Sorry about the delay guys. Was kinda pissed off about the Vapochill SE/Classic thingy...
Anyway here are some of my tips.
As Ace suggested turn off all unnecessary devices (Serial/Parallel/USB, audio, RAID, etc), they eat up valuable system resources. You can turn them back on after you've finished benchmarking.
Always set your memory to their most aggressive 2-2-2-5 with all the trimings enabled (PAT, CMD RT 1, etc). This is vital for AMD users, P4 ppl can get away with a higher CAS Latency but make sure RAS to CAS is set to 2. Myself I always set the AGP Aperature size to 128, I find that setting the thing to 256 causes some weird slowdows sometimes but YMMV of course. A few hardcore benchmarkign friends do like setting of 256 but it's really your personal preference.
Next it's important to select the proper OS. For some reason I find anyway that AthlonXP based systems score best with Windows 2000 Pro, up to 500 points higher than an identical system equipped with WindowsXP. Why is that, I have no idea! For P4 users it's the other way around, WindowsXP is about 1000 points faster than anything else.
The tweaks I'm going to be suggesting are mainly for WindowsXP but they do apply to Win2k as well.
After OS and driver installation the first thing I do is disable services... You can disable services via the Services.msc or MSCONFIG, both will turn the selected services off.
Here's the list of stuff I disable.
Alerter
Application Layer Gateway Service
Application Management
Windows Audio
Background Intelligent Transfer Service
Computer Browser
Indexing Service
ClipBook
COM+ System Application
DHCP Client
Logical Disk Manager Administrative Service
Logical Disk Manager
DNS Client
Error Reporting Service
Event Log
COM+ Event System
Fast User Switching Compatibility
Help and Support
IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service
Server
Workstation
TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
Messenger
Netmeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
Distributed Transaction Coordinator
Network DDE
Network DDE DSDM
Net Logon
Network Connections
Network Location Awareness (NLA)
NT LM Security Support Provider
Removeable Storage
IPSEC Services
Protected Storage
Remote Access Auto Connection Manager
Remote Access Connection Manager
Remote Desktop Help Session Manager
Remote Registry
QoS RSVP
Security Accounts Manager
Smart Card Helper
Smart Card
Secondary Logon
System Event Notification
Internet Connection Firewall (ICF) / Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)
Shell Hardware Detection
Print Spooler
System Restore Service
SSDP Discovery Service
Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)
MS Shoftware Shadow Copy Provider
Performance Logs and Alerts
Telephony
Terminal Services
Themes
Telnet
Distributed Link Tracking Client
Upload Manager
Universal Plug and Play Device Host
Uninterruptible Power Supply
Volume Shadow Copy
Windows Time
WebClient
Windows Management Intrumentation
Portable Media Serial Number Service
Windows Management Instrumentation Driver Extensions
WMI Performance Adapter
Automatic Updates
Wireless Zero ConfigurationAs for the non microsoft stuff I also disable the ATi/nVIDIA driver services too. Please note that some of the services listed above are
required for everyday computer use but my goal here is to create a lean dedicated benchmarking OS. To use yoru system properly you may be required to turn on some of the services above.
Sorry Ace I'm going to be copying you again on the swapfile thingy.
No matter how much physical memory you have in your system you
must have a swapfile in Win2k/XP. Disabling the thing will cause your windows to crawl because some system services and applications require a damn swap file.
You're going to want to set it to something large so Windows does not adjust the thing while you're running a benchmark. Myself I set the initial size to at least 1GB, setting the maximum size is not as necessary, you just want the initial size to be big enough that Windows will leave it alone when the benchmarks are being run.
While in System Properties in the Performance options window, set Windows (XP only) to for best performance.
After that's done defrag the HDD, this places the swapfile at the front of the HDD where things are fastest should Windows need to access it for whatever reason during benchmarks. I use Norton Speed Disk myself but you can use the built in Microsoft Defragger, it's just much slower.
Set all the sliders in yoru display driver properties to Fastest performance/Lowest IQ, we're benchmarking here not playing games.
As everyone knows, load up task manager and clear out all the unnecessary programs running in the background...
HSDX is the snapshot tool I use.
In 3DMark2001 there's a bug with the Game 1 tests. The Car Chase - Low Detail test can sometimes varry by 10-20 fps, and the Car Chase - High Detail can also vary by up to 10 fps. There's no known fix for this what I do is I run the Car Chase tests only first and see if I get decent fps's. If I don't, I reboot the system and retry again.
Same configuration and as you can see Game 1 in the first window is about 10 fps higher and game 2 is about 5, that's 300 points right there. True it's not a big difference but it can mean the difference between a bad run and a good run. This bug is more evident when the videocard is heavily overclocked, with my old 9800XT oc'ed sometimes the game 1 would vary 40fps, that's 400 points alone!
That's all I can think of for now, it's 7AM here in TO on a Saturday morning... I'm usually asleep but something I ate yesterday did not agree with me and kept me up pretty much all night.
I'll post more tips when they come to me.
9/11: directed by Bush 
New World Order 
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