3DMark, what would you expect?Follow

So I'm attempting to tweak my PC to get a little more out of it, as much of an improvement as it was over the old machine, I'm still a little disappointed in some of the graphics.

I heard about 3DMark, a friend of mine just built a computer and while his processor and graphics card were lower quality than mine, he scored in the 6000's. I decided to download the free version and try it.

My score? 2600.

Seems a tad low to me, while watching the test I noticed that it runs through three different videos, then runs through them again. The second time through on all my FPS was at 2-3 at best. First time barely 15.

It just seems to me that I should be seeing betters scores than this but maybe not.

Specs (as if I haven't posted enough on this forum lately )

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego Socket 939
ASUS A8V motherboard
512mb PC3200 RAM
ATI Radeon 9800 pro 128 MB

I currently have the 5.9 Catalyst drivers for the video card, all other drivers are up to date as well.

My friend who was able to get 6000's has the following:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice Socket 939
MSI K8N Neo2-F NForce3 Motherboard
1GB PC3200 RAM
ATI Radeon 9200 128mb

Does the extra 512mb of RAM really make that much of a difference? Or could it be in my BIOS or other settings?

Ah I see.

I checked with him and he was indeed using 2001 instead of 2005.

Still, I was trying to mess with settings and I found that FX card overclocking programs like Rage3DTweak and RivaTuner just ***** the card up more.

My baseline benchmark was 19316 on 3DMark2001, after installing Rage3DTweak and attempting to overclock the card, it benched at 16015. Very suprising. The only way I could get back into the 19000's was to uninstall Rage3D, and the ATI software and drivers, then reinstall the drivers and Catalyst Control Center.

I was just looking for some tweaks to help reduce the choppiness in Jeuno, I suppose I'll just live with it.

Ah yes, I forgot about ATI tool.

I'll give that a try and see what kind of scores I can get. I managed to do enough tweaking to score a 5600 on the FFXIBench3, my goal is 6000 even