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I scored half on 3DMark06

C

coolpurplefan

Golden Member
I scored 972 in 3DMark06 while it says the highest score out of 16 similar systems was 2137. How can I isolate the performance of the CPU and RAM so that I can see which is slowing me down?

SOMETHING is going wrong somewhere. There's a delay every time I click on something. I ran Orthos for 3 and a half hours with no errors.
 
3D mark is designed to stress the GPU. The CPU testing in it is almost meaningless. The delay you are exsperiencing may be from your HDD. If the HDD is slow then it will take a second to get the information off teh HDD and onto the RAm so the CPU can get to it. I have similar problems with my wife's system. Its an older HDD and it takes the system a while to come out of the screen saver and start doing other things. But then the picture viewer screen saver is the one that always causes a problem like that.
 
Originally posted by: sgrinavi
Don't sweat those comparisons. What's hardware and O/S are you using?
Click to expand...

Are you kidding? lol, I know you two probably sincerely believe what you're saying but I have an AMD Athlon X2 5400+, 2GB OCZ Special Ops RAM, Asus M3A78-EM with 780G chipset with integrated graphics (HD3200). Don't blame the IGP because I've seen benchmarks with a 780G motherboard and it was almost 2000 points, still double what I got.

Plus, I just saw the result of a benchmarks someone did on the hardforum.com site with a 5600+ and he had 2076 while I had 2021 with my 5400+. So, I believe my CPU may be running normally.

DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW TO BENCHMARK THE MEMORY PLEASE!!! THAT IS THE QUESTION THAT I AM ASKING!!!
 
Run memtest or goldmem for a few passes to see if you get any errors. Also, sisoft sandra works for memory benchmarking.
 
http://img219.imageshack.us/my.php?image=cpuzcpuko5.png

http://img227.imageshack.us/my.php?image=cpuzramua6.png

OK, it says DRAM frequency is 200 MHz. I tried...
-setting to 400MHz, 4-4-4-15 and 2.1volts = computer crash, BIOS resets
-setting to 400MHz and 4-4-4-15 = computer crash, BIOS resets
-setting to 400MHz and 2.1volts = computer OK (but the 5-5-5-15 timings remain)

However, even though my 3DMark06 score and my Sisoft Sandra RAM benchmark score went up, the 3DMark06 score is only marginally higher.

I want to try some other things but I'll have to post results later. Drivers are from the Asus website, not the DVD (I tried those too). And the RAM settings, timing and voltage were recommended by OCZ.
 
OK, I found the problem. I installed a video card instead of using the on-board video and the gradually changing images while installing UT2004 finally stopped being blocky. Someone suggested that it was the fact that the memory the on-board video uses is slower than the type of memory used in video cards.

I had higher scores with this setup and the video card than I did with the same video card on another machine. As a matter of fact, I had the top score compared to other similar systems in 3DMark06. I also had better framerates in UT2004 Assault Convoy than I had with another machine with a single core Athlon 2.4GHz and DDR1 RAM (like 60 to 100 instead of 30 to 50).

Anyway, in regards to the RAM, OCZ had told me to use 5-5-5-15 timings, between 1.8 and 1.9 volts and set it to 400MHz in the BIOS (so I get the 800MHz speed). I have 1.85 volts and the rest same as suggested (motherboard only goes down to 1.85 volts). I ran MemTest for 13 passes or over 3 and a half hours for both sticks of RAM one at a time. There were no errors.

I can play 1080p Quicktime movie trailers with the on-board video. And I can also play UT2004. However, the fact that I got 1200 in 3DMark06 compared to 12 other systems that had a maximum of over 2100 gives me the impression the IGP is not working properly. When I tried my X1650XT in that machine and played UT2004 and BF2, it crashed in 5 minutes compared to about 25 minutes in my other machine. (I read setting 4x instead of 8x and putting fastwrite to off solves the crashing problem with the X1650XT although I haven't tried it yet. Maybe I need to find a way to reduce the bandwidth or whatever.)

I tried the drivers that came with the DVD for the motherboard, the Asus web site drivers and the AMD web site drivers with the on-board HD3200.

I'm wondering if anyone can tell me how to disable on-board video to see if that had any impact.

One thing I'm considering right now is looking at all the various settings for the Southbridge speed and Hypertransport speed etc. If the RAM was incorrectly autodetected at 200MHz instead of 400MHz, then maybe something else was incorrectly set.
 
Should be an option in the BIOS for disabling onboard devices. Anyway, the card is simply overheating, starving it of bandwidth DOES NOT fix the problem. Anyway, the highest scoring systems MAY have sideport memory, which means it has a small amount of dedicated memory fused onto the board next to the IGP.
 
Originally posted by: BlueAcolyte
Should be an option in the BIOS for disabling onboard devices. Anyway, the card is simply overheating, starving it of bandwidth DOES NOT fix the problem. Anyway, the highest scoring systems MAY have sideport memory, which means it has a small amount of dedicated memory fused onto the board next to the IGP.
Click to expand...

How about local frame buffer? What does that do?

There's something puzzling about the fact that 3DMark06 would say that similar machines have scored up to 2100 while mine scored 1200. The other benchmarks I've tried with other systems or whatever were around the other typical systems. Oh well, something mysterious there.

I'm thinking about getting the HD4670 anyway. lol, that will mean my so-called "test machine" will be more powerful than my main computer.
 
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