Maximum PC

I have two PC’s, an Athlon 2400+ system running DDR and a (until recently) Athlon 1800+ system running SDRAM. I upgraded the slower system to a new Athlon 64 (socket 754) 2800+ with DDR on a very nice board (DFI LanParty w/nforce3 250Gb chipset).

The problem is, according to PCMark04, my increase in speed is much smaller than I expected. Maybe my expectations were too high, but comparing the upgraded system’s CPU scores to the top 1800+ (1533Mhz) score on their online results browser shows only a 20-25% increase!

Unfortunately I didn’t run the mark on the old system. I did however run it on my other one (the 2400+) and it’s only a tiny bit slower. The CPU suite scores are:

2400+ = 3229
2800+ = 3396

The other suite's scores are similarly dissapointing.

What do I need to look for? The new system is clocking at 1810 Mhz, so that seems correct based on what I’ve read. Shouldn’t I be getting a much bigger speed boost over my old slow-ass system? It’s my HTPC and I wanted a big upgrade and figured the $300 I spent would be a good start.

Your rig is only as fast as its worst bottleneck. Get sysoft sandra standard, its great at finding the drag ass componets and even gives tips on tweaking.
Did u keep your old hard drive? How much Ram do u have? With The ultra fast memory controler on that chip and at least 512 of 2100 you realy dont need a swapfile- running things from ram Pwnz
also when updating from old systems make shure the hdd cable supports ata mode 5. Alot of ide cables for optical drives only support ata mode 2

Thanks for the tips. I upgraded the RAM too, so it's got 512M PC3200. I kept the old HDs, but they are both 7200RPM 80g. I'm using the IDE cables that came with the new MoBo, so I guess the next step is to get Sandra and check stuff out one by one.