Huge 3dmark score drop from XP to Vista SP1, normal?

Hey all, I have a Dell M1530, T7250, 4GB, 8600GT etc....

Anyways, when I first got the laptop, I took off Vista and put on XP. Then after the fact found out that in XP HDMI won't carry audio. So I went back to Vista.

Anyways, in XP with my card OC'd to 600/800 I would score a wee bit over
6k in 3dmark06 (this is @ 1280x800 fyi). But now in Vista @ the same OC I score about 5400k in 3dmark06.

I knew I would be taking a performance hit going from XP to Vista, but this seems a bit extreme.

 

I have also done the same experiment and have found about an average drop of about 300 points in 3DMark06 from Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1. The one thing also also noticed is that with Vista SP1 I am able to overclock my GPU a little bit higher than when I am using Windows XP SP3. Again this is just me experiences. God Bless

 

Funny you mention the overclock part of it. In XP, I am able to run 3dmark06 at almost whatever speeds I can throw at it. But in games (TF2 and WoW), it is very instable. But in Vista, I can OC higher and actually game with higher clocks.

 

Mmm....I used XP initially, then swapped to Vista, but now I'm back on XP again.

In XP, I could clock at 600/900 stable, and hit 5300 in 3DMark06. In Vista, 600/900 appeared stable in 3DMark06, but in anything else it crashed within seconds. Anyway, I scored 5050 in 3DMark06 at 600/900 (it didn't artefect in 3DMark for some reason), but for anything else I had to down my clocks a little to 585/870.

The weird part is that while the difference in 3DMark06 wasn't by very much, in games my FPS sucked like hell. In Vista while overclocking at 585/870, I swear it performed just as good (or bad) as my 375/502 clocks in XP, or perhaps even a little worse. I'm hit a minimum of 30 FPS in XP in TF2, whereas my overclocked setttings were constantly dropping into high 20s.

 

I believe i know why that's happening: If you look at the clocks (core & mem) while using program like Rivatuner, you will notice the graphic card has downclocked itself to prevent damage. My 8600m GT (Although DDR2) will downclock itself as well when I overclock it too high and I receive the same FPS (20's) on TF2. By looking at the rivatuner graph I discover the GPU locked the clock at the lowest level, and it usually require a reboot to reset the value back to normal. Oh and that also explains why it performs like XP at a lower clock, because it is actually running at a lower clock.

 

I think you maybe right on there Pai. In Rivatuner when I would OC my core to like 600 in Vista it would drop it down to 100 (well so says Rivatuner). But Ntune says it is @ 600. So I am not sure which program is right.

 

thats a pretty crazy overclock OP, what are your temps like?

 

xp for life

 

that's about right...

10% difference

Drivers and tweaking will reduce it a tad, but it seems about right.

8600m's upper ceiling seems to be 625/1250/1000 (DDR3) but you are going to be hot at or nearing that point.

 

10% is the least margin. You`ll see even more than that,if XP is set for gaming and updated to SP3 now

 

Man I might just go back to XP, what a PITA this has been.

But at 650/900 temps never go higher then 79C

 

Argg forget it, I am going back to XP lol.

 

Smart choice

 

Actually its the larger margin and means you haven't tweaked much.

SP3 is not showing any speed gains truly...

Gotta love parrots.

 

600 3d marks is far from huge, what area were your losses at, or were they just spread around? Back to back runs can easily vary by that much, usually not as high as 600 but its not unheard of, several hundred is very common, hence most reputable sites use batch runs of 30 or so and submit an average score.

Aside from your 3dm score, how are your REAL games playing? Thats the most important and usually overlooked area in determining vista vs xp gaming performance, and its just fine for me and tons of others.

 

Yep KernalPanic, parrots.

And seriously, 3DMark? Iceman said it best, play some real games with some real FPS readouts.


I couldn't possibly imagine going back to XP now. Even if I might get 5% more FPS (woo, that equates to about 2 frames a second). No way do I ever want to deal with networking on XP again. People don't mention it much, but Vista is far superior at basic networking compared to XP.

Oh, and the whole ability to search through files without using the slow as a constipated camel XP search is my second reason for getting Vista.

 

I got a FPS boost in some games when i switched back to Vista.

 

vista ftw down with xp

 

Well I went back to XP. Have yet to really game with it much. Will do some more tests tonight (real world gaming, not 3dmark), and report back.

 

Hell yeah. Setting up a network in XP requieres you to know how while in Vista you just have to put network discovery on ON and set up your share folder.