HEY GUYS!!! Now Im going to cause some debating here!!!
I dont know about you,but I've just found out trying some random stuff,that The overall Image Quality Setting in your NVIDIA control panel or Catalyst does have a huge impact on the score!!
Until now I thought that 3dMark11 entirely handles its own settings to make the scores more objective,but it seems that I was wrong...Now I think we have to make some changes in the rules(like adding one which tells us to use the highest image quality settings,cos that seems the only way to make it as objective as possible)..but I leave this for AthlonX2 and to rest of you guys to verify this by yourself..
EDIT:experiment results:i7 950 @ 4.140GHz + GTX 480 835core/1000memory with NVIDIA control panel image settings at quality score P5851
control panel image settings at balanced score P5929
EDIT:control panel image settings at performance score P6130
Now this is ridiculous!!! We all know that the control panels for VGA cards have the control over the overall performance but should be a benchmark with such a big name as objective as possible....well according to my test objective my arse...they should make the benchmark settings override the control panels settings to one same settings everybody would use...