On last Sunday we reported about PCOnline who were showing the worlds first 8600GTS benchmark figures. A few guys nicknamed 'kemo6600' and 'Gam3Ra' over at the XtremeSystems (scroll down to post 15) point out there is something wrong with these figures and the pictures. Admittedly there is something wrong with the pictures in question. There are 4 of them in the thread at XtremeSystems and all of them have a ACDSee EXIF-tag in it (probably for some cropping reasons) besides one! Coincidentally this one picture is the one that states the 3DMark 06 score. If you look carefully at the provided picture you will see the different sub-category scores at the front center and the right window at the back. Look at the picture at the end of this post where I enframed the parts in red.
Anyway there is another way to bust this picture as a fake even if the numbers weren't manipulated. Check out the 3Dmark2006 Score Calculator by M3kk which calculates the final '06 score based on given SM02, SM03 and CPU scores in the same way the real deal arithmetics behind 3DMark06 are doing it. If you enter SM2.0 3249, SM3.0 2070 and CPU 937 you will get 5212 3DMarks only. Now if you calculate using the other values (SM2.0 2356, SM3.0 N/A, CPU 940) it comes up with 3902 3DMarks. The last picture I added show what happens when you combine the most convincing scores (SM2.0 2837, SM3.0 2070, CPU 940) - the 3DMark2006 Calculator v1.2 now renders 4598 3DMarks which is in fact nowhere close to the stated 5488 3DMarks.
You might wonder why I didn't link to the pictures of the source story. That is because the PCOnline is down at the moment and I would really be astounded if the story is still up by the time they go online again. The other reason is that our own picture-upload engine get's rid of the EXIF tags so our own article doesn't give any evidence.