Thoughts on the Windows Experience Index score

Topic

New Reply

I thought I’d start a new thread on this as it seem that another thread was being hijacked by this topic.

Personally, I don’t put too much stock in this score. I currently traveling and using my stock Dell Inspirion laptop with a dual core i5 processor and 4Gb memory. I purposely purchased this machine w/o a supplemental video card, as I had always done in the past, after much research into Intel’s attempts to beef up their on-chip video processing capability. I have been extremely happy with my decision. I get much better battery life, the machine runs much cooler, and I can see no discernible slow down in the machine due to the video. It is very responsive and I have no complaints at all. BTW: It seems that Aero is the PIG that is killing my score.

This said, I don’t use it for games other than minesweeper. I do a lot of Access & Excel with massive amounts of VBA and some very large Word documents with TOCs, graphics, etc and a smattering of HTML and CSS. The performance using the Office apps is excellent.

Moral of the story the Windows Experience Score is mostly for bragging rights and doesn’t have any real correlation to how I use the computer, YMMV.

May the Forces of good computing be with you!

RG

PowerShell & VBA Rule!
Computer Specs

Reply | Quote

Replies

I guess you are correct RG. My whole interest was out of curiosity and for future reference. I actually can attest to the heating problem with a separate video card. Even with a laptop desk my lap heats to the point that I start sweating after about 45 minutes of continual use. I have thought about a dynamic cooling system, but have not found anything I liked.

This does point to the fact that the more eye candy you want on your computer, the more performance is affected. Even though I have much of the performance robbing portions of Win 7 disabled, I do like the Aero interface, and do use some of it. If I set my PC to the highest performance setting determined by Windows. it looks very bland, not at all what I have grown accustomed to. I can very easily live with the small performance loss for the eye candy.

I was also very curious that Clin’s WEI was the same as mine (5.9) even though he has a considerably faster CPU and double the RAM. This points out the myth that strictly having a faster CPU or strictly having more RAM is not the whole answer to increasing speec (performance) in you PC. The entire system has to be viewed along with the apps you are using and how your UI interacts with this system. If you are using apps that need more memory to run, then the extra RAM will be very helpful, but if you are using apps that do not yet max your existing RAM, then adding more RAM will not work to make your system faster.

Reply | Quote

Even with a laptop desk my lap heats to the point that I start sweating …

I am quite happy with my Logitech Portable Lapdesk N315. It keeps me cool and has a nice slide-out tray for my mouse as well.

Reply | Quote

I am quite happy with my Logitech Portable Lapdesk N315. It keeps me cool and has a nice slide-out tray for my mouse as well.

On the topic of laptop heat, this is where the new core-i3/i5/i7 series laptops are really getting better. Mine generates a lot less heat than I would have expected from a laptop which has 512MB of discreet graphics. Much less battery rundown, as well. These low power consumption chipsets seem to be doing exactly what they were advertised to do — reduce heat and increase battery life. That having been said, I can still stress the graphics enough for the air outflow to be as hot as a blow-dryer. But not hot enough to cause any actual burning.

-- rc primak

Reply | Quote

If you need bragging kudos Try this

Reply | Quote

See the NOTE in the first post. The WEI score you see on the Computer | Properties page is the lowest score of the subsystems tested. In the the case of Ted’s PC & Clint’s PC having the same rating you can pretty much guarantee that it is because of one of the two video video tests.

See What is the Windows Experience Index? for Microsoft’s comments about WEI.

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

See the NOTE in the first post. The WEI score you see on the Computer | Properties page is the lowest score of the subsystems tested. In the the case of Ted’s PC & Clint’s PC having the same rating you can pretty much guarantee that it is because of one of the two video video tests.

See What is the Windows Experience Index? for Microsoft’s comments about WEI.

Joe

In my case it is the Aero desktop that causes my 5.9, in addition to the HD transfer rate. This is probably because my HD is 5400 RPM SATA.

Reply | Quote

There has to be something desktop aero is looking for that it isn’t seeing in most graphics cards because sure, its more persistent but I don’t think there’s any way its more demanding than some of my games. So why the much lower scores for aero than for gaming graphics? I don’t get it, I’ll get 6.2 for gaming and a pathetic 3.6 for aero; not that I think performance is suffering at all; to me it just doen’t make sense.

I even have a 2.9 and 3.0 that are supposed to be borderline for aero…don’t notice any performance degradation at all. Maybe its like a digital signal eh? Its either on…or nuthin’.

Reply | Quote

Byron, This is wierd because I have 6.6 for gaming and do not really have a gaming rig. I guess it depends on how your system is set up. I do have the attached custom display settings shown here. Perhaps these make a big difference.

Reply | Quote

My hard drive is the lowest subscore here, but an SSD would fix that in a heartbeat.
The GPU is an old NVIDIA 8800 GT, very nice when it first came out 3 years ago.
The processor too is probably the best I could get for it’s socket type (LGA 775), already
fast becoming outdated and out performed by the latest i series.
The computer is pushing 3 years and is my first build. The bulk of my heavy lifting on this
machine is in the area of video rendering/encoding. I don’t have much use for gaming.

Reply | Quote

I read in a long discussion elsewhere that the best score you can get with a traditional hard drive is 5.9. In order to score higher in that area, you would need an SSD drive. I am surprised by the 5.9 score for a 5,400 RPM drive.

