3Dmark score dropping?

I have a question regarding overclocking my E6850 further.
I am at 3.8 and have been stable most all day with P95 and everything is good. My question is this. I up my fsb and up my Memory speed and i get lower scores on 3Dmark. Why does this happen? I had my fsb up to 3.85 and my memory up to 996 with 5-4-4-15 timings and my score actually dropped by 500 points. Also if i OC my vid card higher it get lower scores. Am i doing something wrong?

No two runs of 3D will give the same scores (unless you get lucky). Try and powering off the computer to erase the ram and then rerun after bootup, this should help.

so its pretty normal for something like to happen? Is it bad to run your memory at 1000? Just wondering cause i had it there and it seemed good.

Actually, I'm experiencing something similar.

I actually get higher scores running at 3GHz, with RAM at 6-6-6-20 800MHz, 8600 GTS at stock than if I go with my current setup. (3.2GHz/800Mhz 4-4-4-15/850Core, 1840Shader, 1100Memory)

I just plain don't understand it. It's generally about a 1K difference, too. Aprox. 9400 at old setup, aprox. 8300 with current. It's just plain crazy.

Like someone said no two scores are the same but in addition sometimes when you are pushing your hardware too much you can actually degrade performance. This can be a result of instability, errors, or even increase in heat. For example when I benchmark my Q6600 at 4.0GHz if I do not give it enough voltage my superpi scores are actually slower than at 3.9GHz.

I'm pretty sure heat and stability aren't an issue, being as I only hit about 58C running Prime95 after 8+ hours, along with zero errors. I don't really start having stability issues (where I need to start tweaking anything other than Vcore) until 3.6GHz.

That said, I realize that scores are never the same, but they do seem to get consistently lower each time I run 3DMark06... Even after rebooting each time and not changing settings. It's rather frustrating.

Then again, I'm running Vista, so anything's possible.