I find some of these scores a little random. I think CCC settings make more difference than many people are suggesting and not posting them makes this thread somewhat misleading for a lot of people.
My System:
i5 2500k@4.4Ghz
8GB 1866mhz DDR3
R9 290 @ 1100/1400
Samsung 850 Pro 256gb SSD
Posting 2800 @ the settings originally set out in the guidelines, with all the quality options enabled in Valley, using the default CCC settings. However if I simply disable tessellation, force down AF samples, enable "performance" mode for AF and set the Surface Format Optimization setting I can post 3200 and things more or less the same. But on top this, scores can fluctuate by more than 100 points between end to end benchmarks, so I don't know that Valley is even all that consistent in the first place.
Also there are a couple hundred points to be found running on an SSD vs HDD due to the skip or stutter you can get between scenes, which amounts to zero difference in actual game performance, so again just a small but misleading factor.
Valley is perfectly reasonable gaming benchmark, but unless people are exposing their CCC settings, it's kind of a pointless comparison. I came on here to compare my overclocked GPU performance against the same GPU on different CPUs and my performance against a stock 290x, but the scores here are all over the shop it's impossible to make a comparison.
I don't see how a single 7970 at any speed is faster than an overclocked 290, which according to this thread, multiple people seem capable of doing, on poorer CPUs in some cases, which makes no sense.
Unless of course, their CCC options are tweaked for daily use in games, which if you are using an older GPU you probably will tweak down some quality settings in CCC because you do get quite a bit more performance allowing you to push in game details a higher, which makes a lot of sense to do.
I mean if you really look at some of the scores posted on here for older Crossfire and SLi configurations in particular, you can tell things start to make no sense pretty fast.
No one is really calling any of this out either, which I think is kind of misleading, especially for newbies who might sit somewhat puzzled by their dismally low scores, wondering how these benchmarking wizards can post such substantial scores.
To be clear, I like Valley. It is great for testing overclock stability and cooling performance in games, as opposed to something like Furmark. However for benchmarking purposes, I think there are better alternatives.