Interesting? To me at least.

Alright, I've had this notebook for about two weeks now and have had enough time to see how it performs and learn more about it as well. Much more. With every worry due to ignorance I had, I learned more. Thank you all.

I'm going to write a review including all of my opinions, findings, and delicious fact about this godly rig, but before I do, I have one question.

As I've stated, when I first got my computer and hadn't installed much yet, I had 3d mark scores as follows:

3DMark05: 8389
3DMark06: 4660

Just recently, I've rerun my benchmarks and the scores went down quite a bit. This time, I had settings at standard and didn't put the power settings to "Always on" like before. It remained on Portable/Laptop which is supposed to increase clock speeds when needed. My scores went down as follows:

3DMark05: 8119
3DMark06: 4249

Then, I reran my benchmarks putting the power settings back up to "Always On". They benchmarks went up and were similar to the originals, but still lower. They were as follows:

3DMark05: 8313
3DMark06: 4627

Finally, I just got my highest scores thus far. I changed the default nVidia 7900 GTX 512mb card settings. They had been set to High Quality in the Image Settings. I put it all the way to the left on High Performance. I reran the benchmarks and got these scores:

3DMark05: 8489
3DMark06: 4736

They didn't go up that much, but definately higher than before.

So this leads me to my question...

What's the difference between High Quality and High Performance? It's not very clear..

Thanks.

 

it's texture quality, the details on ground, weapons, people, background, etc. high performance sacrifices these details for better framerates, but with that card and set up, you should be able to run any game you throw at it at full quality with all your settings on highest without a hitch.

 

Oh I definately am able to do that. What was confusing me was, the benchmark score going up for performance. Perhaps I don't understand benchmarks enough. I assumed that benchmarks would go up the better your computer could render all those things in a fast time. So, the more it could render, the higher the score. The faster, the higher the score as well. So I thought that if image quality was sacrificed, then scores would be lower.

 

I think all those benches are interested in how much time it takes to render x frames. Probably quality is a variable in their scoring algorithm, but not as much as time.

Edit: That's why when you compare scores, it's important to compare with those who ran their benches with the same settings. Same res, same AA and filtering settings.

Honestly, those scores are +/- important to me, as long as I can play all games @ 1920x1200 with high quality settings .

 

ya, notice how your benchmark would go down the higher your resolution and higher the quality setting. it measures how fast you can render certain things at a specified quality. so technically, the benchmark scores should be done with all graphic driver settings set to default or to "application controlled" to be comparable with other benchmark scores.

 

Actually, the standard for benchmarking is to keep the 3dmark settings at default with no AA, standard resolution etc. then you can run it several times depending on the way you set texture qualities to performance, quality, default, etc. Those settings are just tweaks anyway, the general point is that the machine in question is scoring in a certain range that gives you an idea of where it stands from a benchmark performance standpoint.

 

dimmu- Are you running NHC while doing your benchmarks?
You should check this post I just made-
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=1512883