In case anyone's interested heres the Futuremark whitepaper on how the tests are run.
http://www.futuremark.com/companyinf...whitepaper.pdf
Apparently only the 4 game tests contribute to the score. Only one of these, Mothernature, requires DX9.
CPU has a lower impact on score. The example given shows a 9700 Pro with a XP1700 or XP2700. With the xp1700 a score of 4423 is shown. With the XP2700 a score of 4577.
Keep the XP2700 but replace the card with a 9500 Pro and the score reduces to 3486.
Scoring ranges were designed to be somewhere between 1000 and 5000 for what are described as "Entry" and "High-end".
Entry is described as "approximately a 1GHx
cpu and DX8 graphics card". High is 3GHz and a DX9 card.