Okay I'm sure many of you know abt 3Dmark03... Well yesterday I opened my case while running the pc, and brought a huge fan and overclocked my 3D card... I got a good score and happily shut my PC up... Well today I noticed that the 4.7 cat are out and I tested 3dmark again but somehow, my CPU was running like a 1.5ghz instead of a 3ghz!!! You can check ur CPU score in 3dmark03 and before I got 640+ and now I BARELY am gettin 230... What gives? This only seems to be in 3d applications because stuff like photoshop are running fine... Is it possible I damaged my CPU?! :'( Why Do Computers Make Hell?

"my CPU was running like a 1.5ghz instead of a 3ghz!!!" You're not saying the CPU speed actually changed, but it "appears" to have the performance of a 1.5ghz CPU because your score is less than 1/2 of what it was? Is that correct? Well, what has changed? If the only thing different is that you updated your video drivers, it stands to reason that the new drivers don't work well for your configuration...try changing them back

Well I formatted my entire PC and i still have my 3ghz cpu running like a 1.5ghz... the clock speeds are correct but the performance is runnung really bad... any ideas? i tried various catalyst drivers but no avail... :'( Why Do Computers Make Hell?

Are you using your video card to judge the speed of your CPU?

Dude i have the exact same problem cept with aquamark3. With normal settings my cpu got a score of around 6600 and gfx got a score of 300 (its a crummy fx5200) Then when i overclock the cpu score goes down to about half what it was, with gfx score slightly lower. I set cpu back to normal settings again and i get 3000 again?!? not 6600? The next day i did the test with normal settings and i get 6600. I am going to shut comp down with overclocked settings overnite, then run the test again. Why does this happen. I thought overclocking was meant to improve performance. I can't figure it out.

I have kind of the same problem. Recently, i noticed that my pc's performance in games etc was noticable slower than it was just a couple of weeks ago, without having tampered at all with my hardware. I ran a couple of tests in sisoft sandra, and they confirmed my worries: My pc had actually began to run at half speed. Both the cpu benchmark and the memory bandwith benchmark showed that my cpu and ram performed quite exactly half of what they should. The strange thing is that both my BIOS and cpu-z shows that my cpu and ram still runs at the speeds they are intended to. My hardware is a Abit nf7-s v.2, a barton 2500+ and 512mb of twinmos 3200 ram.