DarrkPhoenix: While I can understand the desired to try to confirm that everything is working properly, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First, hardware these days is pretty good at auto-detecting what settings it should be using, so it's pretty rare to run into a case where hardware defaults to settings that gimps performance. Second, if there's a fault with hardware it almost always manifests itself with obvious errors (e.g. crashing, failure to POST, etc), not through something as innocuous as decreased performance. If part of your hardware is faulty you'll know it soon enough (although it can still be tricky to track down just which component is faulty in such cases). Finally, in the rare cases where there is an error that results in something subtle (like decreased performance) it can be incredibly difficult to even determine there's an error, let alone run down the source of the error- typically you just have to wait for the error to manifest as a larger problem. So while I can understand the desire to test and test at the beginning to make sure everything is working right, in practice the most you'll want to do is check the RAM for errors, check the harddrive for errors, then put some stress on the system. Anything beyond that and you'll probably not find anything and just waste a lot of time chasing ghosts (and causing yourself unnecessary anxiety). Take it from someone who went through the same thing with his first build and a couple of builds later now knows better.
That said, the most common source of errors you'll encounter with a computer are not hardware errors but software errors, and this is especially true for games. Some games don't play nice with multicore processors (requiring you to force them to run on a single core), others don't like SLI, some ingame settings (such as anti-aliasing) sometimes don't play nice with certain hardware setups, driver versions not playing nicely with games are the source of lots of problems, and so on. Fortunately if you have a problem chances are other people have had it as well, so if a particular game doesn't seem to be performing as well as you think it should the first thing to do is put your Google-fu to use and see if it's a known issue (hopefully with know solutions).
As for your CPU temperatures, 60 C under load is reasonable. Could you also post what your idle temps are, as the difference between idle and load can shed a lot of light on whether a cooling system is working well or if there's significant room for improvement.
What would normal load mean???
I will say this, as soon as I stop the Prime 95 torture test, it IMMEDIATELY drops from upper 50's to upper 20's.
But I guess that's no load, not normal load. And with games (the only thing I use this for lol) I can't see the temps on the taskbar.
BTW, the software I'm using for temp monitoring is caled "Core Temp 1.0 RC3" And this thing came with something called eSF, which it looks like is "Smart Fan" and even with the torture test running, the fan never changes speed. Is this something to worry about??? Although to be fair, looking at the graph, it appears the temp has never gotten far enough right on the temp for the jump in fan speed to occur.
I'm guessing (hoping) this means I can stop worrying about my CPU cooler "issue" or non-issue, as it were.
AND thank you so much for your advice Dark Phoenix. I truly value your words of wisdom.
OldFatGuy: more imortantly, because I've been playing Fallout3 with this thing and actually have seen a couple of instances of frame rate slowing to just starting to get choppy. WTF??? I don't think there's any way possible that should happen with this rig. It shouldn't even break a sweat with one 560ti and with two it should laugh at Fallout 3. My last one did and it had a pair of 470's running in SLI mode.
wodmarach: Welcome to the wonderful world of Micro stutter! Turn off SLI and watch your game feel smoother!
Yes Microstutter is a real problem happens commonly in all dual card systems (AMD less so but it still happens on their hardware too). Basicly what happens is a miss on rendering and the whole system grinds to a halt while its worked out between the cards dropping you to 1fps for about a 1/4 second at a time certain games this will happen a lot. If the special profile isn't working look online for one if you still can't find one that fixes it... turn off SLI for that game.
But my last rig was running SLI. And I don't remember ever seeing it in that rig. It was running two 470's in SLI mode.
