PCMark05 and Xbench Scores have fallen also.

Alright so remember a few days ago i mentioned that my windows experience index dropped from 5.1 and 4.9 for processor and memory to 4.4 and 4.7 respectively. I decided to conduct so more test and the results of both test have shown less that average results. First i ran a PCmark05 on my notebook, and the score i got was 3578. A review of the 2.2 MBP (same as mine) scored 5,864.

Link for the review:
http://www.NotebookReview.com/default.asp?newsID=3747

This is almost 2000 points dropped from normal.

I noticed that the person who reviewed the MBP in that link above also did a xBench test, therefore i decided to do one too as comparison. Here are my results:

Results 59.00
System Info

• Xbench Version 1.3
• System Version 10.5.3 (9D34)
• Physical RAM 2048 MB
• Model MacBookPro3,1
• Drive Type WDC WD3200BEVT-22ZCT0

CPU Test 49.65

• GCD Loop 92.81 4.89 Mops/sec
• Floating Point Basic 44.64 1.06 Gflop/sec
• vecLib FFT 36.80 1.21 Gflop/sec
• Floating Point Library 49.48 8.62 Mops/sec

Thread Test 77.92

• Computation 70.47 1.43 Mops/sec, 4 threads
• Lock Contention 87.14 3.75 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads

Memory Test 74.44
System 72.40

• Allocate 100.24 368.13 Kalloc/sec
• Fill 59.28 2882.55 MB/sec
• Copy 68.53 1415.54 MB/sec

Stream 76.59

• Copy 68.14 1407.46 MB/sec
• Scale 72.92 1506.52 MB/sec
• Add 85.07 1812.07 MB/sec
• Triad 82.79 1771.03 MB/sec

Quartz Graphics Test 59.34

• Line 58.12 3.87 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
• Rectangle 65.20 19.47 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
• Circle 53.81 4.39 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
• Bezier 60.45 1.52 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
• Text 60.25 3.77 Kchars/sec

OpenGL Graphics Test 53.60

• Spinning Squares 53.60 68.00 frames/sec

User Interface Test 52.56

• Elements 52.56 241.21 refresh/sec

Disk Test 56.51

• Sequential 70.79
• Uncached Write 81.21 49.86 MB/sec [4K blocks]
• Uncached Write 98.77 55.88 MB/sec [256K blocks]
• Uncached Read 39.97 11.70 MB/sec [4K blocks]
• Uncached Read 110.54 55.56 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Random 47.02

• Uncached Write 18.60 1.97 MB/sec [4K blocks]
• Uncached Write 118.37 37.89 MB/sec [256K blocks]
• Uncached Read 69.95 0.50 MB/sec [4K blocks]
• Uncached Read 116.75 21.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]

As you can see my results are abysmal. I am extremely disturbed by these benchmarks, it seems my MBP is running at almost half of what it is normally supposed to be at. Now i understand there are some variances between computers but that differences between my machine and the reviewer's differs alot. Additionally, looking at PCmark05 scores of other similarly spec machines, mine is score much lower than everyone else. Does anybody have any idea what could be the problem?

 

attached pcmark05 score

 

It looks like you have a different GPU from the laptop in the review. Your laptop is listed as an 8600 GS on PCmark05 while the one in the review has an 8600 GT.

 

There could be a number of reasons, the most likely of which is because you are running Vista, while the person in the review is running XP. Another reason is probably that you are using outdated Boot Camp drivers, which would explain the incorrect identification of your GPU.

 

Thanks for the reply, the bootcamp drivers are 2.1, when i run pcmark05, it shows it as the 8600gt, i don't know why in the report it shows 8600 gs.

so what about the xbench comparisons? That's ran in OSX and there is a significant drop there.

 

Are you running on battery? Any chance the power setting is on "Better Energy Savings" even when you're plugged in? Was the laptop abnormally hot before or during the test, otherwise the CPU and/or GPU might be throttling. Any chance you disabled the 2nd core using the Developer Tools, seeing as many of your scores are half that of the ones you linked?

 

That's normal, pcmark and 3dmark don't recognize the 8600m gt...

 

i also notice that the tester scored about 25% better in 3dmark06 compared to an asus g1s, which has the same gpu and almost the same processor.

meh.

 

Come to think of it, your benchmark results are extremely poor. Can you post a screenshot of Activity Monitor when you run the benchmarks? Chances are there might be another process taking up CPU time.

 

So i have figured out what my problem is. After a while, i realized that i wasn't using my macbook outside very often and i use it mostly at my desk, therefore i decided to take out the battery and store it. But apparently that was a bad choice.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305336

Accord to the link above, apple will reduce processing power whenever the battery has been removed. After reading that, i simply replace the battery back into the notebook and voila, everything is back to normal. Seems very stupid of me for letting something as simple as a removed battery cause me so much grief.

 

wow. yeah. kind of surprised you didn't mention that.

don't let the benchmark stop you from using your macbook sans battery if you want to. it just honestly doesn't matter that much. let the ocd number thing go.