Baad 3DMark 2000 and 2001 scores. Baaad!

[cloasters]

By the holy rood, I swear my 3DMark2000 score used to be 4004. And my 3DMark2001 score was 1600 and change. This was with an Elsa GF256 Vidcard and P3E 600 OC'd to 800, on a 440BX mainboard with 256 Mb of CAS2 PC-133.

Today, with the same GF256, a Duron 850(at stock) on a SiS 735 mobo with 512 Mb of PC-2100 @CAS2, I get:
2846 DMarks in 3DMark2000, and a spectacular 782 DMarks in 3DMark2001. Whut the heyell happened?

You should be so lucky to get such high scores! Who needs a $300 Vidcard when I get 3.9 fps in some of the heavy duty 3DMark2001 BM's? Now that's playability!

Shoot me, I'm Irish.

[SteveI]

Strange. I saw the opposite results.

Celeron@ 100FSB w/ radeonLE, win2k, 256mb PC133
then
XP @ 146.6FSB w/ radeonLE, winXP. 512mb PC2100 (ECS K7S5A )

My updated system saw about 10-20% increase in score. Sorry, I can't remember the exact numbers.

Which OS are you using? If it's XP, don't manually load drivers like the AGP and IDE crap. The XP drivers are faster.

[martin]

Definitely the 3Dmark2000 scores have gone down for me too, the same for 3Dmark2001. Even though the benchmark setting was always a constant 1024x768- 16 bit colour there seemed to be a very noticeable drop in scores. I went from 4700 regular (Herc. GF2MX) thats with a 440BX p3700E@933, and then for some reason my scores for 3Dmark2000 consistantly sat at 2700 up to 2850. 3Dmark 2001 was always around 2800 and then at the same time they dropped to 1900. At first I thought this problem started coincidently with my directX upgrade from 7.1a to 8.0. Ah Hah!. But no, I used the uninstall tool and returned to 7.1a, but I could not return to those high 3Dmark scores. Even a clean install didn't help either.

So recently I popped in a GF2 GTS 32M ddr and bingo! The 3Dmark scores with the same settings and same rig were close to the 4700 I had initially. The 4400 and 4450 3Dmark scores I see now have to be attributed to the new video card, I am using the same video driver and same directx version.

WTF?? Something about the MX card I believe. I'm wondering about the MX bios ver. was it compatible with the driver or directx? It may have been the fact that no less then 5 devices sat on irq 11. I uninstalled the nic and SB Live card and there was still no joy...

[Pinky]

I know this is pretty fundamental, but I determined this after several installs and reread this as an article on anandtech or some other fancy site ...

Driver installation order:

1 -- VIA/motherboard chipset drivers.

2 -- Directx

3 -- Audio Drivers

4 -- Video Drivers

5 -- Any other worthless stuffs

[cloasters]

Does this mean that decaying 3DMark scores are the norm? Arrgh. All that really matters is that your fave games are playable. Nonetheless, it's hard to ignore the magic of bigger numbers!

Thanks for the reminder, Pinky! After my most recent dying 75GXP episode, I plumb forgot to install the ECS/SiS drivers for this mobo! Maybe they'll help.

[SteveI]

Originally posted by cloasters
Does this mean that decaying 3DMark scores are the norm? Arrgh. All that really matters is that your fave games are playable. Nonetheless, it's hard to ignore the magic of bigger numbers!

Thanks for the reminder, Pinky! After my most recent dying 75GXP episode, I plumb forgot to install the ECS/SiS drivers for this mobo! Maybe they'll help.

No, it should not be. If you are running XP, the drivers in the CD are the best. For Win98/ME/2k, you need to install the drivers. For 2k, get the windows update for IDE. Also, go to the ECS website for the latest drivers. The ones bundled with the board have been updated I believe.

Definitely sounds like you are running win98, the AGP drivers should give you a significant boost. You should see a decent improvement over your P3 system from the mem bandwidth improvement.