New HD causing much slower benchmarks

Hunter's Avatar

Hunter

03 Apr, 2011 05:12 AM

The HD in my 5 year old mac book pro finally died so I switched it out with a newer one -- but while my computer is now running much faster, the benchmarks are less than half of what they used to be.

The old drive was an apple 100 GB/7200 rpm drive, and I switched it out for a Western Digital, 320 GB/7200 rpm (Scorpio Black) drive.

My geekbench score with the old drive was around 3000 (already poor), and with the new drive it barely makes 1300 (totally unacceptable).

The boot time has gone from 2 minutes to less than 1, and the load times for my apps have drastically improved -- It is clear that adding the new drive has greatly sped up my system, so why on earth have the bench scores plummeted?

MacBook Pro1,2 -- Intel Core 2 T2600 @ 2.16 GHz -- 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 -- 320 GB/7200 rpm Western Digital HD (Scorpio Black) -- OSX 10.6

  1. Support Staff 1 Posted by John on 04 Apr, 2011 03:23 PM

    John's Avatar

    Hi Hunter,

    Geekbench 2 only measures processor and memory performance (there are no disk benchmarks) so your hard drive should have no effect on your Geekbench score. The fact that your Geekbench score dropped so dramatically, though, indicates there might be a different problem with your system (for example, a sensor might be erroneously reporting that your processor is overheating, causing it to underclock the processor, which would explain the drop in your benchmark score).

    It's easy to determine if this is the case with an application like iStat Menus; just download it and see if it's reporting higher-than-normal temperatures for your processor:

    http://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

    Good luck!

    Cheers,
    John

  2. 2 Posted by Hunter Shanks on 04 Apr, 2011 05:23 PM

    Hunter Shanks's Avatar

    Thanks for the reply! Unfortunately overheating has been a longstanding issue with this computer, but I am getting lower benchmarks fresh after a cold boot than I was with the broken HD, even when the laptop was scorching hot. I also tried blasting the fans, but that didn't help either.

    I have been using istat for a while and temperatures have actually lowered since I installed the new HD, but more importantly, high temperatures never had an effect on my benchmarks before I installed the new hard drive.

    The only change that I made was removing the old HD and installing the new one. The computer is now running very well, the only problem is that the geek bench scores are half of what they used to be.

    Do you have any other ideas as to what might be causing this? Thanks again for the help.

  3. Support Staff 3 Posted by John on 06 Apr, 2011 11:12 PM

    John's Avatar

    Hi Hunter,

    I did a bit more research on this and unfortunately I'm stumped. Do you happen to have saved (or uploaded) your Geekbench results for your laptop before you upgraded your hard drive? I'd also like to see your results for your laptop after you upgraded the hard drive.

    Thanks,
    John

  4. 4 Posted by John on 25 Jul, 2011 07:05 PM

    John's Avatar

    Hey John! I noticed your post about the false overheating of the processor, and I think that applies to me. My iStat temperatures are unusually high sometimes (like 46 degrees) and my Geekbench score dropped from 10k initially to now 7k. Is there any way to fix this?

  5. Support Staff 5 Posted by John on 26 Jul, 2011 06:49 AM

    John's Avatar

    Hi John,

    When do your iStat temperatures hit 46C? What is the computer doing (is it busy, or is it idle)? How hot is the room the computer's in?

    Thanks,
    John

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