New motherboard slowed down my system???

[balane]

Hello. I had a pretty solid cheap homebuild.

2GB 800MHz RAM
E6400 Core2
8800GTS
Intel DP965LT

I wasn't able to overclock my CPU on the Intel board and I wasn't even able to run the RAM at 800MHz because it was locked at 1.8V.

I know 3DMark06 is not the end/all be/all of standards but I figured it would be a good comparison for an upgrade.

In XP Pro I could crack 9000 and in Vista 64 bit Ultimate I would be right at 8600.

I put in an MSI P35 Neo 2 motherboard in today and the install went fine. I installed all the latest drivers and I had no hitches. I started off by overclocking the CPU a little bit and I bumped the RAM up some too. Not much on either, just a tad to get a baseline. Temps on the CPU stayed under 40 with stock cooling.

I left the 8800GTS overclock exactly the same.

I ran the 3DMark again, in Vista 64 bit because I no longer have XP on the machine and my 3DMark plummeted to 7800.

I know it's probably impossible to answer from just a quick post but how, with increased RAM speed and CPU clock, all else being the same, could my 3DMark scores drop 800 points?

I was a little disappointed. Before I continue tweaking I would like to understand what could have caused this to happen?

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

 

[o1die]

I would try letting the board select the memory speed automatically. Set your cpu fsb, then set the memory to auto. If you don't like your 3d mark scores, then bump up the memory voltage to 2.1 and try setting it manually again. I would try 333 (or 666, depending on the board selections) for the memory, and 333 (or 1333) for the cpu. My old msi board would overclock the cpu and the memory by the same ratio. When I bumped up the cpu fsb from 200 to 250, the memory would automatically change by the same ratio, so I used 166 for my pc3200, so when I overclocked, it wouldn't crash. Both would be overclocked by 25%. As for an immediate cause of your lower scores, vista is the problem. It's a memory hog, and takes up 14gb of space on the hardrive. I haven't seen any benchmarks it's faster with over xp. I don't use it yet. There's too many programs on it that I would never use.