Just popped in my new 4850 and ran a 3DMark06 run in XP on DX9. I'm kind of disappointed with the results:

TOTAL SCORE: 10067
SM 2.0 Score: 4340
SM 3.0 Score: 5035
CPU Score: 2238

I have the following specs:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+BE @ 3.0GHz
MSI K9A2 Platinum 790FX
Corsair HX520W
Visiontek HD4850
4GB OCZ SLI-Edition DDR2 800

I expected something more around 12,000 or so with such an amazing videocard. On the Return to Proxycon test, frames dipped into the 20's on several occasions. The CPU tests have never been good. What I found baffling regarding the CPU tests is that my old Athlon 3700+ Sandy @ 3.2 scored around the same as my OC'd 5000+ BE. To me that seems odd.

I can't even beat a stock E8400 and an 8800GT according to Futuremark bench results. That can't be right....can it??

Temps for my 4850 idle at 71C and reach 85C under load, which seems in line with everyone else. I just really expected higher scores. I'm gonna run Vantage in Vista later to see how that fairs.

Those scores looks very low to me, lower than what the card can do...

Yeah...I agree. Not really sure what to do here though. Any chances the card isn't getting enough power from my Corsair HX520W? The PSU has three rails, each at 18amps.

CPU bound more or less, on my 8800GT i get 11k with an e2180 at 2.8ghz
7500 at the stock 2ghz.

it's a benchmark, who cares.

Yep, I agree with the Forum Resident.
What about FPS in games?

he didn't complain of problems in games

Who cares? It's 3dmark, the world's most irrelevant benchmark. Try the Crysis GPU test.

Hehe...
Stabgotham, this is a DX 10.1 card. It's meant to be used under Vista and DX 10.1 not XP and DX 9.
The shaders are optimized for DX 10. Try on Vista and see the results there.
On the contrary with the previous DX versions, DX10 is NOT backwards compatible with DX 9. Because of this reason, the cards performance DX 9 is limited.

complete and utter rubbish.

Who cares about benchmarks. Your CPU is holding back the score. My E4600 @ stock and 8800GT @ stock don't break 10k. Just a couple hundred below it.

My scores with an E6600 @2.7 and 9600GT moderately overclocked to 750MHz on Vista:

3DMark score: 10227
SM2.0 score: 4863
SM3.0 score: 4585
CPU score: 2325

Notice that my SM2.0 score is alot higher than yours. I would think that the CPU would be more of a bottleneck in the SM2.0 tests because they are less stressful, and my CPU is probably better than yours at 3DMark. Also notice that you scored better in the SM3.0 score than your SM2.0 score... alot better. This is quite unusual.

That's why DX10 is so much faster than DX9 eh?

LOL. And that really explains why 3dmark scores are higher on xp

Funny thing is DX10.x doesn't have anything to do with 3DMark06 Now maybe if it was DX10 Vista would pwn XP!