Scratching my head in wonder..?

[Vyncennt]

I've been working on a friends comp all day. He has a half decent rig, aging gracefully, but clogged up with all kinds of crap (physical crap AND software crap...lol)

So today we did some maintenance and got some surprisingly horrible results...

=(

After blowing out all dust/debris in his system with compressed air (trust me it was needed!), we stopped by a local store and purchased a new CPU fan (original was just a heatsink..ACK!), and a PCI VGA cooler. Both installed flawlessly of course...

Then we proceeded to wipe his harddrive and load a fresh install of XP, all of its updates, and fresh drivers for sound, video, chipset...blah blah. All the wastefull windows Services disable also, just as on my personal system...

And heres where it gets strange..

We both have Dells...his a 8100 and mine an 8300

We did benchmarks before and after the changes and were flabbergasted by the results...

Mine:

2.8 P4 800FSB HT
1024 PC3200
Crap Dell board, i875P chipset
ATI Radeon 9800 PRO (N.P. flashed to pro and OC'd slightly)
PCI VGA Cooler and ram heatsinks for the card

His:

1.4 P4 400 FSB
1024 PC714
Crab Dell board, 1850E chipset
ATI Radeon 9700 PRO (real pro, not flashed, OC'd slightly)
PCI VGA Cooler

Now BEFORE the cleanup he was running 11,000ish from what I understand...

Now heres our new numbers:

3DMark2001SE

Mine: 16890-17000ish
His: 7500-8000ish

Is there any reason his comp is scoring (a) lower than before and (b) WAY lower than mine, although our systems are not THAT far from each other (Im almost 2.5 times as fast in these scores, but not in computer hardware)

The only thing that we CHANGED in his system was adding better cooling, OC'ing the video card (used newest ATI Tray Tools and let it choose the OC with a setting of 0 artifacts), and upgraded from Windows 2000 to Windows XP.

Thanks everyone in advance

Y'all have been a TON of help to me this week =))

Cris

Ackk...forgot to add...both using the newest Omega drivers with the exact same settings

 

[Froggy]

Well his CPU is the same as a PIII 1 Ghz and I850 means RAMBUS. So he has 2 major marks against his system performing well compared to yours. Your CPU is at least twice as fast as his and you have about 2x the memory bandwidth IIRC. 3d2k1 is very dependent on the CPU for score compared to 03 & 05 so I would say thats the "problem". As far as having his score be lower, that must be because his old drivers didn't have the IQ sliders set as high as Omegas do. Thats my opinion for the night!

 

[ShadowClock59]

I agree with Travis completely. In 3D01, I would have to say the CPU is more important than the Graphics card, your processor is consideraly higher than his and has much faster memory.

BTW, was he running XP prior to the HD wipe?

 

[Dan0512]

Yes, You can get up to twice the score if you have the same GPU, but a CPU that's twice as fast. I could only get 8800 points with my system (Very similar to your friend's) and a 9600xt (highly OCed), then some guys with A64's were getting like 20000 points with the same 9600xt..

Dan

 

[Vyncennt]

Yes...his was previously running Windows 2000, and now its Windows XP Home

 

[Cheator]

That can make a difference. Windows XP home generall consumes more ram fromm y experience. That could definately lower a score.

 

[Vyncennt]

aye..I thought of that also....but I did deactivate every single WIndows Service and feature not needed....which considerably reduces the load...lol.

He only used this comp for gaming, so you really cna barebone WXP ...heh

Our scores in 3Dmark 2005 were considerably closer, btw, as I took your advice and used 3 other benchmarks...differed by onyl 700 points actually...maybe 800

 

[Cheator]

Aye. The reason it was probably closer is most likly because your GPUs are just fine, but windows XP is consuming more ram and might not be as efficient as win 2k. I found win2k to perform better at most things anyway. I would try installing windows 2000 once more to see if the score changes.

 

[Vyncennt]

*****I would try installing windows 2000 once more to see if the score changes.*****

You really wanna see me suffer, don't ya....LOLOLOL

 

[Cheator]

Thats the plan.

 

[Zulu-1]

lol it would have been halarious if the card was an all in wonder (sorry for being off topic )

 

[Overclocker550]

what a waste of a 9700p on such a slow cpu weaker than a 1GHz p3! Sad to say but this score sounds right. any chance he can upgrade or at least put a faster cpu?

