Maximum PC

I haven't run 3DMark in a while but I just recently upgraded my video card so I just had to. Right??

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/34441

It reports that my Q6600 was only running at 1.6GHz instead of the 2.4GHz that I know it should be running at.

I didn't realize this was out yet. Time to check it out.

Also it's reporting a lower clock speed because your processor was clocked down when it took the reading.

question is, why is it not overclocked? a 6600 should be good for between 3.0 and 3.2 with no problem. I ran mine at 3.2 for years then upgraded to a 9550 recently.

I tried overclocking it before but I never kept it there due to concerns about wear and tear.

Now that it's long in the tooth maybe I should reevaluate.

I have not found an Intel processor since the P4 that wouldnt take a 400mhz overclock without any issues, after that, the stepping of the processor has alot to do with it.

The 3DMark sysinfo is reading your idle clocks before it starts the benchmark. You need to change your power settings from Balanced (default) to high-performance in order to have it read your top clock. There are other ways to achieve this but it generally doesn't matter, it gives only a few points.

I overclocked my Q6600 to 3.0GHz and 3DMark reports 3.0GHz.

Increases for:

Ice Storm: 76486 to 91906

Graphics: 125561 to 146639
Physics: 32301 to 39849

Cloud Gate: 9547 to 11224

Graphics: 34812 to 34753
Physics: 2697 to 3331

Fire Strike: 3655 to 3753

Graphics: 4236 to 4218
Physics: 3888 to 4893
Combined: 1727 to 1725

Well this is weird. I'm running a Core i5-2500 with two GTX 560 Ti's.

Ice Storm
GPU: 211461
CPU: 56341
Combined: 131193

Cloud Gate
GPU: 27635
CPU: 4810
Combined: 13450

Fire Strike
GPU: 3238
CPU: 6758
Combined: 2695

Fire Strike Extreme
GPU: 504
CPU: 6715
Combined: 427

The new 3Dmark is a different beast

Oliver Baltuch explains:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkRfuBRo-K0

(Satch, your 1st run caught your Q6000 in EIST state. The OC more than likely locked it, stressed or not.)

I just installed the new beta drivers for my 7870 and in the graphical tests I got around a 20 to 25 percent increase in performance.

Out of curiousity I ran Far Cry 3 at 1920x1200 with the Ultra settings and got an average of 40 fps.

Who says AMD drivers are crap?

On one hand, it's great AMD released drivers that greatly improved the performance of their cards.

On the other hand, this leads to some implications. Did AMD finally lay off the original driver development team? Is this some ploy by AMD to sell cards to early adopters, then much later down the road go "look, you could've gotten this much performance!"? Is NVIDIA doing the same thing?

What?

The 7870 was good to begin with so the extra fps is just bonus to me.