3D Mark 2001 score down-not sure why

[KingDog]

Was getting 5200 with Visiontek Geforce 3 Ti200/P3 1.1 Gig/ 448 sdram/ using
Win98se. Everything was running non-overclocked.
Made a few changes in past few months:
1)Switched to Win XP Pro
2) new Power supply (Antec 350W)
3) added more ram as I do a lot of video editing, now have 640 MB of sdram.
4) added a second hard drive and an ATA 133 controller for a new 80 gig
Maxtor. Got the 5200 3Dmark on regular Asus P3b-F mobo hd controller with my
WD 80 gig running at UDMA 2 instead of 5. It is now at UDMA 5.
5) Have now filled all of my PCI slots with a NIC card, the HD controller,
and a 1394 firewire controller (on PCI slot one next to the AGP slot).

My 3dmark 2001 score is now 4100.
However, the fill rates and polygon counts are higher on the benchmark, so
the card is actually doing better in some respects. There are slightly lower
fps rates in all of the games, and most of the other tests however. Overall,
a 20% drop in my score.

I have the refresh rate fix installed. Vsync is off. 3DMark is run at
default. No AA.
The only difference in the report from 3dAmrk 2001 is that it states that
Z-buffering was at 32bit in the Win98se test, and it states it is at 24bit
in the WIN XP Pro test run.

My only theories are:
1)The Geforce 3 does not like a card near it in the first PCI slot. ( I had
never done this before, but had no choice when I put in a firewire card)
2)There is some software setting on the Geforce that is slowing it down. I
have 28.32 drivers from NVidia. I was using the 21.83 drivers on both tests,
however before when using WIN 98se, and after the switch to XP. I switched
ot the 28.32 drivers yesterday with the same lower (4100) score.
3) There is something funky with the hard drive controller or how I have it
set up. It all seems fine, however. I do digital video capture and print to
tape with no dropped frames so the hard drives are doing their job.

I am having no other issues whatsoever with the video card. I just ran the
test again out of curiosity after getting the new HD controller card.
My system works great otherwise. Good case cooling (21 degrees C in the
case, 42 degrees on the CPU). Love XP stability, no hardware or software
issues noted in anyway. DX 8.1 tests run perfect.

Any thoughts are welcome. I am obviously missing something.
Thanks.
--Tony

 

[Insidious]

I lost a little when I went to XP (but not that much)

you said you have the refresh rate fix installed? might want to verify that

also check that Vsync is set to always off in Direct3D I recommend RivaTuner RC10.2 Can get it here

Good Luck with it. (Don't sweat it too much if your games are running ok though)

PS: Everytime you add stuff => more overhead => lower benchmarks (Check those configurations and kill extraneous stuff0rz if any is running)

 

[KingDog]

Thanks for the response.
I am using Nvidia reference drivers and there is only a setting for vsync off in Open GL. unless I am missing something.
It appears to be off as I am getting over 85 fps in some of the benchmarks in 3DMark.
My refresh rate is 85 hz.
I think I can try removing the NIC card and using USB on my cable modem if this really starts to bug me in order to
open up a PCI slot.