Benchmarks = GIMMICK!!!

[scarecrow1]

I Dont know about anyone around these forums but i sick of these stupid benchmarks. I just installed 3d Mark 03 and "scored" around 4096 which pretty bad score compared to others who have the same machine as mine with the same specs.
Heres my specs:

AMD Athlon 64bit 3000+
Gigabyte Motherboard K8NNXP
1.5 Gig of Geil DDR400 PC3200 RAM
GexCube ATI Radeon 9800XT256
Plenty of hardisk space
DVD-ROm/WR
21 " Dell trinitron Monitor

and i scored 4096 with some of the demos bringing my machine to fps as low as 20. Whats the deal with that? I run MaxPayne2, HALO, RavenSheild, Pandorra Tommorow perfeclty smooth. The only game that has slowed down my machine is FarCry. Running it on 1024 x 768 is ok until i get to the "RIVER" level and the level where you have to blow all the towers, my frames hit around 30 and below causing some slowdowns- this i think is due to the way they made the game. Hopefully it will run Halflife2 better, somehow i feel Halflife 2 will run smoother due to better optimizations.

[vass0922]

1. You are running XP 64 bit right?
(not the standard Windows XP from the store)

2. Benchmarks are just that.. benchmarks, you never see what they did in the background to get to that level.

3. Its possible you are having a minor hardware/software problem that is causing a problem that could cause your scores to be lower than they should be.

[pinipig523]

benchmarks are just a standard synthetic platform by which different systems can be measured against. thats all.

[GameManK]

dunno whats up w/ your benchmark but thats a sick machine

i wish i could complain about frame rates going down to 30

[eagle1]

Benchmarks (some of them) are synthethic and not real-world based BUT still they do show you some level for which you will judge your system and other systems.

Maybe something is wrong with your configuration or something.
Remember to go into the BIOS and disable the Power Saving thingie for that Athlon CPU. (it causes lower scores in the benchmarks because the cpu runs slower).

[The Real Bingo]

I'm not the biggest fan of benchmarks because everyone trys to push their system to the absoloute limits to get a good score on it. I dont get it. Why cant they just be happy with a game playing decently? They wont be satisfied till they blow their whole damn computer up.

[thekingofpain]

I use em as a tweak tool, comparing changes made when optimizing/overclocking/swapping performance parts etc

[ShawnD1]

I use em for the same reason tkop does. Bench the system. Overclock something. Bench it again.
Also a good way to tell which drivers are the best.
Speaking of which, those Omega drivers that everybody likes are terrible. They made my score in GL Excess drop by 20%. Faster than ATI drivers my a**. Another thing I just found out. With Omega drivers, setting the TV as an extension of my desktop causes the computer to crash.

But like Vass asked, are you using a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows? My computer's hardware isn't even the same league as yours and it scored around 4500.

[scarecrow1]

i am currently using 32bit version, there are no 64bit drivers for the R9800XT at the moment so i cant play any games or test it out

[vass0922]

Then you're not using a 64bit processor so the benchmarks maybe hurt by the processor running as backwards compatible instead of its native 64bit.