PCmark vantage

[corvetteguy1994]

Hello, i got pcmark vantage to help me tell where a bottleneck could be and im having troube reading the scores, system and specs are below. i am already planing to upgrade to a i5 3570k cause i want to crossfire another 7970 with no bottlenecks......all coments help


AMD Phenom ii X4 965 BE @ 3.8Ghz with cooler master n520
MSI 7970 at stock speeds
ripjaws 8gb 1333 ram
5 120mm case fans
GIGABYTE ultra durabe 3 GA-MA77OT-UDE mobo
500gb hdd not sure on the rpm
asus xonar dg sound card

pcmark vantage scores

pcmark score 7609
memories scroe 7020
tv and movies score 4714
gaming score 7364
music score 7514
communications score 8248
productivity score 6799
hdd score 3993

 

[matt_b]

PCMark scores are hard to make sense of because they are just numbers, that's all. The ONLY way to find bottlenecks is really trial and error. Anyone's best bet is to fire up the most demanding titles they have, run monitoring utilities in the background, and see where things go from there. Do you have problems now? Run something like Metro to really stress you GPU, or CIV V or even Crysis to put a workout on you CPU. If you cannot achieve what you're looking to achieve (like less than 30 FPS at the settings you want to run ), then you can hunt from there. I've had games that gave good FPS for my setup, but then saw both cores of my old E8400 @ 4.1 Ghz were at 100%. Conversely, a game I wasn't getting good FPS with but no more than a 70% workload on it. RAM and your disk drive are always the system bottlenecks in a system, has been that way for years. SSD's really helped out one of those aspects big time, but memory remains a bottleneck. Right there, if I had to pick, your 1333 RAM (not dramatically measurable) and 500 GB HDD are you bottlenecks automatically. Chances are you CPU will be after you add the 2nd card for Crossfire, but you don't know for sure without physically testing it yet. To boot, you're not going to find much comparative data with Vantage any longer as it is viewed as the DirectX10 suite, most current testers have moved on to PCmark 7 or 3Dmark 11 and scores vary between releases.