ITS ALL ABOUT PROCESSOR AND RAM

Mine isn't exactly top of the line, but it sure kicks the butt of some of my previous clunkers...

* CPU - AMD Phenom II x4 920 & 5.9

* RAM - Corsair DDR2 800 x8gb @ 5.9

* GPU - Nvidia 9800GT  x 1gb @ 5.9

*HDD - Seagate x500gb @ 5.9

See WEI below:

I see in Win 7 the WEI goes up to 7.9.  I don't score as well in there... somewhere around 5.8, I think.

        Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz 7.4  

Memory (RAM)

Graphics

Gaming graphics

Primary hard disk

5.9

Windows 7 Ultimate

Screwy formatting...but info is there...

Your memory score is higher than mine jafo,  I have almost the same setup as you, p6t Asus, I7 920 2.67 GHz.. 12 gigs of Corsair xms ram, I'm running a lower end card though.  Nvida Geforce 9600 GT oc 512. Not Fair!!

Here is Mine running W-7 the CPU is overclocked to 2.91 it does not show in the Index

I think those numbers aren't worth much. Especially in games. There is more to it than these abstract numbers to get games running smooth.

Keeping your drivers up to date is one thing to improve the stability and sometimes performance. It's free and easy to do. Tweaking the eyecandy in a game or application is another. That one requires a little time and experimentation. You'll soon get the hang of it.

The amount of RAM is important. These days you should not have less than 4GB. Prices are dropping, so that will be main stream soon. Cutting down the number of background apps and services can have a huge impact on your performance. Under XP make sure that less than 750MB to 1GB of your swap file is in use. Under Vista you will be OK if it is 1 to 1.4GB. Both numbers assume 4GB of physical RAM.

Cutting down the number of background apps and services is not all that easy. Mostly because we often have no idea what all these things are doing and what impact they have (if any). So make sure to create a backup of your configuration first. Microsoft has written some guides to help you find bottlenecks. Here are two:

How to configure Windows XP to start in a "clean boot" state.

How to perform a clean boot procedure to determine whether background programs are interfering with a game or a program that you currently use.

That last article applies to both XP and Vista and is in essence similar to the first one.

I started this post with the statement that the performance index isn't worth much. Well, that really has to do with all the above. If you ignore those than no matter what hardware you'll have and what your index is then the performance will be poor.

BTW: My performance index is 5.9 overall. Vista x64. AMD Phenom II 940 @ 3.6GHz, 4GB RAM, ATI HD 4890 (1GB video RAM), 500GB HDD (drive C) and 4*500GB in RAID 0 (drive D). And yes, I do the clean boot thingie too. Without it my machine would be crap.

They're  running Windows 7 gmc2..

UPDATE:

I recently installed and new graphics card and overclocked my CPU to 3.2ghz from 2.8, thus giving me a new WEI in Win 7. My previous CPU score was 7.0 and my graphics was 5.9... RAM is the same.

As you can see, my HDD score is what's holding me back some.  While not particulaly bad/low, a faster HDD would improve overall OS performance.  Hmmm, I can't wait 'til the SSD's come way down in price, for one of those would be ace

Yep...tho my SSD is still the lowest subscore....at least it's a '7.0' ...

My CPU, actually, is the AMD Phenom II 920... though I'd like an i7 920, better still a 995E very muchly.

Mind you, with most i7 920's posting at 7.4, my Phenom II 920 isn't too far behind at 7.3.  Hmmm, wonder what I'd be posting if I had gone with the Phenom II  945 or 955 instead... and similarly o/ced it??  Was originally going to go with the 940 -945, but would have had to wait 6 - 8 weeks after ordering for the shipment to come in... then it would have been a couple of hundred bucks more, so I opted for the 920, being more within my price range at the time.

However, my GTX260 is the Gigabyte GV-N260C-896I @ 896 mb... more or less the same power, etc, as yours, yet your graphics score is 7.3... 0.1 higher than mine.... could be the different brand/components, I guess.

That'd be right... Jafo has to go rub it in! 

Well that's nothing... my monitor rates 9.9... probably a 10.0 if I dusted it.

Yeah, and the GTX260's have come way down in price since release.  Although a recent shortage in supply has increased the price some here in Oz, I still see them going for quite reasonable prices at neweegg and other US vendors, so it might just be a good time to purchase.

My new Laptop :

My Baby   Parts of her are a few years old, but with the crossfired 5700's and the newest toy of a 60 gb SSD (that i see I need to clean) she pretty much screams.

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