What's Your Windows 7 Windows Experience Index?

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Hard drives that store a lot of transactions in their cache before committing them to the drive are capped at 5.9. That is why if you disable drive caching, your score can actually go up. Sure, SSD drives are faster than their mechanical counterparts... but that speed alone isn't enough for those drives to score significantly higher. I'm guessing they also have a different method of caching transactions.
 


Go to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Power Options and select "High performance". Reboot and run the test again.
 
Here's mine:

The Q6600 is overclocked to 3.4,
the RAM is DDR2 and running at 1000ish,
the second 4870 1GB isn't picked up by WEI as Crossfire and SLI aren't recognised (shame)
My C: drive is a week old Intel X-25M, the D: is a 2 year old WD Raptor, and the E: is a WD500GB
Oh, and the screens are 26inch DGM anda 20inch Dell 2007FP.

Now, if I could only get the bloody kids off it sometimes - I built it for me to play on!!! :)

Think the HTPC came out about 3.5 because of the HD3200 graphics, I'll post the screenshot when I've next got the keyboard on it.
 
windows7experienceindex.jpg


Mine is ok for a 2 year old PC...my drive needs to be upgraded..too slow.
 
I'm currently running at 6.9.....which is a bit strange. Everything else is clocking at 7.2 apart from my storage which is causing the 6.9 reading. I'm currently running an OCZ Vertex SSD as my primary storage drive which in real world terms (ie outside of windows index) is running incredibly fast and causing no complaints at all....Is it possible that windows index is getting a false reading for this somehow ??

Any ideas people ?
 
The hard drive score isn't cut and dry. Hard drives that rely on their cache too much are capped at 5.9. SSD drives are by no means guaranteed to score 7.9 alone. Of course, the lower score doesn't mean a lot in real world usage... my RAID 0 array scores 5.9 in WEI, yet I don't notice any appreciable slowdown. Both hard drives have a 32MB cache, so it wouldn't surprise me that they are storing a lot of data in cache and not writing back to the drive right away... which results in a 5.9 score. If I were to disable caching, my score would go up... but I don't know how that would effect performance.
 
Yes I think you are right Zoron....I've tried all the publicised tricks for SSDs like disabling caching, moving swap files and disabling indexing but it makes no difference. I'm now starting to form the opinion that the majority of people in this forum are right, Windows Index isn't a good measure of performance and we are all striving to get this magical 7.9 figure, but why ?? My SSD drive is perfectly ok and combined with the rest of my kit has produced the fastest rig I've ever run, more than adequate for my needs so are really going to worry about a few points on some performance index aimed at the Microsoft Masses who don't know the difference between SATA and SKODA ??

But as Zoron rightly states, WEI means nothing in real world terms so I think I'm going to abandon this fruitless quest before it starts to bug me !!
 
No. Mechanical drives can score higher... it all depends on how they use their cache. If they rely on it heavily and don't commit the changes to the drive often, they will be capped at 5.9. If they use the cache sparingly and commit changes often, then they can score higher. A drive that uses it cache heavily will score better in WEI when you disable the cache... but that won't necessarily translate to better performance.
 
Intel i7 920 @ 4Ghz - scores 7.7
6GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600Mhz - scores 7.7
Powercolor HD 5870 1GB @ 890Mhz core and 1250Mhz mem - scores 7.8
128GB Samsung PB22-j SSD - scores 7.3

image-1BCF_4AFD2723.jpg
 
@Zoron
A Microsoft developer blog stated the maximum HDD score for a system without an SSD is 5.9 in Windows 7 RTM.

It is possible to look at the winsat test results to see that normal HDDs can score higher.

I still get only a 5.9 on HDD Score with my LSI 8408E SAS PCIe 8x controller + 256MB ECC DDR Cache - WDC RE2 drives.

- <WinSPR>
<DiskScore>5.9</DiskScore>
</WinSPR>
- <Metrics>
- <DiskMetrics>
<AvgThroughput kind="Sequential Read" units="MB/s" ioSize="65536" score="6.7">106.27437</AvgThroughput>
<AvgThroughput kind="Random Read" units="MB/s" ioSize="16384" score="4.5">2.68000</AvgThroughput>
<Responsiveness Kind="AverageIORate" units="ms/IO" score="7.6" factor="0.0">1.40000</Responsiveness>
<Responsiveness Kind="GroupedIOs" units="units" score="7.4" factor="0.0">8.89588</Responsiveness>
<Responsiveness Kind="LongIOs" units="units" score="7.4" factor="0.0">9.23470</Responsiveness>
<Responsiveness Kind="Overall" units="units" score="6.9" factor="0.0">82.15073</Responsiveness>
<Responsiveness Kind="Cap" Reason="PASSED">FALSE</Responsiveness>
</DiskMetrics>
</Metrics>

I believe the cap test that passed says, "is SSD = False", thus limitting the score. Had this not been a limitting factor, I would have scored an 6.9 (overall score).
 
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
Intel Core2Quad Q8200 2.33GHz@1333
Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P
Patriot Viper DDR2 PC2-8500, 1066 MHz, 8GB (4x2GB)
1 EVGA GE Force GTX 250, Core 216
Creative PCI Express X-Fi Xtreme Audio Sound Card
2 Hitachi Deskstar HD's 500GBx2, RAID 0
Plextor PX-880SA DVD/CD Multiformat Burner

Here are my latest Windows 7 Experience Index ratings:
Processor 7.2
Memory (RAM) 7.2
Graphics 7.3
Gaming Graphics 7.3
Primary Disks 5.9

No OverClocking, BIOS Optimal Default setting, Windows settings: Adjust for best Performance, Processor resources
Adjust for best Performance of Programs.

I use 2 free programs, Speed Optimizer and Smart Defrag to keep my PC running smooth, I would like some feedback
on how to increase my WEI for Primary Disks score, (Disk Data Transfer Rate).
If and when I can increase my low score, I just recently a Intel Q9950 which I plan to use to replace my Q8200.
Any help will be appreciated.

Mark S.







 
On my six year old PC I get 6.0, the only thing I have updated since I purchased it was the graphics card.

System: HP XW8200
CPU: 2x Xeon 3.8/2mb ----------------------------> 6.0
Mem: HP 16GB DDR II 400 ------------------------> 6.0
Grphx: ATI Radeon 4870 --------------------------> 7.5/7.5
Disk Cntlr: LSI1030 RAID 0
Disk: 4x 15k 72.8Gb SCSI (ST373454LW) -------> 6.5
 

4 - SCSI 15k drives in a stripe array I would think would rate higher than that, that's a pretty sweet RAID set up and even though that's an old chip, thats a pretty respectable one.
 
Yeah, my drives are quite old but they have a pretty awsome collective random access time. I am quite supprised my cpu(s) get over 5.0, they are basically two pentium 4 prescotts with hyper threading --old and slow by todays standards. The 3.8Ghz gives it some good single threaded performance , but it burns alot of power. :-(
 
Processor AMD Phenom(tm) 9650 Quad-Core Processor -------------> 7.1
Memory (RAM) 6.00 GB ------------------------------------------------------> 7.2
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 4770 ---------------------------------------------> 7.1
Gaming graphics 3323 MB Total available graphics memory ---------> 7.1
Primary hard disk 411GB Free (596GB Total) ----------------------------> 5.9
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Phenom x4 9650 @2.5GHz
Corsair DDR2 800
XFX HD 4770
WD Caviar Black 640HD


 
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