Need education! What to make of Geekbench scores

[c23roo]

So I just added 8 Gb of RAM to my MacPro 1,1 - which gives me 13 instead of the 5 I used to have. Someone had suggested I run Geekbench before and after - to see the difference in performance. Not sure exactly what Geekbench is measuring (thus, if it is even designed to detect what I presume to measure).

In any event, with 5 Gb RAM, overall score is 5298.
With 13 Gb RAM, overall score is 5369.

I tried to attach a screen grab, don't know if that helps. New at this...

Should my score have changed, or what might I use to evaluate objectively what kind of performance bump I should see?

 

[Another1]

Geekbench measuring mostly cpu power and memory transfer speed, so more memory wont make a big difference for this. But in real life it can make a huge difference...

 

[derbothaus]

^^ This

 

[c23roo]

Thanks. I figured I wasn't measuring what I thought I was measuring.

I do feel like things are a bit crisper and a little quicker, but is there anything out there I can use to measure some objective improvement? I think I just want a little reassurance that my investment isn't all for naught

 

[derbothaus]

Depends. You can launch and use more apps than previously. But you would have to have a line drawn as to when your old allotment made the Mac swap to the HDD and slow down. I don't know of any synthetic way to gauge the benefit. Sometimes my scores on synthetic benchmarks dip a little because of more memory. More memory to traverse. But I want my 6GB so much more than my slightly quicker to bench 4GB. You'll see overclockers with small memory allotments because these benches usually want bandwidth and speed which has nothing to do with amount.
You could run these if you want both with and without your new memory and maybe get a real world idea. But you will only be testing against yourself. Do not use his figures as a guidepost as he has highly optimized setups.
http://macperformanceguide.com/OptimizingPhotoshopCS5-Benchmarks.html