System built - How do I know its working up to par

Hi again all!! '

After getting advice from some of you guys here, I bought all the parts and put it together yesterday...... and it actually worked on my first try!!!!!!!!!

My only question is this.... My championsonline game works a lot better than it did over my previous system, but how do I know everything is working as fast as it should?

My 955be quad cpu says 3.2ghz, my ram says 1600, the video card is a factory OCed card. My cpu temps idle at 27c and my video card idles at 48c.

If anyone has some suggestions how to tell if its working as well as it should, that would be great!!!

Thanks in advance!!

Sadly the only game I have right now is championsonline... and since its new and "doesnt officially support windows 7" the performance to me is a little suspect, doesn't seem as high as I would think it should be.

I will give 3dmark a try and see how that goes. At the very least I'm happy the cpu idles at 28c or so, lol. I think the bf is jealous, he's already complaining how much he spent on his and mine runs better!!!

1-2 FPS on the CPU test is pretty normal in my experience with 3dMark. It is about the processor power not GPU power. What video card are you running? On my old Rig with a Q6600 & 9800GTX in SLI and I got around 12000 on 3dMark Vantage. I'm getting 21000 now with my system when I was at stock. I won't worry about your score, it doesn't seem to Be low.

also, I did see according to 3dmark that my ram is set at 1333 for speed. the ram I bought was 1600 speed *possible 1800 if oced* I am not familiar with ram speeds/timings or how to increase them.

When looking at my ram timings in my bios, they aren't the same either, no clue if that is how it should be. The first one is something like 9/9/9/7/few other numbers.... the second says 2/2/3/4/other numbers.... Always seems like things don't run quite as well as they should for me,

Also running win7 RC

well it seems a lil low on the score have you updated all the drivers?

have you ran burn in tests ?memtest86+ prime95? and monitoring app hwmonitor cpuid an gpu-z?

they totally free and they help a lot figuring a sytem out

yes, like I said my idle temp is about 28c and when I play games I think it got up to 37-40c

ok, I'll give that a try tonight and see what happens. I'll report tomorrow morning

yes its 3dmark06 at 1900x1200. Like I said, I have no clue what the timings in the bios means but I would have assumed they would be the same, being the same type of ram from the same package and all. Guess we'll see what happens with the tests.

Please rerun your 3DMark06 at default settings and not 1900x1200. All the scores I listed at are at 1280x1080 (I believe that is the default settings). You will see a higher score by doing so and will allow you to truly benchmark, since that is what major (if not all) scores are based on. I would have said that earlier but I guess I missed the part about running the test at 1900x1200.

ok, well I ram the memtest and I got 0 errors. I did "set" the frequency of the RAM from "auto - running at 1333" to actualy saying "1333" and at the default resolution on 3dmark06 I got 14000.

Is that more in line with what I should be getting? or still low?