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Reliability of Benchmark results.

C

crotonrz

Junior Member
I am looking for an opinion regarding how much creedence I should put into benchmarking tools, such as 3DMark06, on my newly built system.

Specs are:

Core 2 Extreme QX6700
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe
4x1GB Corsair Dominator RAM
Nvidia 8800GTX 768MB
Water Cooled Thermaltake Armor
2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 400GB SATA
1x Seagate Ultra ATA 250GB

I have upgraded all my drivers, and BIOS, however they were all after I had installed older drivers, and BIOS was upgraded after WinXP Pro install. I had the apparently common problem of having problems booting SATA hard drives for Windows install, so I used a Ultra ATA hard drive for the OS.

My basic problem, is that it scores in the low 3000's on 3DMark06 (not overclocked) which given the components, is disappointingly low. I haven't had a new computer in quite some time, so I am not sure how smoothly certain programs should run, but they seem slower then I would have thought, and I am not able to max out graphics settings like I would have figured I could have.

So, two-prong question, should I rely on 3DMark06 as a benchmark for performance, and will having the OS on a Ultra ATA drive significantly affect performance overall? I am not very far into loading apps. into it, so I am not against a full wipe, and re-install, but would like opinions on how to best bring it back up, to perform at it's best.
 
No. My DVD Drive would not read the ASUS CD, which had the network drivers on them, which in turn meant I couldn't download them either. So I installed video card drivers before I went to get a CD drive to read ASUS CD. It has been awhile since I last put a computer together, and while the components are similar, I didn't anticipate the amount of chipset, BIOS and disk management updates required, so I probably f'ed up the order of install pretty bad.
 
i put virtually no faith in benchmarking tools such as the 3dmark or pcmark type of series, same with the sisoft sandra.. i used to about 6 years ago. but big numbers dont do it for me, ever since the 2003, i am only concerned with going off of the FPS of like 2 games i would be playing that are considered high end that really tax all video cards where they look bad and then comparing to something like what tomshardware.com has for its vga charts using the same settings. and i like to go off of prime95's benchmark, since the site for that has the benches for all the cpus, and its pretty good as well, i like superpi, but thats just what i do for a quick judgement between systems i have a hold of or go through.

"I had the apparently common problem of having problems booting SATA hard drives for Windows install, so I used a Ultra ATA hard drive for the OS."
-you shouldnt have that problem if you grab the sata drivers from the asus cd for the board, put it on ye' old floppy, hitting i think its f8 for scsi drivers, and when the time comes that it asks, give it the drivers from the floppy. or you can slipstream it to the windows cd.

"should I rely on 3DMark06 as a benchmark for performance" i sure as hell dont, but if you have a large amount of processes running on your system, that may be slowing it down, but your cpu is quad core so i doubt even that matters since 4cpu should handle anything today for a home pc.

"will having the OS on a Ultra ATA drive significantly affect performance overall" um, assuming that the things like latency, rpm of the drive, cache, etc. etc. etc. are virtually the same between the 2 drives, not that much of a difference. but some factors such as the 400gb drive having a larger cache and faster interface can def. help make a difference in some thingns. also, are your 2x 400gb drives in raid 0? raid 1? or your just leaving the 3 hdd, 3 seperate ones according to windows?

another thing, your running xp pro, 32 bit version with 4GB for ram right? isn't it only letting you use 3GB?

what i would do would be leave your stuff on the 250GB drive, after you grab an old fdd from your old pc, use that to copy the sata drivers for the asus motherboard to it from the asus cd, then disconnect the 250gb hdd, i think your one 400gb drive is empty right now, install xp pro to that, after installing windows to the sata drive, you can connect the 250gb hd, make sure the bios is set to boot off the 400gb hd and not that 250gb, and take all the new drivers you downloaded from nvidia and asus' website from that hd and install them, or you can just redownload them.. your best saving all your data to the 250gb one right now, then installing xp clean on a 400GB, you obviously dont need to do the bios update again.
 
after installing xp, do chipset, etc. right from asus' website. download them now before you reinstall windows since you wont have internet on a clean install until you do the drivers, after those are done, install the nvidia drivers from the nvidia website.
 
Just FYI, I have been researching this for a couple days, I just wanted to get some feedback on my particular system, but you summed up everything I had assumed I should do already.

I have downloaded the new drivers for the SATA drives, and during the next install will F6 them in, so I can load Windows onto one the drives. I have determined that a RAID 0 is risky for a single drive failure to wipe out all of my data, and a RAID 1 seems redundant, given I was planning on using the Ultra ATA for backup, as well as a Firewire external hard drive for all my important pictures and files. My plan is to use one hard drive for primarily OS applications, and the other for games and misc. apps.

You are correct that the UltraATA is a inferior drive, it was always intended as a data backup drive that if necessary I could load into an older computer, so performance was not as importance as affordable storage.

WinXP only sees 3GB of RAM, I didn't know this prior to buying my components, is it possible having too much could slow the system down (I have not removed the 4th stick).

I have loaded some stuff onto the SATA drives (they show in windows fine, just not as boot drives), so I will format those, as well as the UATA drive. Any particular driver install order?

Thanks for responses.
 
its good you did some research when you hit into the problems, i usually spend time on "research" before i even orders the parts for me though to prevent finding out any bad news, but now that your squared away thats fine still.

32bit windows xp will only see 3gb, the 4th GB is pretty much useless, there are hacks and stuff you can do but its still a waste of a GB, i dont think having more than 3GB would slow the system down, windows just will not let you use it. but you can try cutting hown to 2GB, leaving it dual channel still to see if it really makes a difference in the benchmarks, another thing to check is that the ram speed is correct, make sure the bios is running it at the highest speed the Corsair Dominator RAM supports.

i like to install drivers in the order of, motherboard drivers 1st, then video., then external devices. chipset first, network second, sound third, other motherboard drivers then video drivers, last is drivers for things that are not as important to me, such as printers, etc. things that are external devices.
 
Excellent, thank you. Yes, you are very correct that I am researching at the wrong time, but I really appreciate the help now. I will follow your advice, and have all of my updated drivers ready at install. Thanks again.
 
Installing the video card drivers after the chipset drivers is what is causing your 3DMark06 score to be so low. And you will see this performance loss in games as well. You will need to re-install windows from scratch to fix this, well, this has certainly been my experience.

And yes, either keep 4GB of ram, or 2GB. Don't go with 3 sticks, you will lose dual channel, and this makes a difference with Intel systems, much more so than AMD based systems.
 
Thanks to both of you, I am much more confident now that I can get this beast performing like it should. I will post how it all goes.
 
Wow, installing the video card drivers last can really make THAT much of a difference? I've always installed my chipset drivers first in order to be able to connect to the internet to download new drivers. Lately, I've just pulled the drivers off a USB device for my chipset but I still install it first.
 
I did a fresh wipe this weekend, following the guidelines here, and although 3DMark doesn't make use of my quad-core processor, I scored in the high 13000's. Even with two cores loaded to 100% in TAT, it scored essentially the same. Thanks to you two for help me out, everything went super smooth.
 
Anyone know of why my Core 2 Extreme QX6700 will only allow a 10x max overclock? I am running a Asus P5W DH, and it says it is a fully supported processor. Any setting I am not enabling or disabling that keeps the mulitplier locked from 6-10? Thanks.
 
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