Need help with HD4870

I just bought Sapphire 4870 and on my system it scores 10700 on 3dmark06. My previous card ( 3870) scored 9500. This as much as i know is very low score for the 4870. Any ideas why might that be? My processor is amd 5600+ and the psu is CoolerMaster real power 520w,( which is sufficient, if the psu is not broken in some way). Is it possible that i have a faulty card?

Yes i thought that might be the case, but my friend on his rig( core2duo on 3.0ghz) had 13600 points. That is almost 3000 difference. Isn't that a bit too much?
edit: That is with his 4870, and he lives in another country so i can't check mine on his system.

I think 3D mark is Nvidia biased. But even if it wasn't, don't worry about that stupid score, it's not worth much when it comes to gaming as it doesn't tell the whole story. Just forget about those numbers and play.

If you start getting worse FPS and quality then you should, THEN you come back and tell us something's wrong.

OK thanks folks. I'll definitely change the mobo and the cpu. I just thought something is wrong because the scores were so close. I still don't think they should be so close just because of the cpu.

sorry for the thread-jack but what did you overclock your prcoessor/8800gt to?

That is not normal for the 4870, the CPU is holding it back.

Correct.

OP: I have the same Sapphire card but I have a X3350 (yorkie quad) @ 3.2GHz. I pull in 15K with 3Dmark06 at stock settings. 3Dmark is very dependent on your CPU, so I would look at gaming performance more so than 3Dmark scores with an older CPU. Both of NVs and ATI's new cards this round are monster GPUs that are going to be sensitive to how good your CPU is.

The 4870 can do better than that at stock speeds. It's performance is being hindered by the CPU. If bottle necking our graphics performance with a slow CPU is normal then that is your cup-o-tea.

Also, OP, did you do a full clean up of the drivers before installing the latest CCC? I wonder if that might help out a bit.

why does everyone think that if you have an amd your cpu limited. i know they're slower than c2d's cuz i have an amd. plus its a single card so the cpu wont decrese preformance that much. but 3dmark is very cpu dependent and i only get like an 1800 cpu scor on my 5200+ so ur 3dmark will be lower but in real world gaming it shouldn't make a big difference at all.