Low PCMark 05 Score?

[RPG Monkey]

I've recently upgraded my system from the one shown in my sig (I'm lazy and haven't updated yet :) ) to the following:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
Asus M3N78-CM mobo
2GB OCZ DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 4-4-4-15 RAM
2 x Seagate Barracuda 80GB SATAII HDDs, 7200 RPM, 2MB cache (running side-by-side but not in RAID array)
No graphics card yet
Windows XP Home

I ran PCMark 05 yesterday with no other programs/processes running, and got a score of 4900.

After looking around the net this score seems really low. Would anybody else agree? If so, how could I go about troubleshooting?

[latency]

Well ya, you've got no graphics card... the gf8200 isn't exactly a gaming card- it's about the equivalent of a 5 year old drawing pretty, pretty pictures on the screen...

A geforce 6100 and a radeon x1200 are comparable and slightly faster than the 8200.
Wait until you've got your graphics card, then run 3d Mark again ;)

[RPG Monkey]

I ran PCMark, not 3DMark.

I thought PCMark was supposed to test your system, whereas 3DMark is the one that tests your graphics handling capabilities?

[latency]

Beh... my bad... disregard previous post...
Assume you've got all official drivers (no default windows ones...) installed?

[jacobzcoool]

Are both cores detected? (open task manager > performance, are there 2 CPU usage graphs?)

Obvious perhaps but meh, seen it before.

[RPG Monkey]

latency- yeah I have all official drivers. I also installed AMDs dual core optimiser, downloaded from their website.

jacobzcool- that's a good point. I'll check as soon as I get home.

One thing that does concern me is that when fitting the CPU heatsink to the mobo when I initially assembled everything, I slipped and managed to scratch a single track running from the CPU socket off into the labyrinth of other tracks on the mobo.
I couldn't tell if the track was broken though, or if I'd just scuffed the resin coating. I even had a magnifying glass out and spent a good 15 minutes squinting at it, but it was impossible to tell for sure.

In the end I decided that seeing as I hadn't clipped it very hard and I couldn't see any glint of copper, I'd probably just scuffed the resin. However now I've got this low PCMark score I'm starting to wonder if it is broken after all and it's somehow affecting performance.
No idea how I could rule that out either way though.

[jacobzcoool]

If it was broken your mobo would likely be dead, or you would have an unstable system BSODing all the time.

[latency]

I second that. As well as checking both cores are there, you might want to start CPU-Z and sanity check that the CPU and FSB are running at the clock speed they're supposed to.

Have fixed complaints of slow performance before to find the FSB was on 100Mhz, nerfing the CPU speed.

[RPG Monkey]

If it was broken your mobo would likely be dead, or you would have an unstable system BSODing all the time.

Cool, that's what I'd hoped.

So if it isn't broken then hopefully it'll be fairly straightforward to figure out why it's slower than it should be.

Apart from checking to make sure that both cores are being recognised, are there any other things you could think of for me to check tonight?
Somebody who I work with mentioned something about making sure it's running in dual channel mode (which I presume it is seeing as both RAM sticks are identical).
I also remember on my last PC, the CPU multiplier was set incorrectly by default and it was months before I realised (thanks to advice from people on here as it happens) and fixed it, so I suppose I should check that too.

Are there any decent diagnostics programs out there that could help me narrow it down?

[RPG Monkey]

Task manager is showing both cores, and according to CPU-Z the core voltage, core speed, multiplier, L1 cache, L2 cache and bus speed are all bang on what they should be.
It also showed 2 cores on there, and 2 threads (multithreading??)

I noticed there's also a figure called 'HT Link - 1000 MHz'. Is this HyperThreading?

On the memory tab of CPU-Z it shows 'Channels # - Dual', so that answered my other question about how to check if it was running as dual-channel.

The only thing that didn't look right is the DRAM frequency- it's only 375 MHz whereas according to factory spec I should have 800 MHz RAM.

Any ideas about this?

[Fat Jez]

2 things - HT is hypertransport and your ram speed is fine (double it for DDR2, basically).

[RPG Monkey]

So it seems like my CPU and RAM are ok. What else could cause my low PCMark score?

[RPG Monkey]

I've done some more reading and it looks like I've got my initial assumption totally wrong:
Apparently it's very difficult to get a score of 6000 or more, and people often have to overclock to do so. Bearing in mind that none of my components are OC'd and I don't even have a graphics card, 4900 is actually pretty good.