Score after hardware upgrade

[wellmon]

Hi everyone,

I just built a new machine and was expecting a bit more of a performance boost compared with my old machine. I've upgraded from:

GA-7N400 Pro2 motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (overclocked to 2.4Ghz)
3Gb generic DDR
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro
80Gb Maxtor SATA

To

GA-965P-DQ6 mobo
Intel Q6600 quad core
2Gb Kingston hyper-x DDR2
Nvidia 8500 GT Sonic edition
80Gb Maxtor SATA2

I'm still running win XP pro SP2 on the new machine and although I haven't tested any games or proper software yet, I was just expecting a bit more, I thought maybe windows would startup and shut down quicker. Do my expectations exceed the limitations of the hardware?!

I haven't done any overclocking yet on the new board, but I got an overall PassMark score of 1091.1 which I guess is pretty good looking at other scores on here.

[David (PassMark)]

You'll probably find that most software doesn't fully use your Quad cores. In fact most software will probably use just 1 of your 4 cores.

Things like the start-up and shutdown speeds are heavily influenced by the software you have installed and the disk speed (which probably didn't significantly change).

[wellmon]

ok, shame about the CPU not being utilised, but I guess if two programs run at once, or a multithreaded app runs, then I'll see a difference...

I would have expected a better disk speed though having gone from SATA to SATA2 (double the bandwidth). Currently the mobo has the default configuration of native IDE mode for the SATA ports. I can change this to AHCI mode (but I think I may need to reinstall windows with a different driver?) so maybe this will utilise the full 3Gb/s of SATA2..?

I got a disk mark of 375.4 is this good?

[David (PassMark)]

3Gb/sec is about 375Mbytes/sec. But most hard drives can only do about 50MB/sec. So only about 13% of your bandwidth will be used. Even less if the drive needs to do a lot of seeking. But slightly higher if you happen to request data that is cached in the RAM on the drive.

In short SATA2 doesn't offer much (if any) speed increase over SATA in a single hard drive situation.

[wellmon]

aw man that is totally pointless! Ok well thanks for clarifying

[David (PassMark)]

But on the plus side, if you install a RAID disk system, or solid state drive, in the future, then have the requried bandwidth on the interface.