Help Needed With Evga 680i Mobo

[ed12371]

HI everyone,
Is it just me or are the latest components running just to hot?

I started with an Asus striker extreme board, lotsa problems 2 months before I finally got a refund. Then the memory had a bad stick and had to return and get two new ones.
Now, I have brought an evga 680i mobo. I got it home put it together with a couple of evga 8800gtx superclocked cards, some dominator c3 ram and an intel x6800 cpu.
All power hungry components, all run very hot on stock cooling, I do have a zalman air cooler in place of a intel cooler.
The problem I beleive is all this heat is killing the components very quickly?
I was playing Elders Scrolls:Oblivion Gate, I read on reveiws sites that they had all the settings on full at playable frame rates on a single card.
I have a dell 30" monitor, so I got 2 cards to run the game at 2560x1600 resolution.

The game ran a bit jumpy with all the video settings on full, plus I had artifacts On things like my players suit of armor (some parts perfect and some with lots of tiny multi colours, also fires didn't run smoothly and smoke in outside scenes was running at like 3 frames a second?, which bothered me as the reveiw sites had them running fine on one card, one would think two superclocked cards could handle it easily. So I moved the video setting sliders to about 3/4 and everything else on high with HDR off.

Then the game kept freezing, total lock up, I had to turn of the computer and restart. I did a clean reinstall of nvidia 158.22 drivers and tried again.
Videocards running at 66 degrees celcius for vid card1 and 79 for vid card 2 and that was after restart.
I ran nvidia performance tool (ntune) and no problems came up?
Tried to play the game again and the game froze again, turned off the computer and it didn't restart. The fans don't spin up on the videocards upon restart and the system starts for a few seconds then stops. I tried the cards individually in another system and they work (fans spin and system loads) as did the memory. So the pci express slots are fried, I think? Mind you that is all at stock standard settings on the components, no overclocking what so ever.

So whats the issue here? Bad board, too much heat, drivers no good for sli, 680i no good for sli?

So now I'm going to get a return swap for the same board and get danger den water cooling blocks for cpu and both cards.
Is there something on the bios I need to turn off or on to make the system handle oblivion with all settings on full at playable frame rate?

Any help would be appreciated, When I'm finished building this computer (ie:watercooling) I would have spent alot on this computer. I built it to play Crysis when it comes out and to play Oblivion Gate now with settings maxed out, otherwise I would have brought a $1000 computer, (prebuilt) and played pacman.

I think all these power hungry, heat producing components don't play well with eachother. Each manufacturer is trying to produce the best of the best, but do they consult eachother about how the whole thing works together?

Anyways thats my gripe, just disappionted after waiting ages for expensive, hard to get components that keep breaking down.
regards Ed.

[DMB2000uk]

That is a very nice setup, which will only get better if you throw it under water.

Sorry to hear about all your issues. Do you think that maybe Oblivion isn't actually using SLi in your setup? Maybe you need to turn down your AA (is it at 16x? that will kill it ) or turn off HDR.

Dan

[ed12371]

Hi mate,
thanx for the reply. What do you mean oblivion might not be running in Sli set up? I've set up sli in nvidia management.

Although in the set up it says it is using sli but rendering using single card as apposed to split frame , etc.

If you go to change that setting a nvidia warning comes up saying nvidia has set it to optimize performance and adjusting it would stuff that up, so I left it alone.

Also with the old nvidia management, you could pick global settings or sli for each perticular game but I can't find it in the new version, so that is not set either.
regards Ed.