CD Mark of... 5.4?!?!??!?

[Lonesomesound]

Firstly, just wanted to give mucho respect to Passmark - both for the top s/w and for taking an active part in these forums - cheers.

OK, my position is that I've just bought a new-ish system, main specs thus:

Pentium D-940 dual-core, 3.2Ghz / 2Gb RAM / 300Gb HD (8mb buffer) / GeForce 7500 LE graphics card (512Mb).

The PassMark is around 450, which is OK considering it only cost me £230 (that's about US$460), and I've been using a P3-500Mhz up til now! BUT the main issue seems to be the CD/DVD drive, which comes back with a CD Mark of around 5 (using an audio CD with one long 74-min track)!!!! It's ATAPI (unlike my HDDs which are SATA), model number HL-DT-ST DVDRRW GSA-H21L. Any ideas why the mark is soooo low? It's bringing the whole score down, and since I primarily want to use the PC for ripping CDs, if there's a CD drive issue, I wanna know... !

Thanks in advance, Martin

[ice]

ammm...

Don't use an audio CD, put in a DVD with like 3-4 big movies on it, not many small files.

Otherwise, pentium D's are extrememely bad CPU's, so you won't get much of a high mark as well... What is your CPU mark?

Best of luck

[David (PassMark)]

If as you say, your CD had a single large file on it, then the result of 5.4 is low for the CD Mark.

Was there some other software accessing the CD. e.g. was windows trying to play the audio CD at the same time as running the benchmark?

Maybe the CD was scratched or damaged and the drive was re-trying multiple times to read some sectors? Did you try other CD / DVD disk?

[Lonesomesound]

Thanks for the replies... this is a history of my CD Marks that I've just taken using different media in the drive...

Win XP Pro installation CD... 239
DVD (my own burn)... 621 / 548 / 729 (3 consecutive tests)
Audio CD with 1 60-minute track... 210
A number of audio CDs (that play fine in WMP)... results came back lower and lower each run, taking about 5 tests to settle around a figure in single figures (hence the 4.5 that I reported last time). Interestingly, the test comes back with a figure *immediately* - it doesn't actually seem to run the tests at all.

Any idea as to the reason for these results? Should I not be using audio CDs to run the tests? There seem to be massive discrepancies even between a data CD (239) and a DVD (up to 729)...

Taking the best result brings my overall mark to around 530, which I'm happy with. Incidentally ice, my CPU Mark came back as 830-ish - s'alright innit?? Are D940s really so bad?

Any views / input appreciated...

[ice]

Yes, Pentium D's are bad CPU's.

You see, they aren't really true dual-cores, they are just two Pentium 4's (already hot chips), glued together... exactly, lol...

Especially, 830 for a dual-core processor.. doesn't look too good. I can score over 2000+ with my Core 2 Duo E6600

Peace

[Brian]

ice, your CPU cost more than his entire computer when it was released to the market. Why would it not be faster?

Anyway if you are planning on ripping any DVD movies, you may want to look for a DVD Video rip lock patch for your model drive. Some drives lock the DVD Video ripping to 4x or sometimes 6x.

-Brian