3Dmark benching question.

[Flo4ts]

I've been frequenting these forums for well over a year now and I've been reading up on all of the overclocking you guys do. Your results are amazing and I look up to you all. I just haven't been doing much posting. You're going to be seeing me posting much more though. I've done some successful overclocking and benching on some pretty solid hardware... But I just have a couple of questions.

I always have a harddrive with a fresh install of Windows XP on it for benchmarking purposes. my question to you is do you apply the minimum amount of updates to the OS to allow 3dmark05 / 06 to run or do you just fully update your OS. The reason im asking this is because Ive always just benched on an OS with minimal updates. Will I see 3dmark scores improve with a OS that has SP2? or will they go down because of extra background processes running ? These are questions that I haven't really seen an answer to. I anyone could shine some light on this I would really appreciate it.

[BenchZowner]

Most of use Windows XP SP2 "customized" ( less services, tweaks applied, etc ) versions.
I haven't compared the scores between tweaked Windows XP SP1 & tweaked Windows XP SP2, but they shall be pretty close or even equal ( taking that both "setups" have been fully tweaked ).

[zakelwe]

Welcome to the 3dmark board :up:

Good questions. I guess the honest answer is "it all depends" but that is not very constructive so I'll add a bit of meat to the bones and say that in general, and for 3dbenching, unless you are either

1) At the very top
2) Having a battle where you need just a few more points
3) Have loads of time on your hands

your time will be better spent not tweaking the OS system after sticking on the chipset drivers and SP2 or whatever, but instead doing the following

a) Before buying your video card hunt around for the ones which will give you the best starting point.

b) Spend time and effort working out the best video drivers and LOD settings by constant runs that may take hours, days, weeks.

c) learning and applying volt mods and better cooling methods.

All of the above should give you a better bang for your buck timewise than spending any time with the many OS tweaks IMO. The only OS tweak that I think ever gave a good return was the Ricky Tweak; that must have been good, it has it's own name.

At this point everyone will tell me "no you can do this and that and other" and I'll be burnt at the stake as a heretic. :)

One thing that is true though is that real men / women bench 3d, it takes a lot more skill. Not that I am biased of course .. heh heh.

Regards

Andy

[TheKarmakazi]

cant find a link to explain "ricky tweak" can anyone help me out?

[BenchZowner]

cant find a link to explain "ricky tweak" can anyone help me out?

Ricky's tweak was effective for the single-core ( mostly ) Athlon 64's/Opterons back in the socket939 era, where you'd force Windows to believe that you have a multi-processor PC by forcing it during Windows installation ( ACPI - Multi-processor ).