Win7 'Experience Index' scores

[VirusType2]

I was just wondering what type of hardware gives the best score in the Windows 7 Experience Index.

The index application scores from 1.0 to 7.9 and runs some tests on CPU, RAM, Graphics Processing, and HDD performance.

CPU: 7.3 (Intel i5-750) (Turbo enabled | Score: 7.2 Turbo disabled - based on the difference I don't think the test is representative of real world difference.)

RAM: 7.5 (GSKILL F3-10666CL8D-4GB)

Graphics: 1.0 (GeForce FX 5200 - 128MB PCI)(Generic VGA driver)

3D Graphics: 1.0 (")

HDD: 5.9 (Samsung F1 HD103UJ 1TB)

For the record, I've got a MSI P55-CD53 motherboard. I'll be getting a new video card in a few days!

I was also wondering if power savings make a difference in CPU performance. I have mine set to use the most power savings possible: 5% minimum CPU power usage.

What are your scores and what parts/settings got you the score.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

AMD Phenom II X4 955
ASUS M4A79XTD-EVO
8Gb Corsair DDR3
XFX Radeon 4890 1Gb
128Gb Samsung SSD (with another one for Steam)

 

[PvtRyan]

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
8 GB DDR2-800
HD4870 1 GB
Seagate 500 GB HDD


Pi: Weird, my HD4870 1 GB has a higher graphics score than your 4890?

 

[VirusType2]

BTW, the graphics card destroyed my overall score and brought it down to 1.0 overall. Looking forward to the new card. I'm using XP right now, will post an update from Win7 when I get the card.

 

[lame-o]

Intel Core 2 Quadcore 9000 2.0ghz
Radeon 3650 HD 1gb
4gb ram

my laptop is pretty good. I bought it for Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2, so it should be fine. Though I'll probably get a new laptop by the time Diablo 3 comes out -_-

 

[DEATH eVADER]

128Gb Samsung SSD (with another one for Steam)

I was thinking on getting a SSD for OS and Steam, but I wasn't sure about the data transfer rate; What is your DTR and do you notice a significant difference compared with HDD?

What type of SDD are you using; flash, DRAM, etc?

Anyway

Processor; 7.1 Intel Core 2 Quad 6600
Memory (RAM); 7.1 Corsair DDR2-SDRAM PC2-6400 - [DDR2-800]
Graphics; 6.9 GeForce 9800 GTX/GTX+
Gaming Graphics; 6.9
Primary Hard Disk; 5.2 500 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 family

 

[Dinnesch]

Kinda disappointing to see how my HDD is ranked, although it's speed is more than enough for me.
the Experience Index doesn't look very reliable as a benchmark IMO.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

I was thinking on getting a SSD for OS and Steam, but I wasn't sure about the data transfer rate; What is your DTR and do you notice a significant difference compared with HDD?

What type of SDD are you using; flash, DRAM, etc?

Samsung MLC Flash, claimed data rate of 220 read, 200 write.
It's blazingly fast - the longest part of my OS bootup is the BIOS screen. As for games, it's noticeably quicker. If I join an L4D2 server, I end up waiting at the loading screen for the server to finish loading the map.

 

[DEATH eVADER]

Do I really want to know how much it cost?

The reasonI wanted to know about the DTR and read/write speeds was because I didn't know how much contribution a HDD seek time will have in bottlenecking performance compared to the way flash SSD handles data

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

It's a massive difference, really.

Oh, and £250 each

 

[DEATH eVADER]

It's a massive difference, really.

Oh, and £250 each

When a Gigabyte is worth more than a quid you know your doing something right :thumbs:

 

[Barney Fife]

Not bad for a three years old system eh? Get load of that 8800GTX 7.2 is not bad, I thought they be long dead by now.
The result though is not pretty much accurate, and HDDs are your weakest link of your system... Always!

Good Luck.

 

[VirusType2]

Lol, yeah, well you've got two of them. 850w power supply says it all...

I'm getting a card from my brother, but eventually (when price comes down), I'm thinking about going with the Ati 5890, unless things change between now and when I'm ready to buy. Pretty much twice the processing power and half the power consumption of the brand brand new 5870.

 

[CyberPitz]

 

[Barney Fife]

Lol, yeah, well you've got two of them. 850w power supply says it all...

I'm getting a card from my brother, but eventually (when price comes down), I'm thinking about going with the Ati 5890, unless things change between now and when I'm ready to buy. Pretty much twice the processing power and half the power consumption of the brand brand new 5870.

lol. Yeah man, it has been three years and three OS, and so far I'm blessed with this setup. So far, no hardware has gone kaput, I haven't upgraded anything (Except adding couple of 4GB memory sticks, when I switched from 32 to 64.) It plays anything I throw at it, at max, well... Except Crysis (30FPS at medium), but who can play Crysis at max? That game is crazy. Over all, I'm pleased with my investment, and I'd do it again if I had to (Except CPU.)

