Intel Duo Core PC's

[Atrocities]

Thanks guys, I will check into the cooling issue but I have a cool master case with excellent cooling. But the CPU fan, although suppose to be superior, might not be up to the task. That sounds very reasonable.

I haven't over clocked the 8800gt. I am however thinking about buying a second 8800gt and setting up an SLI system.

Also adding Vista as a second OS along with a 1 terrabyte second HD.

[Fyron]

SLI is a huge waste of money. Don't fall for it.

[MisterBenn]

I'm reasonably inclined to agree with Fyron. I had a couple of SLI systems in the past - a pair of GeForce 2s years ago, and my last system had a couple of 7800GTs. For starters I didn't really consider the benefit of the second card to be worth it either time.

Secondly, with the 7800s I had a driver issue. At some point in time during the life of the drivers, nVidia added some additional SLI rendering options into the driver, such as options for AFR/AFR2/SFR etc. From that driver onwards, I was never able to use them with my SLI set-up. I would have rampant artifacts and consistent crashing until I either disabled the second card or reverted the driver version once again. I trawled the forums, and tried every service pack, system driver update and driver cleaner going and always had the same results.

I had to stick with the previous driver version, and in the end I was still trying to survive with it when it was 18 months old! The newest games often had quirks and were not well optimised for the old drivers as I'm sure you guys are aware is common with aged unified drivers and current releases. Reading the forums, I was not alone and my system was hardly an obscure one (AMD64 based).

In hindsight, my opinion is that with the unified driver strategy that both ATI and nVidia operate, it is the safest bet to have an extremely common GPU architecture to get the best support. With aging GPUs and "rarer" configurations such as SLI setups, the amount that driver releases cater for your issues dries up quick quickly. When building my last system, I opted for a simple life and just bought a single, fast card - I have become conservative in my old age! I mainly want my system to be reliable so that I know it's going to be ready to go when I sit down to use it...

[Atrocities]

Thanks, SLI is out. At least for the foreseeable future. Thanks guys.

[Xrati]

Whew! I'm glad that's settled. Now we can move onto bigger and better things! Like the 'Star Trek Mod' for SE6. Anyone hear from Aaron on the approximate release details? AND how do I get to be a playtester so I can get a head start on the mod?

[Edi]

Atrocities, it might be the drivers after all. Nvidia does have something of a track record of fixing things that ain't broken and then something less than hilarity resulting from that. A driver upgrade completely borked my Freespace 2 install because they changed some OpenGL handling and it corrupted half the graphics. That was while running a 7900GT card.

Worst case, you need to go back two or three revisions of drivers until you find whatever non-broken thing they tried to fix working correctly. I have had a Core2Duo machine for two years and aside from that one Nvidia related problem, I have not had any problems with it. I recently bought a new monitor and an ATI HD4870 graphics card and no problems at all with WinXP SP3.

An overheating card is another possibility. I assume you have also cleaned out the computer case adequately? Dust clogging stuff can do nasty things.

[Atrocities]

Thanks for the tip on the drivers. I will try that.