Reply | Quote

I read in a long discussion elsewhere that the best score you can get with a traditional hard drive is 5.9. In order to score higher in that area, you would need an SSD drive. I am surprised by the 5.9 score for a 5,400 RPM drive.

That’s correct, a regular hard drive will alway be 5.9 at best.
A system configured as part of a fast raid array may also improve the score somewhat too.
With mine, it doesn’t matter that it’s a WD 10000 rpm raptor…with regards to the Windows Experience Index score that is.

Reply | Quote

I am surprised by the 5.9 score for a 5,400 RPM drive.

The answer to that is areal density is significantly higher on large slower drives so thruput is still very good for contiguous data.

The GPU is an old NVIDIA 8800 GT

Its a little old but its also one of the classics, I have 2 and one powers a 42 inch HDTV and 22 or 23 inch monitor (also 1920×1080), I sometimes game on the big screen and its rock solid.

Reply | Quote

Byron, This is wierd because I have 6.6 for gaming and do not really have a gaming rig. I guess it depends on how your system is set up. I do have the attached custom display settings shown here. Perhaps these make a big difference.

Well, I have gaming rigs and then I have the gaming rig, which still isn’t anywhere near the latest and greatest but its in the 7.1 to 7.3 for everything except the hard drive perfomance. I stay about 2 years behind the latest games because I can get them super cheap that way and don’t need the most expensive hardware. The main gaming rig cost me less than $500 including the graphics card and I pay from 9.99 to $19.99 for games that were $45 to $60 last year.

Reply | Quote

Complex indeed. My WE Score was limited by my Hard Disk Drive. I replaced it with a WD Velociraptor : Twice the speed, (10,000) rpm. My WE score improved by only 0.5.

My Rig: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core CPU; ASUS Cross Hair VIII Formula Mobo; Win 11 Pro (64 bit)-(UEFI-booted); 32GB RAM; 2TB Corsair Force Series MP600 Pro 2TB PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD. 1TB SAMSUNG 960 EVO M.2 NVME SSD; MSI GeForce RTX 3090 VENTUS 3X 24G OC; Microsoft 365 Home; Condusiv SSDKeeper Professional; Acronis Cyberprotect, VMWare Workstation Pro V17.5. HP 1TB USB SSD External Backup Drive). Dell G-Sync G3223Q 144Hz Monitor.

Reply | Quote

I wondered about that index. I have a 3.4 for Aero and I have it disabled! I would think that would rate a “1”.

Reply | Quote

I wondered about that index. I have a 3.4 for Aero and I have it disabled! I would think that would rate a “1”.

I believe these tend to be estimates rather than hard factual numbers. They are just indicators to look at and attempt to improve. I suppose some tweaking might improve them somewhat but who knows.

Reply | Quote

I wondered about that index. I have a 3.4 for Aero and I have it disabled! I would think that would rate a “1”.

Hi Paul,

When the WEI assessment runs, if Aero is active it temporarily disables it. That is its normal way of doing things. So your disabling Aero has no negative impact on the score.

Reply | Quote

Come on guys. You should all Know that Mr Microsoft designed the WEI score so you could buy software and games that would run OK on your system.

It was designed for the average to low user so they could see that if they had a score of say 3.4 and they went to a shop to buy a game or software then on the side of the box would also be a WEI score and if it was higher than theirs, say 3.8 or 4.0 then their PC might not run that software properly. It was designed to replace system requirements that’s printed on software and to the average person means nothing.

For us who are PC tech minded, the WEI means a lot more and shows us where we may improve our system, but to the laymen they buy a PC weather Desktop or Laptop and expect it to do the job not knowing anything about how they work or understand the lingo. They need simplicity so Microsoft designed WEI. ( For them Not Us )

Reply | Quote

Two observations about graphics in WEI:

On my Toshiba Satellite with a core-i5 processor and dual-mode graphics (Intel HS and NVidia geForce 330M, 512MB discreet graphics memory), the WEI (and Windows 7 itself, when analyzing my hardware) fails completely to detect the discreet NVidia portion of the graphics, and knocks down the Graphics and Aero performance scores. If all were detected correctly, my limiting factor would be the 5400RPM SATA Hard drive, limiting my WEI score to around 5.9. Which is very good for a laptop.

On the Aero front, there is another factor which can affect WEI scoring. You need to have Direct-X 10 (DX-10) installed on your computer to get the best scores in this category. Most laptops ship with Direct-X 9 (DX-9), so a driver update for Direct-X would improve the Aero category in these cases.

(End of observations. Discussion follows.)

For comparing different laptops in a showroom, or for choosing video games, WEI makes a good tool, and you do not have to do anything unusual with the display models of the computers you are comparing. So, when buying a new computer, I would only remember to also look and see if Windows is detecting all the graphics on the computers which are being compared. For gamers, the box ratings and the computer ratings should be matched for the best experience.

If you already own a computer and want to evaluate its capabilities, there are much better diagnostics which can really get into details and provide a realistic assessment of what your computer is capable of. I use GPU-Z and Glary Utilities to assess my own laptop, but there are many more detailed utilities out there.

WEI is a useful “quick and dirty” comparison tool, but I would not rely on it for a technical assessment of any computer’s capabilities.

-- rc primak

Reply | Quote