I ran 3D Mark '06 and it made my PC cry.
 

I ran it for fun, really.

Okay, I was hoping I'd find out my PC was "teh bomb," but man, '06 destroyed me; and, I hear will crush even high-end gamer boxen.

For giggles, if you're interested in a 580mb torrent, and a gig install, then here you go:

3D Mark 2006 torrent.

My system:
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2

1.93 gigahertz AMD Athlon XP
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache

Board: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. GA-7VAX 1.x
Bus Clock: 167 megahertz
BIOS: Award Software International, Inc. F3 08/10/2004

1536 Megabytes Installed Memory

Graphics Chipset ATI RADEON 9600 Series
Driver Name RADEON 9600 SERIES
Driver Version 6.14.10.6525
Video Memory 250 MB
Core Clock 499 MHz
Memory Clock 297 MHz

Which garners a:

3DMark Score 330 3DMarks
SM 2.0 Score 154 Marks
SM 3.0 Score N/A
CPU Score 674 Marks

Graphics Tests
1 - Return to Proxycon 1.1 FPS
2 - Firefly Forest 1.4 FPS

CPU Tests
1 - Red Valley 0.214 FPS

Um. None of the other tests ran.

06 is out??? 05 just came out last year! That's crazy. My PC slaughters 03, but in 05 it has some trouble. I'm sure 06 is gonna be embarassing.

AMD Athlon 64 3700+
NVIDIA 6800 GT
2 GB PC3200

I refuse to touch '06. It's not worth the embarrassment.

With an AMD 4400+ and 7800GTX at 486/1.26Ghz, I scored 4667 total. On both CPU tests, I was at 0 or 1 frames/sec. In the video tests, I probably maxed at about 30 frames/sec and bottomed at 9 or so.

Oops...wrong thread.

Right.... and now we know why benchmarking blows?

Yeah, it does. Kinda fun to watch the thing run though. Just from a "I've spent all this money, and am fairly happy with the pc. Now I'm runnning this at 0 fps...."

For me it served as a great reminder that no matter how badd I think my box is, give it 6 months or a year and it won't be. It makes the point that somtimes you have enough power to do everything but the gpx stuff. I dunno, a sense of perspective somehow.

It is a fun way to measure the pc against other pcs. Most times though, there's so many variables it's tough to get anything solid out of a "my pc is better 'n yours" kinda comparison.

I'm not really sure I've ever found benchmarks to be accurate. I do fine on '03 and got less than 10 fps on '05.. yet all my games from '05 run at 60+ fps with full or one step below full graphics.. *shrug*

The 3d Mark benchmarks are designed to test top end systems. If they catered to systems that were more than a year old, any new systems would max it out - then there would be no way to compare them. It's designed to totally fuck you in the ass, so that no computer can ever run it well.

It's sort of like a teacher who designs a test so that nobody can finish it. You're supposed to be there the whole three hours; you're supposed to feel like you're getting raped in the ass by a burly man. If you only get 30% of the questions finished, and of that only half right, you might still be in the top 10% of your class. So yeah, that's what 3D Mark is. An ass rape test.

And the point of this is? So we can see who got 1 FPS and who got 0 ?

Well, it crashed on my computer (P4 3.2Ghz, 2Gb ram, gforce FX5900), so no score at all for me.

No, not really. It was somthing new to try. "You'll never know until you do," and all that.

I know my PC can run Word, Excel, etc. I know it can run a browser, f00bar, trillian, AVG, PowerChute, Samaruize, uTorrent, Quake, etc. etc. etc. etc.

But what would happen if.....I ran a program on it that's supposed to be really tough to run? "whoa, it damn near wept" is what happened. I mean, how often do you try to run somthing so complex your PC can't do it?

I ran it because I felt like seeing what would happen. Curiosity, I suppose was enough for me.