Poor performance, any ideas?

Recently built myself a new PC. Core i7-2600k (oc to 4.6ghz), 16gb ddr3 RAM, Adata SSD, 2xRadeon hd 6970's in crossfire. This pc should blow the doors off EQ2, but when boxing it doesn't.

I run 2 monitors, main at 1920x1080 and secondary at 1680x1080. I run one character full screen on main and 2 in a 2 visible layout on the secondary. In a low resource area I will get around 60 fps on the main. Which is good. But throw in a few mobs and I see fps as low as 13. I am not running all 3 at high quality or anything. I run main in just over balanced, and secondaries at very high performance settings.

Any ideas on how to improve performance?

[MiRai]

General rule of multiboxing with Crossfire or SLI -- disable it. Other than that, I'm pretty unfamiliar with how EQ works.

[lax]

One 6970 should be able to run that. There have been performance and stability problems for some people with SLI or Crossfire enabled since these features came out, not to mention neither worked in windowed mode until the last year or so anyway. I would try grabbing GPU-Z, and see if the second GPU is actually idling.

If you disable crossfire and run monitors on separate cards, you will want to have cross-monitor swapping disabled when setting up your window layout. That should prevent the performance hits described in GPU Management.

Thanks for the advice, I tried just disabling crossfire and that improved performance greatly. I am now getting at least a solid usable framerate in all situations.