In couple of more years, I'll have to sweet-talk my wife on new setup. This time, I'll kick AMD and Nvidia to the curb, that is if they don't get their acts together. Nvidia's GPU/Chipset and AMD's CPU have been the joke of the town. For the last 10yrs (Since Athlon and GeForce 6800gt Ultra AGP) I have been a devoted AMD and Nvidia loyal fan, but I came to be really disappointed with them lately. If AMD and Nvidia don't come up with something new, and stop this insanity and focus, instead of bombarding us with the same disguised products, I'll (As God is my witness) start to cheat and find somewhere else to soothe my heart.
I heard unbelievable amount of high remarks about the 5800 ATI cards and the x58 Chipset, and I'd strongly advice anyone out there who are thinking of upgrading to look into the two and read the reviews. You will be amazed. But that is not the punchline; they are cheaper than Nvidia GPU and Chipset models, yet perform better.
So, as far as CPU is concerned nowadays, well, we all know the drill, we must bring the newspaper and slippers to Master Intel.

Good Luck.

 

[Raziaar]

Here's mine. The RAM on mine is actually lowered because I dropped the available amount to 3gb. There are 4gb installed. I dropped it because ArmA doesn't play nicely with 4 gigs available to the system.

 

[15357]

I get like 7.4 for everything except the HDD which is 5.9.

 

[VirusType2]

I get like 7.4 for everything except the HDD which is 5.9.

Don't be lazy in my thread. You come back when you're ready to play the game.

 

[VirusType2]

the Experience Index doesn't look very reliable as a benchmark IMO.

I think maybe that each point is a big difference. So the difference between 7.2 and 7.3 would be significant; it should be noticeable when comparing them.

Anyway, it only shows how well Windows 7 will run, it doesn't show true performance. For example, something that scores higher runs Windows 7 better, but it doesn't necessarily mean that component is better overall, or better for other things.

Because I was originally using a very old EIDE 80GB Seagate HDD and I scored 5.2 for the HDD, but when I cleared one of my Samsung F1 Terabyte drives, and installed windows on that, I scored 5.9. TBH, the Samsung is several times faster, more than 10 times faster in some things, but all it measures is Data transfer. So I can attest that, the difference .7 points makes is very large in real world difference.

Supposedly, the WD Caviar Black is much faster than my Samsung F1, but they scored the same - further proof that the fractions of points mean a big difference.


I think that in a few years, it will be common to see people who have 7.9 in everything.

 

[unozero]

It's a massive difference, really.

Oh, and £250 each

when it comes to ssd's are their brands I should stay away from?
is it trye that defrags kill the drive?

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

Intel seem to be very good, and Samsung too. Avoid the ones that have the slower data rates.

Defragging doesn't kill them, it just adds unnecessary read/write cycles, and there's no need to do it.

 

[barbarbarbarbar]

Four point nine
*sob*

 

[stemot]

What a load of shit the ratings are on it. I have everything else over 7 and because of the data transfer rate on my HD is rated a 5 this brings my rating down to a 5.5. Seriously? Because none of the games I play seem to give a shit.

 

[VirusType2]

Don't agree. Your hard drive is just as important for overall speed as all of the other factors.

When we launch an application, the speed with which the application launches is limited by the hard drive. Obviously, once loaded into RAM, the hard drive speed is no longer relevant, however.


Imagine a scenario where you launch an application. The hard drive takes 5 seconds to load it, the CPU takes .0003 seconds to compute and the task is finished. You can see how much hard drive speed affects overall Windows performance.

 

[stemot]

Don't agree. Your hard drive is just as important for overall speed as all of the other factors.

When we launch an application, the speed with which the application launches is limited by the hard drive. Obviously, once loaded into RAM, the hard drive speed is no longer relevant, however.


Imagine a scenario where you launch an application. The hard drive takes 5 seconds to load it, the CPU takes .0003 seconds to compute and the task is finished. You can see how much hard drive speed affects overall Windows performance.

Maybe so, but it has no bearing on how my games actually perform which is what these ratings in the game explorer are for.
I would understand if when I played Crysis for instance, I was bogged down by constant HD thrashing, but the game suffers none of this, as do none of my others. The initial load up taking another second longer makes absolutely no difference to the game experience. In fact, all my games load up much faster than they ever did in XP. So dropping off 2 whole points for a fraction of a faster load time is pretty shitty.

 

[Baal]

My laptop's SSD got 7.3!

But everything else was pretty crappy

 

[VirusType2]

Maybe so, but it has no bearing on how my games actually perform which is what these ratings in the game explorer are for.
I would understand if when I played Crysis for instance, I was bogged down by constant HD thrashing, but the game suffers none of this, as do none of my others. The initial load up taking another second longer makes absolutely no difference to the game experience. In fact, all my games load up much faster than they ever did in XP. So dropping off 2 whole points for a fraction of a faster load time is pretty shitty.

I haven't played any games yet, 'Game explorer'? Is that an actual thing or just what you call it?

Also, yeah it affects performance of games that stream from the HDD, like Oblivion, for example.

This isn't a rating of how applications work once loaded (you can refer to the other scores for this), the Overall Score of Windows Experience Index is a rating of your overall windows performance.

