3DMark06 Speed Run

I could not resist for bragging rights.

After seeing the incredible 3DMark06 scores posted by owners of the Nvidia G80 (8800GTX & 8800GTS) graphics cards, I had to see how mine compared with these scores.

All of my 3DMark06 benchmarks up to now have been run with both of my monitors enabled, image set to "High Quality," Antialiasing set to "4x," and Anisotropic filtering set to "8x" - my preferred operational settings.

With my own tests, I have determined that having more than one monitor enabled while running the 3DMark06 benchmark decreases the score by approximately 100 3DMarks.

The incredible 3DMark06 scores I referred to earlier are also run at the "High Performance" setting with both Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering turned off. So I changed my settings accordingly and disabled my second monitor to see how my overclocked BFG 8800GTS (Core Clock of 660 MHz and Memory Clock of 1000 MHz) would perform against the "big boys."

I was totally unprepared to see Nighthawk score a high of 10292 3DMarks! Here's the 3DMark06 comparison for this score. I ran the benchmark 7 times and all the scores were above 10000 3DMarks with the lowest being 10143 3DMarks after upgrading the Nvidia driver from 97.44 to 97.92.

That was a fun exercise but my image settings are now back to my preferred operational settings.

In yesterday's post, I reported that it was not clear what the Core Clock is for my BFG 8800GTS since both ATITool 0.26 and Everest Ultimate were showing different values. I set the Core Clock to 660 MHz and both tools were ambivalent about what the Core Clock was actually set to. This morning, I decided to check with the NVIDIA Control Panel: it reports Core Clock of 660 MHz so that's what I'll use.

This morning, ATITool 0.26 is now consistent in reporting the Core Clock at 660 MHz and Memory Clock at 1000 MHz. However, Ultimate Everest is still not sure. It reports "GPU Clock (Geometric Domain)" at 648 MHz while in the "nVidia ForceWare Clocks" section, it reports GPU at 660 MHz. I think this may be an error in Everest Ultimate.

I am now preparing Nighthawk for the installation of Vista Ultimate x64 (RTM Build 6000) alongside Windows XP MCE 2005. I will be sharing my experiences in this endeavor with you here.