From the posts I've seen, people who want to "win" 3DMark turn their refresh rate seisure inducingly low and turn off every quality increasing feature available.
Maybe that's just a few people who aren't "in the know" but they make my scores look pretty dumb. Mine was about 4010 with no o/c last I checked, 72hz, mipmaps set to "performance", colorspace set for my 92k NEC monitor. No utility running for graphics but several background apps, firewall etc running.
Make it go as fast as you can, but competition will surely blow your card. I see too many people with high scores one week (and a "beat this" attitude) crying about their fried system the next. Yes I do intend to OC this system (mildly) but not until I have the cooling worked out 100% and still running quiet. I could overclock my card 10% today without a problem but I see tiny imperfections when I do it. They are unacceptable to me and until I can do it with no quality sacrifice --at my settings-- I don't see the point in even running the software.
I've seen what I'd call artifacts that didnt crash 3DMark (like the side of a hill turning green) that are obviously unacceptable. A more extreme test is in the bump test, if you see any flashing that looks like lightening, thats an artifact. The faster I set my card, the bigger and more frequent they get.
