Disappointing 3DMark2001 Scores

[wonkothesane]

Well, OK. I assembled a pretty nice system last week for a tad under eleven hundred dollars, the core components of which are:

[*]2.4B GHz P4, C1 stepping
[*]80 GB Maxtor hard drive
[*]Radeon 9700 non-pro
[*]2x512 MB of Kingston HyperX PC2700 RAM
[*]AOpen AX45-4D Max motherboard (supports dual-channel RAM)
[*]431 watt Enermax Power Supply

Ran WindowsXP nice and zippy-like. I was happy.

Went about updating drivers, installing useful software, games, benchmarks, etc. I was happy.

Dowloaded DirectX 9.0a and 3DMark2001 SE. Ran it and looked at the pretty pictures. I was happy.

Saw my score: 11023. I was not happy.

"Well, all right," I said to myself, "this is still all at stock everything. Let's try fiddling around with BIOS settings and then see how we do."

So I locked the PCI/AGP bus speed, bumped up the FSB to 166, which boosted the CPU to 2994.6 MHz, set RAM to 2-2-2-5 timings at 333 MHz. Default voltage kept for everything. "Surely," I said to myself, "this will now run like the proverbial champ."

So I ran 3DMark again, enjoyed the pretty pictures, but did not enjoy my score of 11964.

So, now, my question is, what do you think is causing me to get these scores? I haven't overclocked the video card, true, but I wouldn't think that that would lower my score by 3000 3D Marks. Many people I've seen have gotten 15000+ with equivalent hardware, so does anyone here have any ideas as to what I can do to raise my score?

 

[alkemyst]

running the benchmark and getting a certain score depends on many many things....most of the highest scores I think are run at 10x7x16bit and with all eye candy off....I wouldn't be surprized if even lower resolutions were run to boost the scores.

What you want to do is find a score you 'like' and then see how they ran their system....then set your's up that way and go for it.

Good luck....the main thing is regardless of benches, do you like your system? It sound like a nice one, and welcome to anandtech.

Chris

 

[MrSmithers]

When you compare your 3dmark score to others, please do so with a grain of salt. Granted, I don't know a whole lot about 3dmark, not near as much as some folk, and I haven't taken on volt modding and stuff yet. When you see one of these high scores somewhere, here is some stuff they might have done, and this is just the stuff I know.
Reformat drive, use Win2K with SP(3?) slipstreamed (XP is said to drop score ~500 pts)
Install motherboard drivers,Defrag
Install DX9 if applicable,Defrag
Install Video Drivers,Defrag
Tweak Registry, services and such, Defrag
Set Windows for best performance
Install benchmarks, Defrag
OC hell out of system
OC hell out of vidcard
Turn vid card to all performance settings
Use Rivatuner to adjust things like LOD Bias settings if possible(makes things look like ass, run faster)
Start 3dmark, adjust it via task manager to realtime priority, everything else to idle.
Run benchmark one test at a time at previously documented highest possible vid card settings each test can handle, reclocking in between

So you see, there is a lot going on, and I am still somewhat a newb, so I know there is tons more that go on. Anyways, I have a radeon 9700 pro, and running CPU at 190*11 and vidcard at 380/340 I can do almost 17000. There are people with my setup that score 20000, but that is ok, because I am happy with my score. Maybe someday I will spend lots of times and have a seperate bare hard drive for doing things like this, but for now, I do it to play around, see how my system runs, then turn all the eyecandy up and go play a game(bf1942 is good) with everything looking sweet ass sweet.

Smithers

 

[human2k]

That score is very low, one of my older rigs(MSI KT3 + XP1700@1.86GHZ+Radeon9500>9700Softmod+DDR266 512mb) does over 12.5K in 3dmark2001, in 3dmark2003 it does 4.5K+. Are you sure you turned-off AA/FSAA? You should be humiliating my scores with that kinda rig.

 

[Jeff7181]

MY computer does almost that well. You got some problems dude. Make sure to check that Anti-Aliasing and Ansiotropic filtering are turned off. Also, the default resolution is 1024x768x32.

 

[gplracer]

I agree it could be faster. My 1700+ @ 209x11=2300mhz and a $79 gf4 4200 did 13128 on 3dmark2001SE. Although it might be the cpu that is holding you back. Try 3dmark 2003 and see what you get. That is where the dx9 cards really shine.

 

[wonkothesane]

Yeah, the first tests were run @ default resolution.

I went into the ATi drivers and set everything to "Maximum Performance," from "Application Preference." This boosted my score about 2000 points, into the low 14000s . Then I set resolution to 640x480x16bits, which boosted my scores ANOTHER 2000 points, to 15959. Of course, having 200 frames per second doesn't mean much when your monitor only refreshes 85 times a second, so optimizing for points/fps is rather silly. Still, it's gratifying to see scores almost in the 16000s, even if it's as worthless as fools gold...

The REALLY interesting part came when I looked at the System Info stats from within 3DMark2001SE. Apparently, 3DMark is seeing TWO PROCESSORS. Keep in mind that this is a 2.4B processor overclocked to 2.99 GHz. WCPUID, however, sees one processor, as does Windows itself. Still, I nearly had a heart attack when I saw "2 x Intel Pentium 4 @ 2.99 GHz." I wonder why 3DMark shows the wrong information...

I'll upload pictures soon and update this post.
***see http://eschew.org/images/pc/software/ ***

 

[Jeff7181]

Actually, any tests other than at default settings are meaningless in comparison to other cards because all the accepted benchmarks done by places like anandtech.com are done with default settings unless otherwise stated.

 

[wasssup]

well...i've got an xp2000, 1gig of crucial pc2100 ddr, and a gf4 ti4200 128mb, and i get a score of 5500 on 3dmark2001. Something here is DEFINITELY wrong

i've never bothered to look into it, but my guess is this soyo k7ada v1.0 motherboard is only 2x agp, and that could be what's holding me back...though, i could be (and probably am) wrong.

 

[Jgtdragon]

Dude! Use screenshot next time.

 

[AtomicDude512]

You guys are crazy, my GeForce4 Ti 4200 with XP 1700 (all at stock speeds) benches at 8562. You people worry to much about benchmarks, if it plays your games fine then that's all that matters.

 

[wonkothesane]

Eh, I was looking for a good freeware screenshot taker that can at least look Ambroisa Software's Snapz in the eye without wincing. I figured that would take a while, so I just used my camera to take some quick and dirty shots.

As for the scores, I actually agree that the scores mean diddly; real world performance is all that matters. I find that this rig runs Dark Age of Camelot and Unreal Tournament 2003 quite smoothly, and will probably be able to handle Doom 3 without TOO much of a performance hit, and that's all that really matters for the moment. Beyond that, it'll be time to upgrade anyways.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: wasssup
well...i've got an xp2000, 1gig of crucial pc2100 ddr, and a gf4 ti4200 128mb, and i get a score of 5500 on 3dmark2001. Something here is DEFINITELY wrong

i've never bothered to look into it, but my guess is this soyo k7ada v1.0 motherboard is only 2x agp, and that could be what's holding me back...though, i could be (and probably am) wrong.

I bet you have it set to override what applications want, and you have 4X AA on.