When I originally drafted this post, I thought I had a legitimate 7.9 Windows 7 WEI (Windows Experience Index) score. This is the new max value, 5.9 being the max on Windows Vista. Since that draft, I discovered an error which I’ll get in to shortly which put me at a 7.8, but Microsoft has managed to fool me again and tell me I have a legitimate 7.9 score…supposedly.
Let’s begin with what’s in the box so I can make this marginally interesting and perhaps somewhat drool inducing.
Case: Cooler Master HAF-X
CPU: Intel i7 980X, 6 core
Motherboard: ASUS Rampage III Extreme
Memory: Corsair Dominator GT DDR3 1866 MHz (could really do the 2000 MHz sticks, but they’re not necessary as I’ll discuss)
Power Supply: Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1000w (mainly for aesthetics and consistent power…a bit overkill and has some downsides)
Hard Drive: Corsair SATA III SSD (in AHCI mode)
Video Card: EVGA 480 GTX
Cooling: More Koolance parts than I care to list. In short, CPU, VGA and Chipset Blocks. This was my first “real” liquid cooling build.
As you can see, this isn’t exactly building a workstation on the cheap, but by the same token – I tend to put more of a demand on my workstations than the average home user (at least that’s how I justified it!) and at some point, particularly after reading Scott Hanselman’s post, it became a bit of a personal challenge.
My initial build yielded a very frustrating 7.7 due to a poor memory score and I had an unexpected 7.8 CPU score. I was using a different model of Dominator (not the GT version) which had a stock speed of 1600 MHz with – not a huge deal, it couldn’t break into 7.9 territory. I replaced these with the parts listed above and my memory was at a solid 7.9 when slightly overclocked past the stock speed to 2100 MHz, but I was still stuck in the 7.8 bracket on the CPU even with it being fairly heavily overclocked to nearly 5GHz (ok, 4.7GHz…still had a few more I needed to kick out). So here I was with a pretty smoking machine overclocked by about 40% on a top of the line processor, and still couldn’t max out the score. OCD kicking in in 3..2..1…
After a bit of research I found out how to run the individual tests to see what was going on. The tool that the WEI UI sits on top of is called WinSAT using the following command to evaluate CPU performance:
WinSAT cpuformal -xml c:\cpu.xml
(you must run this wth administrative privileges)
This dumped the results to an XML file for easy viewing and provided a result like so:
<WinSPR>
<CpuScore>7.9</CpuScore>
<CPUSubAggScore>7.7</CPUSubAggScore>
<VideoEncodeScore>7.7</VideoEncodeScore>
</WinSPR>
This showed me that the basic CPU battery of tests was running at a 7.9 level; these are tests that stress the CPU via encryption and compression. It also showed me that there was this nasty encoding thing going on that was dragging me down, but how to ‘fix’ it? This is where I start getting a little Canseco on you…
Deep in the bowels of your Windows installation, you’ll find a file called C:\Windows\Performance\WinSAT\winsat.prx. This is the file that WEI uses to encode the sample files in the same folder (winsat.wmv, winsatencode.wmv) to evaluate your encoding score. The time to encode these files (either individually, or collectively, I’m not sure) is recorded in DshowEncodeTime element in the XML file created by the aforementioned command line. Since I knew how long it was currently taking, I thought it perfectly reasonable to determine where I needed to be and determined this by tweaking some parameters in the .prx file.
If you open the .prx file, and you’ll notice that there are several parameters that define the target movie and that they’re set at 1920×1080. In order to determine where I needed to get to, I dropped the resolution down to 1024×768 and worked my way up until I went from 7.9 to 7.8. According to this methodology, you need to be at approximately 0.55s for the encoding time in order to score a 7.9 and I was at ~0.8 while OC’d to 4.7 GHz. Doing some basic math, this yielded an overclocking requirement of over 6GHz. Not a good thing. The bigger problem came when I thought I had a legitimate 7.9 and erroneously posted to WEIShare.net when in fact, I had one of my tweaked files as the active file. Once I restored the original version I was magically, and very sadly, transported back to 7.8 land.
At this point I thought the adventure was over. Yesterday I restored the machine to its “known good” state and tinkered a little with the .prx file again with some much milder overclockings (4.2GHz, and the XMS proile on the memory. I initially got a 7.8 on the first go, then 7.9s with modified files, but after I restored the file, Iwas still gettng a 7.9 when running through the user interface. Odd to say the least. Maybe it’s a matter of running it through the UI, but I suspect not. I suspect WEI is generally just a little wonky, although this should be expected to an extent as it isn’t a legitmate benchmark. But for the time being, I’ll take my wonky, marginally legitimate 7.9 and pretend it’s real, if nothing else, for my sanity. Besides, after the last two days at the offce…even a little joy is welcome 
Here are some additional random things I learned during this excercise:
- The CPU score doesn’t sufficiently account for multi-core machines based on my reading. The Windows Media Encoder documentation discusses a setting called Force NumThreads which has a maximum value of four. You receive the strongest impact from this score when your total core or core + HT count is four. So with a 980x, you’re penalized another four threads beyond a hyper-threaded quad core (assuming a linear performance gain with thread counts for the operation which given the size of the files, may not be substantial).
- You can tinker with your WEI scores directly by modifying the data files. This is good for flexing epeens as well as fooling any software that may have a WEI score requirement on it for whatever bizarre reason.
- Seeing a nearly 5GHz clock speed makes me both excited and terribly afraid the sky might fall. I probably could’ve pushed it a bit further but I was more afraid of my wife’s wrath than anything.
All and all, it’s been frustrating, interesting and in the end, I guess a little fun! The only advice I’d give is build what you’re happy with and be content with the score, there’s no point in getting worked up over a meaningless scoring system. Before I even began to overclock it, applications such as PhotoShop and Visual Studio 2010 were loading in less than three seconds. Did I need to do any tweaking? No. Am I a little OCD to the point that if someone sets out a marker, I need to hit it? Absolutely. Have fun, happy tweaking and I’ll get back to legitimate posts shortly.
