Cinebench score lower than before...WTF?

[Timmah!]

As the title say, i had my 980x overclocked to 3,78 with Turbo, no voltage increase... was getting nice cca 9,6 Points in Cinebench 11.5...today after a while i decided to run it again and the score is lower! I ran it 3 times and it was 8,9, then 8,79, then 8,73 and finally 8,8... my overclock stays and only change i did to my comuter is that i replaced the GPU: GTX460 for new GTX590... is there a connection? Could i damage a CPU, when i swapped the GPUs, or does the CPU degraded somehow? This really worries me...

 

[soccerballtux]

a damaged CPU would not make your score decrease, you would get BSODs. More than likely a Windows Update patch or other software install did it.

 

[Timmah!]

a damaged CPU would not make your score decrease, you would get BSODs. More than likely a Windows Update patch or other software install did it.

Thanks for the answer, its good to hear i did not break it.
I underclocked it to its default speed and the now i am getting scores in 8,1 - 8,2 range. Right now i am going to reinstall Cinebench to see, if there will be nay change...
btw during the GPU installation i had to unplug the ATX_12V_2X cable, cause it was in a way... indeed i plugged it back, but it went kind of "hard", could be a badly plugged cable from PSU mean not enough juice for CPU and lower score?
Or the computer wont just turn on, would be unstable...i mean there is no such a thing as badly plugged cable, its either in or out...or is it?

EDIT:

It seems problem is solved...after "reinstalling" Cinebench i get the right score again, 8,89 on default frequency...now i am going to overclock it back to 27x multi....

EDIT2:

Or no..second run and the score is 8,31...its bloody erratic...weird

 

[(sic)Klown12]

The difference in score is probably something simple, like a piece of software in the background using some CPU cycles that you didn't have running before.

I ran the Cinebench test with Foobar2000 minimized but playing a song(taking only 1-2 cycles at most) and the score dropped quite a bit.

 

[Timmah!]

The difference in score is probably something simple, like a piece of software in the background using some CPU cycles that you didn't have running before.

I ran the Cinebench test with Foobar2000 minimized but playing a song(taking only 1-2 cycles at most) and the score dropped quite a bit.

I think i found the culprit. The only new software i installed recently since the last time i disabled Cinebench is the Nvidia Display Control Center, which installed as a part of a new drivers i downloaded for the gtx590... i have now nvidia icon in the system tray, it was not there with previous drivers...
Anyway i turned the control center off and the score is again 9,61 (original score with overclock), so it seems you are right!

 

[Timmah!]

Nah, it was premature assumption...its still erratic. I just got now 9,66 points and in the succesive run, just seconds later with nothing changed i got 8,87...thats almost point less! WTF is going on? It never fluctuated more than 0,05 points...

 

[dbcooper1]

Open task manager and see if the CPU is staying at 100% utilization throughout and while you're at it, arrange tasks in order of CPU utilization and see what might be using some of your cycles.

 

[Timmah!]

Open task manager and see if the CPU is staying at 100% utilization throughout and while you're at it, arrange tasks in order of CPU utilization and see what might be using some of your cycles.

So all of you are hellbent its just something else stealing cycles from CB? I had taskmanager opened, however i looked at the graph, if there is a 100 percent utilisation, not the table with processes. Will try it today, thanks for suggestion.

 

[HW2050Plus]

Though it would need to be analyzed more exactly it is likly related to having more interrupts if your only change was switching the graphics card. The interrupts let the drivers run (scheduled by OS) and those consume some resources not to speak about the general loss in performance by context switches. You do not see this consumption of CPU resources in task manager.

But again, would need to be analyzed with according tools to be sure about this.

Also Nvidia Display Control Center could cause this. You should get rid of this and install only a driver.

How to identify with a simple method? First check your idle load with task manager, do nothing but watching task manager, how much is it? If it is very low than it is caused by interrupts (kernel software = driver). If it is not very low than it is caused by some user software (= any application) and you can identify it with task manager.

 

[Timmah!]

Though it would need to be analyzed more exactly it is likly related to having more interrupts if your only change was switching the graphics card. The interrupts let the drivers run (scheduled by OS) and those consume some resources not to speak about the general loss in performance by context switches. You do not see this consumption of CPU resources in task manager.

But again, would need to be analyzed with according tools to be sure about this.

Also Nvidia Display Control Center could cause this. You should get rid of this and install only a driver.

How to identify with a simple method? First check your idle load with task manager, do nothing but watching task manager, how much is it? If it is very low than it is caused by interrupts (kernel software = driver). If it is not very low than it is caused by some user software (= any application) and you can identify it with task manager.

For now i uninstalled the nvidia 3d vision and updater stuff, which installed as a part of the drivers, kept the driver itself, some HD audio and PhysX stuff.
Anyway it did not help
I downloaded the PassMark CPU benchmark to try something else to compare and there is no problem there, i ran it multiple times and everytime i got about the same score around 11500 points, what is in line with the CPU benchmark table they have on the Passmark home site (995x 3,6GHz gets 10800 points).


Ok, i can confirm the score decrease is down to latest Nvidia Drivers, 270.61. I uninstalled them and driver-sweeped them, rebooted and then ran Cinebench about 10x with no drivers installed (and pretty big desktop icons ) and i kept getting consistenly the proper score in 9,55-9,65 range. Even rebooted again to see, if its no coincidence, but no, its the drivers... i reinstalled them back and voila: 8,8 scores again.
I downloaded and ran several times the older CB (R10) and got consistent scores in the 29500-30000 range, + the aforementioned Passmark was pretty consistent as well. So its probably just a R11.5 issue, though the question is now, if this affects for example Vray or 3dsmax´s Mental Ray, or any other app i might use as well. I already wrote a topic about this on Nvidia forums, do you think there is a possibility they might look into it and fix it in the next drivers?