's
your swap file? Defragged? 6 Gigs of ram, so you're running Vista 64?
Try running on Windows XP? 32-bit?

Try CPU affinity to use just 1 core in WoW?

I like to tell people a few things about WoW.

1. The reason there's 10 million + players in WoW is because there are
10 million computers that can run WoW. Just like the reason Crysis only
sold 50,000 copies is because there's only 50,000 computers that can run
Crysis.

2. WoW will run on a toaster (P3 800Mhz I think is the minimum
requirements, and I've tried it, you can raid on that setup)

If you want to test the capibilities of your system in gaming, try
http://www.futuremark.com - download the latest 3d benchmark (it's
free), and run it with your old card, then switch to the new card and
try it again.

You should see a score increase. Do some comparisons, maybe WoW has an
issue with Xeon CPUs, BFG probably won't know this, but maybe you can
contact Blizzard for answers. I mean they wrote the software after all.

your computer is designed for engineering, maybe there's something to
that.

--
-A.

Check your power supply to make sure it can handle your processors and video card. Your video card might be starved for power. I ran a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W single rail power supply on dual 280 Opterons and 8800 GTS 640MB. I have a PC Power and Cooling Turbo-cool 1kW-SR 1000W on its own 20A circuit with a Tripp Lite 20A 2400W line conditioner for a pair of quad Xeons and the same video card.

"WindWaker2008" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:cc5e8f683409059a7a859a0e06daea49@xxxxxx-gateway.com...I have Windows xp x64 and Windows Vista ultimate xp x64. I also have a 2nd
hard drive so am going to format it and install a clean copy of Vista x64
first and see what that does. The xp x64 is so flakey I'm not sure I can get
it to install still but will try if that does not work.

"SCSIraidGURU" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:37aca0373f7e407409f722eea56e4fd2@xxxxxx-gateway.com...Dell could not give me a clear answer on the Amperage avaiable to me on the
rail. They basically told me though it is strong enough to support a very
hard core single GPU video card, two CD/DVDs a floppy and three SCSI drives
(Basically what I have now) and they doubt I'm having any issues in that
regard. Dell told me he 'thought' I had about 20 amps on that rail.

The original Quadro FX3400 that came with my Dell had a 82 watt requirement.
The 8800 GT has a 105 watt requirement and the GTX260 has a 182watt
requirement (15 AMPs). So they 'think' I should be good to go.

I could disconnect my floppy and other hard drive and cd CD/DVDs just to see
if I see an increase in performance. They shouldn't add up to much.