 

[PvtRyan]

Maybe so, but it has no bearing on how my games actually perform which is what these ratings in the game explorer are for.
I would understand if when I played Crysis for instance, I was bogged down by constant HD thrashing, but the game suffers none of this, as do none of my others. The initial load up taking another second longer makes absolutely no difference to the game experience. In fact, all my games load up much faster than they ever did in XP. So dropping off 2 whole points for a fraction of a faster load time is pretty shitty.

What exactly gave you the impression that the overall score was supposed to be indicative of game experience? There is a separate score for that! And the hard drive has the largest effect on overall computer performance, while the video card has a negligible impact outside of games.

It makes perfect sense that the overall score is determined by the lowest sub-score. Weakest link in the chain and all.

 

[stemot]

What exactly gave you the impression that the overall score was supposed to be indicative of game experience?

Because I'm talking about the score given in Game Explorer in Windows 7, which is the same as the Experience Index score, and it compares your score to the games recommended score.

There is a separate score for that!

Nope, it's the same score that it uses in Game Explorer.

And the hard drive has the largest effect on overall computer performance, while the video card has a negligible impact outside of games.

Really, well for such a low scoring hard drive I must be pretty lucky not to have had any issues or performance trouble with it so far.

It makes perfect sense that the overall score is determined by the lowest sub-score. Weakest link in the chain and all.

Not when the scores for every other part of the system seem to have been disregarded even though everything else is 2-3 points above the final average.

I haven't played any games yet, 'Game explorer'? Is that an actual thing or just what you call it?

Also, yeah it affects performance of games that stream from the HDD, like Oblivion, for example.

This isn't a rating of how applications work once loaded (you can refer to the other scores for this), the Overall Score of Windows Experience Index is a rating of your overall windows performance.

It is called Game Explorer Virus, yes. Click on the start menu and click on games. You can then compare your index rating to that of any of the games you have installed.

Spoiler

Like I said, I have had no issues of games streaming data while playing affecting the actual game performance, the game continues to run as normal without effect. Like I said, if the only reason the drive may take 30-60 seconds more to load being the only visible performance difference, then surely that does not warrant a whole 2-3 point deduction, as that is the only difference it could be making to my machine as not only is everything on the desktop (apps etc) loading up pretty much straight away, games are loading up as fast as I would expect (in fact just the same as other peoples machines I have seen with faster transfer rates).

 

[kupocake]

I have yet another one of those 7-ish systems bottlenecking through a slightly inferior HDD. Oh well

Processor [Core 2 Quad Q6600 Overclocked to 3Ghz]: 7.3
Memory [4GB]: 7.3
Graphics [Radeon 4850 512mb]: 6.9
Gaming Graphics [^]: 6.9
Primary Hard Disk [500gb, forget the rest]: 5.9
---
Overall: 5.9

 

[PvtRyan]

Because I'm talking about the score given in Game Explorer in Windows 7, which is the same as the Experience Index score, and it compares your score to the games recommended score.

Fair enough, didn't catch that. Perhaps it should just look at CPU score + 3D graphics score for the Game Explorer and take the lowest of that, then.

 

[Krynn72]

Does windows not care about Hard Drive RPM? Mines 10,000rpm and its getting the same scores as you guys.

 

[VirusType2]

Well, mines 7200 RPM, but it rivals some of the 10,000 RPM. What model do you have exactly?

I tried my slowest drive and it was only 5.5 compared to 5.9 for my best. The difference is actually quite substantial in real world use. So like I was saying earlier in the thread, I think the difference between 5.5 and 5.9 is huge. In other words, your drive might not be all that much faster, or at least in 'data transfer rate'.

You've probably got a killer burst speed or something.. I don't know much about 10k drives.

Or, it could be an inaccurate score and I'm just making excuses for it and giving it the benefit of the doubt.

 

[Asus]

Did you guys ever read this?

Computers with a base score of 5 were the highest performing computers available when Windows Vista was released. The base scores currently range from 1 to 5.9.

The Windows Experience Index is designed to accommodate advances in computer technology. As hardware speed and performance improves, higher base scores will be introduced. However, the standards for each level of the index stay the same. For example, a computer scored as a 2.8 will remain a 2.8 unless you decide to upgrade the computer's hardware.

A computer with a base score of 4 or 5 is able to support high-end, graphics-intensive experiences, such as multiplayer and 3?D gaming and recording and playback of HDTV content.

The higher HDD scores are probably for SSDs.

 

[Viperidae]

4 year old hard drive ftw. SSD's be damned.

 

[VirusType2]

My brother gave me an X1900XT yesterday:



(new score) 5.9 > 1.0 (original score)

Pretty happy because all of my games are from 2005-2008 anyway. Just got through playing Gears of War and Condemned.

I'm about to install some more games, but I'm not sure if I should install them on Windows 7 32bit, Windows 7 64bit, or XP Pro. I'm thinking I'll try windows 7 32 bit because I'm hoping the "optimizations to kernel for multi-core processors" will at least break even with XP.

Plus this is pretty much my first time using anything but XP since Windows 3.1, and some of the features of 7 are great.