Skyline - Pentium 3 500Mhz Katmai @ 560MHz - 1334 marks PCMark 2004

[Caos Wolf]

To Mr.Scott:

As I said yesterday I ran some more test to identify the reason to this high scores.

 

I realize that (probably cause of my habit with spi) I've set pcmark to run in realtime and that gave me a boost of ~300 points.

 

I wasn't sure (actually I'm still not sure) if this was legit so I made a quick search and came out with this:

 

This is from futuremark.

 

pofpcmark04 wrote:

Our official policy is that PCMark04 should be run with normal priority.

 

This is because normally one does not set the priority of any program (from the Task Manager or otherwise), but let's the program decide the priority. In other words, normally users do not even know about priority classes.

 

When you change the priority of PCMark04 to Realtime in the Task Manager it says:

"WARNING: Changing the priority class of this process may cause undesired results including system instability. Are you sure you want to change the priority class?"

 

Notice the warning about undesired results including system stability!

 

Technically this means that if you have rebooted your system and exited all the unnecessary programs from the background, the only processes running are PCMark04 and some system services. If you then set PCMark's priority class, system services may not be run when they are needed. This can have the above-mentioned undesired results including system stability. This also means that PCMark04 is not doing what it is meant to do.

 

Since I am now ranting, I will continue some more.

 

If you run your processor heavily overclocked, it is no wonder programs seem to behave badly. Actually, it might even be so that the programs are not to blame, but the processor may not be working as it should. In my honest opinion, this is why heavily OC'd HT processors show better PCMark scores when HT is disabled. Or has anyone had a better PCMark score with HT disabled than HT enabled when both test runs have been run without OC'ing or running PCMark04 with realtime priority class?

(From hardwareheaven 2003)

 

And this:

 

Using realtime-priority has been intentionnally prevented in Build110 as it produces results which don't reflect the way applications normally run. Best Regards, Futuremark Support

 

So I looked into the executable to see which version i was using and find out it's the 1.0.0.

 

Then I gave a look to the hwbot rules for pcmark04 and:

 

Allowed benchmark versions: All versions

 

and

 

Disallowed tweaks/cheats : Any software or human interaction altering the perceived speed of the benchmark program, tricking it to believe it ran faster

 

Should run the exe in realtime be considered "tricking it to believe it ran faster" ?

 

From rog.asus.com forum:HOWTO: Benchmark for HWbot

 

12. PCMark04

Set Windows for "Best Appearance" and make sure Classic view is not on.

(Dual Threaded)

set affinity for 2 cores (Disable any others if possible to gain higher overclock)

set priority to real time.

Run Benchmark

repeat several times for best results.

Save Screen Shot Showing Score, CPU and Resolution.

 

I've searched also into the HWBForum but didn't find anything

 

In conclusion:I'm still not sure if this submission shuld be considered legit.

If only one person tells me that this result shuld not be considered regular I'll remove it ASAP (my life don't depends on that ) and submit my best result with priority set to normal (somthing like 1000 points)

 

I know i wrote a wall of text (in a super mario-ish kind of english ) for a 15 years old cpu,an almost irrilevant benchmark and for one useless gold cup, but I always fell the need to be extra sure of what I'm doing.

 

I prefer to be the incontestable last one than a suspectful first.

[Mr.Scott]

Totally legal. Good job and thanks for the explanation.

[GENiEBEN]

Priority change is allowed, don't worry about that.

[Caos Wolf]

Priority change is allowed, don't worry about that.

 

What i was preoccupied about was the version used.

 

If I understand it correctly "newer" version of pcmark04 make the application run in normal priority even if set to realtime from taskmanager,so using a older version (with priority =realtime) give a substantial advantage.

 

Totally legal. Good job and thanks for the explanation.

 

My pleasure man

[GENiEBEN]

No problem either, there are similar situations with other FM benchmarks.

[Caos Wolf]

No problem either, there are similar situations with other FM benchmarks.

 

Alright then,thanks for the confirmation