Just how bad is a loss of 200 point in a bench test

Reason I ask is I have a HIS exacaliber x850xtpe and an nvidia ultra d board

problem I have is that because of the artic cooler on this it wont fit in the mobo's first PCI slot, the mobo northbridge cooling fan obstructs it,

I've got it in the 2nd pci express slot but there is an approx 200 point loss, how bad is this going to affect games performance.

I paid 400 quid for this card so I want to get the best out of it, if this is a problem I could always swap if for a XFX Ultra 6800 which will fit in fine as well and save myself 40 quid.

any ideas

Which benchmark?

you could consider using the zalman vf700 cooler instead of the arctic one

can be found here

for me 200 points is not a big problem, others may disagree (im guessing you mean 3d 05?)

yep just build my rig so am new to all this

Thing something is not right thou

I have a dfi lan party board, athlon xp 64 4000 san diego and a his x50xtpe, corsair ptimum 3200 2-2-5-2 ram, nothing has been over clocked yet but all I got on 3dmark was a poxy 5894 !!

where am I going wrong ?

the frame rates were shocking

3dmark05 is more a graphics only benchmark. Stock X850XTPE's usually get around 5500-6000.

You would get 500points more for ~70mhz overclock on GPU core
Compare that to a 500mhz overclock on my 3200+ winnie only gives 200 more points.

ok so how can I improve on this, i.e get bettr framerate from stock also should I be changing my bios settings for the GPU ?

I noticed there are different settings for anti aliasis, v-sync etc what should I be doing with those ?

Framerates are always shocking in 3dmark05, it's just how the benchmark is. Even my SLi rig which can score over 9800 looks like a dog in places. :p

3dMark 05 is a killer...its waaay ahead of the graphics cards SO that it has a long long life.

Try 3dMark 2001SE....THAT'LL score high ;)