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    Improving 3DMark06 (or any benchmark) performance?

    Discussion in 'Gaming (Software and Graphics Cards)' started by Stella, May 7, 2009.

  1. Stella

    Stella Notebook Deity NBR Reviewer

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    What do you guys do before running a benchmark to try and maximize performance? I don't know how much each of these things affect different aspects of performance as I've never tried benchmarking WITHOUT doing them, but here are a few things I do to get the ball rolling:

    * Turn off anti-virus
    * Defragment/disk clean-up
    * Restart
    * Turn off sidebar/gadgets/Aero (Vista/Win7)
    * Close all open programs
     
    Stella, May 7, 2009
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  2. Angelic

    Angelic Kickin' back :3

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    I basically do the same, lower resource usage and general computer optimization. Overclocking seems to help as well. :)
     
    Angelic, May 7, 2009
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  3. MAG

    MAG Notebook Deity

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    Well, I don't have an anti-virus program and the sidebar is the first thing I close when I boot Vista for the first time and never let it open again (Who uses it anyway?).

    Defragment wouldn't help much, but loading time maybe. Nothing related to benchmark.

    Of course close all programs, install best drivers, make sure your notebook is set to high performance and not running on battery. And yes, over-clocking would give your notebook's 3DMark06 score a boost :)
     
    MAG, May 8, 2009
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  4. StormEffect

    StormEffect Lazer. *pew pew*

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    On a system running Vista with 2+ cores and 4GB of RAM, most of this stuff will result in minimal performance gains. Having a couple programs running (provided they are minimal, like having Internet Explorer open, not running an H264 encode) shouldn't have much of an impact on gaming.

    Open up your task manager and see what processes are using the most CPU power, those are the things that will draw performance away from your game. But when you have a Dual/Quad Core running at 2.0+ GHz, that 1% processor utilization on ONE core means less than 1 FPS difference while gaming.

    Now if Firefox suddenly goes nuts (processor utilization up to 30%, lets say) because a flash advertisement happens to load while you are playing Crysis, you are going to notice a serious decrease in performance.
     
    StormEffect, May 8, 2009
    #4