Strange 3dmark?

[KennethChong]

Well i was trying to do some benching and i noticed somthing weird. At first, stock speed on the card and stock voltage, i was getting around 22k, then i ran it again at the same speed, nothing changed, i got low 21k, then high 20's. I decided to change some settings, turn vsync of and such, i got an even lower score. Then i went into bios and turned the voltage up a few notches, still the same thing. Anybody know why its acting like this?

[Holst]

Windows probably.

Ive had this problem many times with win2k, the only solution is reinstalling the OS :(

This is one of the (many) reasons I rarely have a decent 3dmark score.

[KennethChong]

Hrrm, now its even lower, into the low 20's at a higher clock.

[saaya]

ive had this phenomenom of extremely fluctuating scores before... it was the card that died some weeks later.... was a 8500 pro .... it started to give me artifacts on default speeds andthen i couodnt run any games because windows said there is no dx7 ßor dx8 compatible card installed... tried diferent drivers etc on a bunch of pcs... card wouldnt work. i rmaed it to powercolor in taiwan about 4 months ago...still no reply :/

[KennethChong]

I dont think its the card. On a fresh reboot i will still get in the high 22's low 23's, but if i run it a second time it just keeps getting lower and lower. I really hope its not the card :/

[jaawood]

it's not your card Ken, it's just a phenomenon with 3d mark....the first run after a boot is always the best, and then the rest get worse and worse until you reboot. you don't have any card or hardware damage. and like you said, on the fresh reboot you get back up to the high scores. best way to bench is to defrag and reboot after every run of 3d mark.

[saaya]

I dont think its the card. On a fresh reboot i will still get in the high 22's low 23's, but if i run it a second time it just keeps getting lower and lower. I really hope its not the card :/

thats exactly whatv my card did before it died... :(


it's not your card Ken, it's just a phenomenon with 3d mark....the first run after a boot is always the best, and then the rest get worse and worse until you reboot. you don't have any card or hardware damage. and like you said, on the fresh reboot you get back up to the high scores. best way to bench is to defrag and reboot after every run of 3d mark.

its some hundret points normally, not a few thousand! his score drops from 23 to 20... thats not the usual "the first run scores higher" phenomenom

try a fresh windows install! i hope that helps

[jaawood]

Originally posted by saaya

its some hundret points normally, not a few thousand! his score drops from 23 to 20... thats not the usual "the first run scores higher" phenomenom

well, who says it's a few hundred and not thousand? i think i know quite a few people who have lost 1000+ points from that phenomenon.

Ken, is the card volt modded at all? because if it is not, then it is a very low probability that the card is going to die. very few cards die for no reason.

also, it could be some weird bug in 3d mark. look at the bug Brett used to have with his 3dmark scores.....who knows

[KennethChong]

Naw it isnt volt modded yet. I just ran another after a reboot and i was hitting 19k now its starting to worry me. Im going to try to reformat and see if that works.

[Holst]

Good luck :D

[saaya]

yeah good luck, 19K after reboot is weird if yu got 23K before... but i hope its just your windows! good luck!

[KennethChong]

Getting 23k again, ran a few test and it seems to be pretty stable. Glad it wasnt my card.

[saaya]

cool :)

[Dissolved]

i had that prob too..
i hit 11k with a ti500 that had a vert high oc on air..

i got a few emails of ppl whieing at me for killing them in 3dmark. but i tryed again a few days later and i was only getting 10.4~10.6k.. Nothing i could do ever got me back to 11k.. and my score looked fine. no killer nature score or anything. just all tests were a lil faster then the ppl lower then me on 3dmark.
they ended up removing my score. and i wasnt ever able t get that score again..

its happened to me alot of times.. usualy i can get higher and higher.. then when i get a great bench, i cant seem to get past itor equal it again. maybe its 3dmark itself or just some weird thing..

[saaya]

i found out that a fresh install is sometimes giving me worse scores than a windows im already running for a couple of weeks or months...

weird huh? about 100-200points

[jaawood]

glad it's workin for yah Ken

[KennethChong]

Thanks, i was worried for a minute there.

[Holst]

I had a high score of 20700.

I didnt upload it as I thought I could tweak some more.

Now I cant even get 20k and im too lazy to reinstall :(

[Hell-Fire]

Bah....to heck with reinstalls. Get yerself a 10-20 gig drive, format it using Fat32, not NTFS, and then do a fresh install like this:

-OS
-Chipset
-Video
-Critical Updates
-SP's
-etc etc
-Software

After that, GHOST it onto your Fat32 drive that way if you want a fresh install, you get it done in minutes versus an hour or so.

Important to grab yerself a Win98 bootdisk, or any dos boot up disk you can. Thats why the need for a Fat32 disk since NTFS isnt accessable from dos. Thats unless you have the windows version of Ghost of course...

Thats how I do it...seems to work pretty good.