Is SiSoft Sandra screwed? Or is it something in my system?

[leech]

Ok, this has been bugging me most of the night. I updated my motherboard's Bios to 1006 (Asus P4PE) and benched it with SiSoft Sandra 2003. But the CPU Arithmetic benchmark reported only HALF of what it should have (Anywhere from 31xx-45xx, and it should be more around 85xx-9xxx) So what's up with that? I used to get damned high on it (oh this is the Dhrystone Mips I'm talking about) Any clues? I went back to the 1005 and got the exact same results with the exact same bios settings. It's driving me nuts. Even though I know this isn't a 'real-life' benchmark, it's still irritating to see it. I tried both the Max3 version and the older 2003 version and got the same thing. Any ideas would be appreciated.

I also ran the performance tune-up wizard and disabled all the crap that it suggested too that WinXP turns on by default. I have a 3.06ghz Pentium 4 with Hyper-threading enabled.

Leech

[bsdgeek]

Have you noticed any sort of real performance drop in anything else?

If not, then yeah Sandra might just be messed up.

[LvR]

Not sure that it is Sandra.

2.8G HT P4 returns 8247 here on version 2003.7.9.73 - compared to the ref scores it tallies.

[mutz]

Uh, I think SIS treats a P4 with HT enabled as a dual Pentium and for some reason gives you half, or at least lower, results on certain benchmarks. I've had the same thing.

I don't remember where I read about it, but you can be sure Zao, AZ, VJ or somebody around here can write you a book about it.

[ayoub_ibrahim]

I noticed the same low score with my p4 but assumed that it was because I had HT switched off!

[VJ]

Originally posted by mutz
Uh, I think SIS treats a P4 with HT enabled as a dual Pentium and for some reason gives you half, or at least lower, results on certain benchmarks. I've had the same thing.

I don't remember where I read about it, but you can be sure Zao, AZ, VJ or somebody around here can write you a book about it.

I don't remember what SIS gave me (dual Xeon 2.4, HT enabled). I'll have to test when my system is up an running (see thread "stress test on floppy") . But you'd think Sandra would know about HT by now... Have you tried benching it with HT disabled (in bios) ?


Jörg

[leech]

Odd, I had hyperthreading on before and it had no problems, and I tried it with the latest Max3 version that came out in June and it had listed Hyper-threading as one of the benchmarks. But now I'm scoring 8959 MIPS after turning HT off. I'll try the Max3 version after I get home from that horrid place I call work.

The Whetstone FPU MFLOPS is still rather low compared to the 2 SMT 2.8ghz one though.

Leech

[Admiral]

I think Sandra's just a moody b$%#h
Also, the provided comparison scores are generally (quite) higher than what you get in real life with similar hardware.
If your game performance's fair, screw what Sandra says.

[Byock]

Has Spawn been chewing on the wires?

[leech]

Spawn went back to hell, remember? I think I agree, Sandra is just like that b!@#$ I left drunk in the gutter that tried to... oh wait, that was a movie.

Leech

[LvR]

I have always used the Sandra bitch to only run comparative tests - I don't think one should compare scores obtained here with any other bench. Always found the included scores of other hardware to tally with scores I see on my own hardware when running my own Sandra tests.

[leech]

yeah, I just compare it with itself. Anyhow, just ran it again (version 2003.7.9.73) and it gave me Dhrystone 6623 MIPS and Whetstone FPU/SSE2 of 2073/4226 MFLOPS.

The one in the reference CPU that is Intel Pentium 4-b 3ghz 512L2 (Win32 x86) (which should be the exact same processor I have...) reports Dhrystone 8004 MIPS and 1683/3930 MFLOPS. That's a bit of a difference, I'd say...

Leech

[LvR]

Running hot perhaps with bios auto performance throttling on?

EDIT You did say "I have a 3.06ghz Pentium 4 with Hyper-threading enabled." earlier.......?

That means you are actually worse off than you think - you should be looking at the 3G "[2 SMT]" HT version where the scores are 8781/5205.

[leech]

I don't think that's on.

I was thinking the same thing, that I should have the SMT option to compare it too.

Leech

P.S. I'll go check if something like the throttling is on.