oddities in scoring

[brad1138]

I am rating my new computer I built. Gigabyte 970A-UD3 MoBO/FX-8350/2x8GB PC12800/Radeon HD 7850/Windows 7 Ultimate x64. I am noticing that the total score is exactly the same (give or take a few points-normal fluctuations) if I have my HD 7850 OCed or not. The stock score for the 7850 is ~3700, when I OC it, it jumps to ~4100 (about a 10% increase).

All other sub scores are the same (CPU/MEM/etc) and the overall ends up being the same. If I have the FX-8350 @ stock speed, the total score is ~2050 with or without the 7850 being OCed. If I OC the 8350 to 4400MHz, the scores are ~2150 (again with the 7850 OCed or not).

It just seams really weird. Shouldn't an increase in the video card performance show an increase in the overall score? I have run at least a dozen tests back and forth and they all confirm the results.

[David (PassMark)]

Hard to comment without seeing all the scores from the individual tests.

The "PassMark Rating" is a combination of the CPU, 2D, 3D, Memory and Disk Ratings, the bigger the number, the faster the computer. The exact formula for this calculation is as follows.

1 / (((1 / (CPU Rating * 0.396566187)) + (1 / (2D Rating * 3.178718116)) + (1 / (3D Rating * 2.525195879)) + (1 / (Memory Rating * 1.757085479)) + (1 / (Disk Rating * 1.668158805)))/5)

In this formula each rating is weighted then inverted, the average of these values is taken and then inverted again. The weight multipliers were calculated from the hundreds of thousands of baselines collected in PerformanceTest 7. The score is also calculated in such a way that a single extremely high value cannot significantly improve the final score. Conversely, a single low score can drag the score down significantly using this formula. All components in a system must be performing well in order for the final score to be high.

So my guess would be that the 10% improvement in 3D performance isn't enough to move the overall score much due to bottlenecks elsewhere in the system.

[brad1138]

Here is a screen grab of the results (edited to fit the screen better). The difference in CPU Mark is just random fluctuation, settings were the same. Everything else is nearly spot on. "FX-8350 FSB @ 220" is when the Video card was stock settings. "8350 FSB 220 7850 1GHz5200" is the OCed 7850 results.

Aside from the 3D Mark issue, every "sub" mark is higher in the 2nd listing (other than a very slight difference in Disk Mark) and yet the 2nd listing scores less, that seems odd.

[David (PassMark)]

I think it might be because you hard drive performance is really really bad.
It's an anchor slowing down the whole system. Meaning that you couple probably double your 3D score, but your system (overall) would still suck as a result of the under performing hard drive.

[brad1138]

I think it might be because you hard drive performance is really really bad.
It's an anchor slowing down the whole system. Meaning that you couple probably double your 3D score, but your system (overall) would still suck as a result of the under performing hard drive.

Compared to a SSD drive it is very poor, but compared to other HDDs, it isn't that far off. But I don't want to argue the point, it isn't that big of a deal. Thanks for your thoughts.