D630 Owners Thread

Not bad. I know, everyone rags on the GMA, but it's decent esp. if you don't plan on gaming. Only thing I'm mad about is the lack of GPU accelerated Flash support on the X3100.

 

This is what I put into my system. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate x64.

http://www.buy.com/prod/emartbuy-8g...l/q/listingid/68304166/loc/111/213752227.html

 

dang, nice. Hope you have a nice SSD to go with all that RAM! prices for DDR2 Laptop memory is ridiculous nowadays- that is about 2/3 of what i paid for this laptop!

i'm running Win 7 X64 right now on my D630 as well. Looking forward to popping in my 4 gigs when i'm free

 

I had one on order but Tiger Direct cancelled it due to "lack of inventory". First time I've ever heard of them doing that. I'm sourcing a 500GB SSD, but it's going to take a few months to raise some cash.

 

While the extra RAM is great, it feels like you're better off with SSD and a huge page file. Although the extra is still faster, if you need more than 8GB, then it's going to the page file anyway. Just my 2 cent (CentOS).

 

I found a trick recently to get a few more MHz out of my D830 by tricking the CPU and locking the Intel Dynamic Acceleration speed to both cores full time. The same trick will probably work on the D630 too or on any Core 2 Duo mobile CPU that supports an adjustable EIST bit.

Head over to this thread if you're interested in learning more.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=477704

 

I'm not so sure that will be practical...it's not just a one-time thing, and will have to be done every time you boot...

 

That's why I added the option so ThrottleStop will immediately exit if you want it to after it raises the multiplier to its maximum on both cores. Adding an app to your start up sequence that immediately exits after it has done the deed seems like the perfect solution to me.

On the 45nm T8100 I tested, there is zero increase in power consumption or heat at idle and a 9% boost in performance when running multi-threaded programs. That seems like a good deal to me, especially since ThrottleStop takes up zero memory and zero CPU cycles after it exits. It locks the multiplier of both cores to their maximum and then exits if you tell it to. If I'm watching for it, I might see the icon flash in the system tray for about a second.

 

I bought a D630 off of ebay, and its still under warranty. It has the Nvidia GPU and runs VERY hot. I clocked the GPU at 185F idle. It's very hot to the touch, I can barely touch the bottom. Dell came out and replaced the heat sync and fan, didn't fix it. They replaced the motherboard, didn't fix it. They replaced the motherboard again, and for the most part it's fine and stable now at around 125F but it will sometimes heat up to 145F or way higher for no reason, when I'm doing nothing.

What is this "copper insert mod" you guys were talking about?

 

Did you check that the BIOS is up-to-date? They sometimes ship out motherboards with older BIOS versions.

The GPU in my D630 idles around 130F undocked and jacked up on a stand I made for it, but when docked, it idles around 140F. If it stays around that, it should be OK, but any higher would not be good.