Windows 98 results

[Anonymous]

My system has a BIOSTAR M7NCG (NFORCE2) motherboard, an Athlon XP 2500 processor, a Asus V9280/TD GF4 TI4200 video card, and 256MB Kington PC2700 DDR. Operating system is Windows 98 SE. The hard drive is a 18GB SCSI hard drive that runs at 10,000 rpm.

There are a couple issues with the performance results that I have questions about.

The first is in the Graphics 2D - fonts & text. The performance test is returning scores on this from .16 to .18. There is no way this video card should be performing this badly on this category.
This system also has onboard video which is a GEFORCE2 Mx440 chip. Using on-board video I am seeing the same results. All other graphics results look normal & competitive with other benchmarks. There must be something in Windows 98 that is causing this. Either a bug or a configuration setting that needs to be changed. I did submit this issue before. But the numbers I supplied were wrong (16 instead of .16). I also did not supply much info about the system I am running this on.

The second issue is the variability of the results. When I run "ALL TESTS" I get something on the order of 285. I am finding that about half of the tests return higher values if you rerun them individually. By doing selective reruns I can get the total score well up over the 400 mark. I understand that the disk benchmarks will fluctuate but I am seeing the same on a lot of other tests as well. Is this normal? This also raises the question on the supplied benchmarks. Are te benchmarks collected just by running "ALL TESTS", or have individual categories been rerun to get the best performance? I know if I were to submit a benchmark I would do whatever I could to get the best score possible. So the question is am I comparing apples to apples? Am I comparing my best score to the best scores of the systems benchmarked or am I comparing my best score against average scores?

I also have one issue with the Burnin test program. It always gives me an error indicating that it failed to to initialize the graphics, something to do with DirectX. I am using the Direct X drivers that came with the motherboard. Not the latest & greatest, but fairly recent (I think version .

Please advise,

Jim

[David (PassMark)]

As stated in the previous post, (see, http://www.passmark.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=130 )

For the 2D fonts & text test, you can only get good results if you have a graphics card that supports 2D hardware acceleration and the right device driver for the card.

So on a P4 2.8Ghz machine in Windows XP with a ATI Radeon 7500 (Dual monitor) the test result is 108. With hardware acceleration turned off (in the advanced display properties) the result drops to 78.

In a second example. A Windows 98 machine with a Athlon 1600+, Rage 128 Video got the following results.
With the correct driver and hardware acceleration on: 120
With the correct driver and hardware acceleration off: 48
With the wrong driver and hardware acceleration off: 25

It is interesting to note that the results in 98 are better than XP. This is becuase Window 98 doesn't have as many fancy display effects as XP.

A score of less than 1 is really surprising however. How long does the entire fonts & text test take to run? Does the scrolling and zooming appear to be super slow when you watch the test execute? If the display updates don't appear to be slow then it might be an indication of a currently unknown bug in PerformanceTest. In this case E-mail support at passmark dot com, so we can get some additional information from you.

Second issue
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Only the disk tests and maybe the CD test should have significant variation from one run to the next (becuase of Windows disk caching and CD spin up times). The other tests should be fairly consistent and not vary by more than 5% to 10%. Of course if you have other activities running the background then the variation can be much greater depending on what is happening at the moment you run the test.

Most of the baseline files on our web sites are submitted by our users and we don't do in depth investigations to check if their machine was in an optimal state when they ran the tests. So you can expect some varation in the baseline files.

3rd issue
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You need at least DirectX version 8 which does not come with Windows 98 but does with XP. You can download it from the Microsoft web site however.

You should also check you have the most up to date video card device drivers. This is important as there are known problems with many video cards when using older device drivers.

------
David
PassMark

[Ray (PassMark)]

Your low 2D "Fonts and Text" results (less than 1) are caused by having an old version of RichEdit installed on your computer. This is a Microsoft Windows component required for this test.

To update your computer to RichEdit 3.0, install the following "Microsoft Installer Redistributable for Windows 95, 98 and ME" from the Microsoft website:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...2-DE3BB768148F

This package includes the newer version of the RichEdit component required and should return more accurate results.