5850 3DMark Score Concern

[Collider]

Just want to verify that my 5850 score is what it should be for a stock card. Please give me some feedback.

System Specs:
i7 920 @ stock
Asus P6T Deluxe v2
6GB OCZ Gold
Saphire 5850 @ stock

3DMark Vantage
3DMark Score: P13873
CPU Score: 17636
Graphics Score: 12952

 

[AndroidVageta]

I dont know about base line...but when I ran Vantage on my older rig (E5200 @ 4ghz) and a single 4890...I got 8603 base score with a 9388 GPU score.

Comparing rigs and benches for the 5850, Id say youre right where youre supposed to be.

 

[luv2increase]

Just want to verify that my 5850 score is what it should be for a stock card. Please give me some feedback.

System Specs:
i7 920 @ stock
Asus P6T Deluxe v2
6GB OCZ Gold
Saphire 5850 @ stock

3DMark Vantage
3DMark Score: P13873
CPU Score: 17636
Graphics Score: 12952

You CPU is "bottlenecking" your 5850. If you OC'ed your 920 to around 3.8Ghz, you'd see a very high jump in your "GPU Score" and "CPU Score". I'd say that you'd get a 3000-4000 jump in your GPU Score and a 6000 point jump in your CPU Score by just doing that alone.

You aren't supposed to buy top-end cards and run your CPU at stock. It defeats the purpose of buying a top-end card in the first place.

 

[Rebel44]

+1 what they said

+ test performance in some game - ignore stupid benchmarks - unless you bought that PC to "play" 3DMark

 

[evolucion8]

Considering that the Core i7 has very strong single threaded performance, I doubt that's a CPU bottleneck case, heck, even a Core 2 E8600 is enough to feed the HD 5850 in games that aren't heavily CPU bound like Crysis, your scores is okay, bear in mind that the higher your CPU clocks is, the higher your score, all is about relativity.

 

[djnsmith7]

I just ran 3DMark Vantage on Rig 1 in my Sig & got the following scores:

3DMark Score: P11391
CPU Score: 7143
Graphics Score: 14207

My CPU Score seems insanely low compared to yours. Not sure why the Graphics Score would be off by that much, as my card is at stock settings also.

 

[Borealis7]

+1 what they said
test performance in some game - ignore stupid benchmarks - unless you bought that PC to "play" 3DMark

what if he likes running 3DMark because he enjoys looking at the purty pikturz?

 

[evolucion8]

I just ran 3DMark Vantage on Rig 1 in my Sig & got the following scores:

3DMark Score: P11391
CPU Score: 7143
Graphics Score: 14207

My CPU Score seems insanely low compared to yours. Not sure why the Graphics Score would be off by that much, as my card is at stock settings also.

Your overall score seems a bit low, specially your CPU score, it drags your overall score down. Is your RAM timings set too loose? Is your overclocking stable? Have latest drivers of everything. This is my score as a reference:

3DMark Score: P11391 <<Odd, the same as you.
CPU Score: 17811
GPU Score: 10170

 

[Painman]

I set my 5850 to stock and got:

P13281 overall

11325 CPU

14092 GPU

This is my sig rig, Q6600 @ 3.2, 8 GB cheap RAM @ DDR2-855.

If I OC the 5850 back to 1000/1250 I get an overall of P14968 and GPU score of 16923.

 

[djnsmith7]

Your overall score seems a bit low, specially your CPU score, it drags your overall score down. Is your RAM timings set too loose? Is your overclocking stable? Have latest drivers of everything. This is my score as a reference:

3DMark Score: P11391 <<Odd, the same as you.
CPU Score: 17811
GPU Score: 10170

Yea, system runs fine without issues & the OC is stable. RAM timings are stock & I have the latest drivers. I was shocked when I saw the CPU score. Any other guesses as to what could be bringing the CPU score down?

 

[Collider]

You CPU is "bottlenecking" your 5850. If you OC'ed your 920 to around 3.8Ghz, you'd see a very high jump in your "GPU Score" and "CPU Score". I'd say that you'd get a 3000-4000 jump in your GPU Score and a 6000 point jump in your CPU Score by just doing that alone.

You aren't supposed to buy top-end cards and run your CPU at stock. It defeats the purpose of buying a top-end card in the first place.

This is a newly built system - so far it destroys everything I throw at it (except maybe Crysis), so I really haven't felt the need to OC. Just wanted to verify that my 5850 is running as it should be, the package from NewEgg came opened, even though ordered as "new", thus my concern.

But thanks for the advice, I wasn't aware that CPU could bottleneck GPU performance that much - this will be another reason to start working on that OC sooner

But at base level, would you say my 5850 is performing as it should ?

 

[evolucion8]

Try to tight the ram timings a bit, Core 2 architecture loves low latency thanks to its FSB dependency. I lowered the timings the lowest possible, using Memtest x86 to test RAM stability, plus I activated some tweaks in the Northbridge in the BIOS menu. It improved my RAM performance by 12%.

 

[djnsmith7]

This will be the first time I make any adjustments to the RAM timing settings. Which settings do you recommend that would offer a safe, yet meaningful increase in performance?

Overclocking the 2 Rigs in my Sig was my intro to OC'ng, so I'm still relatively new to the OC realm. Even then, the only adjustments I made were to the FSB & Voltage.

AVP, it's not my intention to threadcrap here, so I don't have a problem moving my questions to another thread if this is disruptive.

 

[evolucion8]

If your RAM is running over 800MHz, try to use settings like 5-5-5-14 for example, it varies greatly with different memories. If your RAM is running at 800MHz, you can go lower like 4-4-4-14 or 5-4-4-14, something like that. My RAM at stock DDR 800MHz can do 4-4-4-10 with no problems, but since my RAM is validated to operate over 1GHz and I had to reach it to get my overclocking goal, the best that I could reach was 5-5-5-13 instead of the 5-5-5-15 that was set in the SPD profile.

 

[djnsmith7]

Evo,

Thanks for the info. I will check out the settings tonight & see what I'm working with. Off the top of my head, I don't remember what my starting point will be, as I've spent some time with CPU-Z & I know the info is there, as well as in the BIOS. It will be interesting to see what the starting point is & what potential is readily available. I have a feeling this could very well be what's holding the CPU back.

 

[evolucion8]

Everest is a nice utility that can read your current timings and the ones stored in the Ram's SPD.

 

[djnsmith7]

I've used Everest in the past, so I'll be sure to check it out.

 

[djnsmith7]

This is what CPU-Z is reporting for the RAM timings. Are these settings where they should be in order to maximize performance, or is there still room for improvement?

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=914727

 

[evolucion8]

Since your RAM barely exceeds the 8XXMHz threshold, try to lower your RAM latency for example, 5-4-4-15, or 5-5-5-13, try to find the most stable setting. Even though those timings that you currently have aren't enough to impair your CPU performance at all.

 

[djnsmith7]

5-5-5-15 is what's stable. Anything else & the system is unstable.

 

[Collider]

How did this turn in to a ram timings post? lol

Can anyone else share their 5850 3DMark scores for comparison?

 

[djnsmith7]

AVP, that's my bad. I should have started a new thread. It wasn't my intention to Threadjack.

 

[Collider]

no worries