Various Overall Scores

[skean]

Is there a generally acceptable fault tolerance when running Performance Test?

If I run PT7 multiple times, I can get different scores each time. Sometimes it is very close, other times it is significantly different. What percentage of difference in scores is acceptable, and what would be a major concern.

[David (PassMark)]

The disk test is the test that can show a lot of variance. As there are many factors that can impact the results (e.g. fragmentation, caching and the position of the file on the disk).

The other tests should return a result with about 5% variation. Most variation is caused by background activity of the O/S and 3rd party software. On newer versions of Windows there is always a huge number of background tasks running.

But you can also get cases where the hardware performance varies. This can happen for example if the CPU overheats and under clocks itself.

[skean]

Thanks, 3% to 5% is what I was going to recommend to the company.

[David (PassMark)]

If you get more than this is doesn't mean something is wrong with the machine.
It just means you have active stuff running in the background, much of which might be legitimate stuff.
e.g. The Windows search indexer, checking for E-mail, checking for O/S patches, anti-virus scans, anti-virus signature updates, automatic disk defragmentation, pre-fetch building files for boot optimization, media player scanning the disk for new media. The list is nearly endless.