Thanks for the reply.  The system says I have a seagate barracuda 2T 7200k...agrees with Dell's build records...

Optane is marketing.   SSD's do boot faster but they do not increase the speed at which your fingers type nor do they speed up how fast your applications run.

Its like Ram Speed.  Also marketing.  AMD calls it Store MI

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/store-mi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWXBo0bb_dU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_Yt4vSZKVk

PRIMO Cache seems to be the best option

https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/

The HDD test only tests the hard drive, not the Optane SSD.  The hard drive is probably a slower 5400 rpm model (what is usually in OEM systems).  

According to the chart on this page: https://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/common_drives.html

your drive got a disk rating of 1176 which seems in line with the number the disk mark you got.

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@TimTucker wrote:

Hi all!  Ran PassMark on my new XPS 8920 and got a 50 percentile score. Seems out of line given all the talk about the Optane and HDD performance increase. All drivers are up to date as of this morning.  Does 50 percentile seem low to you?

 

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Not sure what you expect from a spinning-platter HDD. They max-out around 125MBps. When fetching unique data-files, no lame caching is really gonna improve your disk throughput.

As for your low compare score ... with SSDs being dirt-cheap now-days, I'm sure most that care about fast/snappy machines are using conventional SSDs for their Windows and Apps. That's at least 5-times faster than spinning HDD. 25-times faster if PCIe/NVMe-SSD.

https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-Desktops/XPS-8700-Samsung-SSD-PM830-issues/m-p/6178463/highlight/true#M18406

and

https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-Desktops/XPS-8900-running-out-of-space-GPU-upgrade/m-p/6178113/highlight/true#M18387

or probably about 30% of my other posts here. :Smile: A bootable SSD for Windows and Apps is not just about fast initial Windows booting.

Thanks to all that replied!  My score of 1222 beats 1176...I guess I need to look into an SSD.  Again Thanks!