Wierd graphics results.

[MiseryQ]

I'm getting some strange results on the both the 2d and 3d graphics test.

Even when doing back to back runs without any changes the results can be different sometimes 200%.

I pretty much use performance test before upgrading or comapring with other computers but with these results...

Thanks,
Q..

[David (PassMark)]

Can you post some details of your hardware and the actual results.

You might also like to increase the test duration from the Edit / Preferences option as this helps to reduce the variability of results.

Large differences can also be caused by other activities running the background on your PC. (Internet access, E-mail downloads, Virus checking, periodic document backups from MS Word, etc..). In this case you'll need to do several runs and ignore the low values.

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David

[MiseryQ]

Thanks for the reply.

The system right now is just a, "backup" while I have another board RMA'd.
I noticed it on that system too.

Soyo KT400
AthlonXP 2400+@2325mhz
1G DDR
30G Western Digital
OC'd Ti4200 with 45.23driver. Have tried other drivers as well.

I increased the time to "6" and ran 3 back to back tests with all background tests except NOD32 and ZoneAlarm off.

Just realized I could'nt attach so here's a capture.


BTW I'm using XP SP2 with AstonShell.

[David (PassMark)]

Well clearly there is something strange happening. We have not seen such large variations between subsequent test runs on the same machine before.

Again, I would look very carefully at all the processes running on the machine. Maybe there is some activity you don't know about.

As the machine is overclocked, then maybe there is some other effect coming into play. For example all the newer CPU's do automatic clock throttling when they get too hot. eg. The CPU clock speed will automatically drop from 2.3GHz to 1GHz. There is also a driver from AMD called, Cool'n'Quiet that will drop CPU speeds. This is only speculation as we don't have the machine here to test, we can't really know.

There similar things reported with P4's. For example,
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041114/

3.6 GHz 560, runs extremely close to its thermal limits, possibly causing the processor to throttle under a high load.
It took us several weeks to look into this phenomenon. Everything began with Pentium 4 560 benchmark results that kept becoming slower and slower with every repetition. We suspected the engineering sample to be fishy and contacted Intel. The German media manager Christian Anderka and a thermo technician, Benson D. Inkley, spent an entire day at our lab in order to solve the mystery.

It could also be the video card doing thermal throttling? But I don't know if such a thing existing for video cards.

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David