if you ran it in safe mode, wouldn't stop things from running in the background and lowering your score? or would that just not let the drivers work too?
with high performance? thats around what u should be getting 7k-7.5k i would think. dont forget your ram and cpu is going to limit the 7800gt's performance
theres gotta be something wrong with your card because im getting that with 6600gt's and your card is way better. Look at my cpu score for '05 and you see why i was so low, man that killed my cpu