 

[Jimbob7]

Sure he ran a default 3DMark01 run to get 11k before? Chipset drivers installed?

 

[Vyncennt]

Actualyl he ran 3DMark 2001...not 3DMark2001SE...

...so I downloaded and ran the original 3DMark2001 to see if it made a difference...and it really didnt...lol..although he did get a steady 8000ish

Now he's telling me that it wasnt 11000 and it WAS 8000ish...

but for all who have been helping, Ive accumulated some data...gives a good frame of reference for CPU-VGA-RAM

 

[batboy]

His 1.4 P-4 is an old Willamette socket 423, which sucks even to us Intel fans. Your system has twice the FSB, twice the clock speed, and a better vid card. Why is it surprising that your system outperforms his in 3Dmark2001 by about twice? When I was reading the posts about his claims to 11k, I was thinking BS, then I noticed he "remembered" is was really about 8k which sounds about right.

Travis, RDRAM was actually pretty good back in the old days. It was dual channel in the i850 chipset compared to the single channel DDR of the time, so the memory bandwidth of RDRAM beat single channel DDR until dual channel and faster DDR came on the scene (if you compared same FSB). Of course in this situation, the FSB is doubled.

 

[Froggy]

His 1.4 P-4 is an old Willamette socket 423, which sucks even to us Intel fans. Your system has twice the FSB, twice the clock speed, and a better vid card. Why is it surprising that your system outperforms his in 3Dmark2001 by about twice? When I was reading the posts about his claims to 11k, I was thinking BS, then I noticed he "remembered" is was really about 8k which sounds about right.

Travis, RDRAM was actually pretty good back in the old days. It was dual channel in the i850 chipset compared to the single channel DDR of the time, so the memory bandwidth of RDRAM beat single channel DDR until dual channel and faster DDR came on the scene (if you compared same FSB). Of course in this situation, the FSB is doubled.

Yeah I remeber RDRAM being better than SDRAM in terms of bandwidth, but it seems that it was very expensive and didn't OC very well. Also I believe the early P4s couldn't fully take advantage of RDRAMs bandwidth due to the limited FSB. Am I remebering correctly? My last intel set-up was a PIII 1Ghz so I have no direct experience with Rambus.

 

[Vyncennt]

****Why is it surprising that your system outperforms his in 3Dmark2001 by about twice?****

A fault of my own ignorance it seems. I was quite aware my CPU/RAM/FSB are quite a bit faster than his...it was the similarity in VGA cards that had me confused in initial 3DMark tests. I was fully suspecting to clobber him in PCMark tests.

What I was not aware of, and was promptly taught by the helpful gentlemen on these forums, was the reliance on the CPU of the 3DMark 2001 tests. Further testing with other/newer FutureMark products confirmed exactly what everyone said. The differences in VGA performance closed significantly as newer/better tests placed more load on our GPUs and less on our CPUs...heh.

I'll say this though...I believe the days of my 9800PRO are limited. I've squeezed every last bit out of this technology, and I suspect a whole new build is in order. Ive plans to play Vanguard and the like when they are released, and although this rig would probably run it fine, it will not run in great.

My CPU would probably be fine...especially OC'd to 3.0 or more...BUT...and this is the final clincher for me...478 is out, and no current 478 board supports SLI that I know of. Looks like Im stuck buying the whole CPU/MoBo/VGA combo.

Takign donations btw =)) lol

Thanks everyone and I hope those tests shown above help SOMEONE at least...took me quite some time -)

 

[Overclocker550]

a 1.4GHz p4 arent gonna run any modern game smoothly, waaaaaaaay too cpu limited. I would make my next rig an a64, its well known those game much better than p4s and will lessen the cpu bottleneck

 

[Vyncennt]

Whats the fastest CPU I can jam into a 423 socket btw?

 

[Cheator]

According to my school notes and wikipedia, socket 423 P4s didn't go past 2 ghz. Now, it really depends on your board. If your board supports up to 1.5 ghz, i don't think you will be going anywhere anytime soon. I would highly recomend selling off the current system and getting an A64 system. Its worth your time and money. Dells are not.