Lower 3dMark06 and PCMark05 then review: Why?

I assume that the review here ran 3dMark06 and PCMark05 bare bone stock, with factory settings.

In the review the scores came out to be 6,256 PCMarks and 3,754 3DMarks.

I have done a clean vista install on my notebook, have used it for a few weeks and finally decided to run benchmarks. My scores come out to be 5566 PCMarks and 3736 3DMarks. Now the difference between 3D marks does not concern me, it doesnt seem too big. But the difference between PCMarks does concern. Is there an specific reason as to why this happened? Something wrong with my hardware? Software? Drivers? Could it be because I have some background programs running like Kaspersky, etc.?

BTW this is all on the M-152XL

Thx!

 

Okay so i closed Kaspersky and a-squared, and any other background program i could think of. the PCMark05 score improved a little but still is ~300 less then what is the on review. New PCMark05: 5961

Any ideas anyone?

 

Synthetic benchmarks give different results every single time you run them (even if you run it back to back) and can be impacted by many things, even something as simple as having aero enabled or using the windows sidebar. You should just use those tests to get a basic idea of how well your computer compares to others. I wouldn't worry about a 300 point difference, especially when the scores are that high, because in real-world applications that small amount doesn't mean much.

 

if push come to shove and i see a decline in performance ill just use that as an excuse to get the notebook exchanged. lol.

 

They may have used different RAM, different timings in the bios, different Vista version, different drivers, different resolutions, different harddrive versions.

And you're right about background processes, very important. Maybe some services were running at yours.

But like nofxman32 said, I would not worry about 300 points.