low benchmarks?? need some input!

[lemmiwinks]

I just finished building my new comp with the following specs:

P4 2.6C mhz
A-bit iS7
Corsair XMS PC3200 256 x2(running in dual channel mode)
Radeon 9600
Win98se

When I ran 3DMark2001se I got a 9036. I was flipping through the June 2002 issue of PCGamer and stumbled upon a "3D Card Challenge". Of the cards benchmarked, the Radeon 8500 received a 9,243 and the GeForce4 Ti4200 got a 9,556. What I want to know is why I got such a low score? These tests where run over a year ago and still got higher scores. I realize that the Radeon 9600 isnt the greatest card but I would have thought it could have beat the 8500 and the Ti4200(especially with the newer drivers and the better hardware). Is there any way to increase my scores w/o doing any major overclocking or I'am forever stuck with this performance using my video card? Any input is much appreciated.

BTW:These where the settings used by PCGamer:
1024x768 in 32bit color w/ tripe frame buffer, 24-bit Z-buffer, compressed textures, hardware T&L enabled, and V-sync disabled--as for the machine they used I'm not completely sure but I don think it was over a P4 2.4

Thanks

 

[StraightPipe]

ehh, your about to hear this alot, so i'll go ahead and say it.

dont worry too much about a bech mark speed, since it's an artificial measure of performance.

the best thing that benchmarks are for are to see if you made a performance increase after changing something (ie: bench it before and after adding a new video card and compare)



hopefully somebody else with similar system will post a score now