is this firestrike score good?

[scott]

I'm running at stock clocks except for my ram, which I enabled 3200mhz in the bios.

I did this test before and got 40 points less. I am seeing people with the same hardware getting over 100, 150+ points higher than me. is something faulty or/thermal throttling (shouldn't be, CPUID isn't reporting thermals over 60) or is this due to them overclocking?

[ThunderOne]

150 points is not that much....

[UL_Jarnis]

Remember that 3DMark test accuracy is about 3%. This is running on Windows that does a lot of things in the background, so some score variance is completely unavoidable.

Quick reference:

For a score of 5000, variance of 150 points is normal.
For a score of 10000, variance of 300 points is normal.

If higher accuracy is required, run the test multiple times and take an average.

If after, say, 10 runs the average confirms that your score is slightly lower, it could be simply due to the background programs you have running. For best scores, disable everything unnecessary before running the test. For squeezing out the last few points, run the system at the same desktop resolution as the test. So, for fire strike, run desktop at 1080p. For Fire Strike Extreme and Time Spy, run at 1440p, for Fire Strike Ultra, run at 4K.

(the benchmark scales the internal rendering result to your desktop resolution before sending it to the monitor to ensure best possible compatibility. This scaling is *nearly* free, but if we are talking about getting the last few points for a high score, it may matter)