m6400 FX3700M 3dmark 06 reduced by half?

Hey all

For some reason that is beyond me, my 3dmark06 went from a confirmed low 11K to 6K. Machine is a QX9300, FX3700M with 8gb.

I revisited my previous runs, the CPU is dead on, but the SM 2 and sm 3 results are halved. I have rolled forward and backward with drivers to no avail.

I have experimented by reducing all possible running services, and still do not see any help. I have a very technical install of Vista 64 here, I do not want to reinstall.

I did install vista SP2, and I had played a little with rivatuner. Rivatuner is at defaults and has been unstalled. It does look as if 3dmark06 is not pushing the GPU at all, the fans don’t even kick up. I am reinstalling 3dm06 now in case it's just a benchmark issue.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Here are some random things I tried:
1) undocked, ran with power
2) reset power settings to high performance
3) reset nvidia control panel to max performance
4) Ran test with as many services as I could turn off, off.

Thanks

 

Perhaps your FX3700 is faulty...
Call Dell to help you, I don't think its a software issue.

 

ya thats what i would guess.

 

As a *last* resort, you could always take a disk image (using Acronis or some such) of your current install and then do a clean install to run the benchmark. Restoring an install using Acronis takes around 1hr.

 

Thanks guys

Wrassled with it some more tonight. I am back to 11,625. I had to do a driver cleaner cleanup, install again. I still don't know what caused it, or really what fixed it, but it's back.

 

Shure that Rivatuner fully supports the FX3700M ?
If not the defaults maybe not the right defaults.

regards
Christopher

 

Thanks Tanis, yes, I suspect that it was either that, using driver cleaner killed all registry entries associated with nvidia products, so that may have fixed it.