I found out what was up with the RAM after visiting newegg and reading a few reviews. The BIOS automatically re-set my RAM from 800 to 667. As soon as I upped it to 800 I was able to back off to the recommended 2.0V and boot without issue. It evidently didn't like 4-4-4-12 timings at that low a speed. It defaults to 667 @ 5-5-5-15 @ 1.85V on install. I caught the timings and volts but didn't catch the speed.
I'm also now seeing 2.25 Gb of RAM. I guess that makes sense because there's a little more than 1 Gb of video memory plus I had totally forgotten about the memory on the X-Fi (not sure how much that is). I did a little reading and found out that XP also allocates memory to each USB port and various other things on boot-up which explains why different people see different amounts of RAM even with similar set-ups. I guess I'm in the ballpark of where I should be.
Get this: The problem with the hard drive being recognized was that I had totally bent two pins right down to the bottom of the connector. They were flat down in there and bent at almost 90 degrees where they hit the sides. I'm guessing it happened while I was trying to force that largly unpliable round IDE cable into a tight spot behind the video cards. As I was looking at those bent pins thinking uh-oh, I heard a little plink. Another pin just fell out.
Figuring I had nothing to lose I straightened the two bent pins with a tiny screwdriver and a tweezer. Then I tried to force the lost pin back into it's hole hoping and praying it would make the right connection just by force. No go. I couldn't get it into the hole so I just hooked the IDE cable up without it and voiala. The drive was recognized and works perfectly. It reads, it writes, it sautees and purees.
So then I went into the game to test the new SLI set-up. I had the Nvidia control panal set to force my card to my monitor refresh rate (59-60 hz). I jumped into the game and was getting frame rates in the 280's. So I alt tabbed just to check and I was right, it was set to force refresh rate. So then I exited the game and went to the video settings for the game. I turned off unlimited frame rate and set it to maximun frame rate 60. I jumped back in the game and I'm still getting 63-65 fps. These cards just don't like to be slowed down I guess.
I'm running 8x anitaliasing, 2x anistropic filtering and have just about every other setting in the Nvidia control panal maxed (but not quite). Picture quality is astounding. It actually seems better than before running the same setting. Not sure how that could be but it seems like it. Alt-tabbing out of the game and coming back in all my graphics re-draw in about one to two seconds which is lightspeed fater than before. I can count every rivit on the wings of my 190A-8 (good job to whoever did that default skin). These cards together in SLI have some serious horsepower.
I'm still having a problem though and that is that as I look around in snap mode I get some BIG time stairstepping on the cockpit window frames. I'd almost call it tearing but not quite. It only lasts a fraction of a second but it's a bit annoying. I've tried playing with the video settings in the control panal and gotten it a little better but not better enough. Still, if I'm forced with this trade-off I'm not sure it's really all that bad. It seems isolated to the forward window frames and the wing edges. I'd listen to any tips.
The other negative is that my lower card is almost on the bottom of the case (ptobably less than 1/4" clearance) and has extremely restricted airflow. It's running consistently 10 degrees warmer than the upper card. I wish I could set the fan speeds individually in Riva Tuner to compensate.
I'll play with it some more over the weekend and see what happens.
