3dmark06 score: 7759

[BackBreaker]

does this sound about right? I have a 9600 gt a 2x 64 bit amd 4600+ (2 cores at 2.4 ghs) and 2 gigs of ram on vista. My sm 2.0 score is: 3614 and my sm 3.0 score is: 3877/ CPU is 1574. Should I be expecting better results or upgrading ram help or downgrading to xp a lot?

[Ghostcustoms]

The cpu is holding back the card, with a x2 AMD you need to be around 3.2-3.3ghs to max the 9600gt in 3dmark06.

Xp will help your score, as far as ram I have yet to see a gain over the standard deviation for running different sticks.

[don'tknow]

Yep, that CPU is holding you back. Try OCing it as high as possible. RAM would help more in games than 3dmark, upgrade to 4gb when using vista (64bit preferably, but even for 32bit that's better than 2gb since it'll still use about 3), or stay with 2 if you want to downgrade to xp.

[BackBreaker]

so if I ever upgraded to a better card like the 9800 gt I wouldnt get a better score or better fps in games due to my pc bottlenecking the card?

[Cuiiey]

Upgrade your cpu but really theres not much point if it all runs smoothly just to get a couple of thousand more on a benchmark

[BackBreaker]

I took it again and this time only got a score of 6764 3DMarks and the cpu was 1291. The fact steam, mccafee and a download on firefox were in the background could have influenced it? Also, what I find weird is this guy with only a two core 5000+ (so a couple hundred more mghs) got a cpu score of like twice as much:
http://service.futuremark.com/resultComparison.action?compareResultId=183913&compareResultType=19

either gateway is not telling me something or I dont know. Maybe it's the cache that is 512 on each core together to 1 meg.

[slb785]

You will see better results if the CPU doesnt have to worry about other things running in the backround. Leaves it more power to run the benchmark

That 9600 GT isnt the most powerful card either. You may get a little more by overclocking your CPU but i wouldnt expect to get more than about a 10k score in 3dmark with that card

[huskernation]

score looks a bit low and like everyone said cpu bound