Dell Precision 670 slow frame rates with several video cards

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?

 

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.

 

Tell "YaYa" to f***off fast and furiously, David. We don't mind
cross-posting here. In fact, we encourage it over it's
least-preferred option: multi-posting.

 

You're a moron, YaYa. We don't mind cross-posting here. But we DO
mind morons.

 

At least I offered advice. What have you idiots contributed to this group?