FX 1700M Reviewed

chrous25,

I'd be very interested to know your thoughts on your system. I'm thinking of a config that would be very similar to yours (quad core, 8GB, 7200rpm) but my concern is heat/fan noise/battery life.

How well do the FX770 energy saving features work when doing non-intensive things (email, internet, Word)? Battery life?

Does the edge of the M4400 cause any discomfort after extended mouse pad use?

Any other pros/cons.

Trying to decide between M4400 (tired eyes) and M6400(tired arms) !

and also avoid heat burns and early deafness



Thanks.

 

4 DegC on the GPU,didn't make any difference to the cpu[25w runs very cool anyway even max load],maybe it will work better on yours as you have hotter components in a warmer climate.....it did make the difference in that my fan doesn't run at max all the time now when gaming.

Don't see the harm in trying it,cooler is always better,plus it would be hard to do a worse job at applying thermal paste than dell's assemblers do,also noted when I disassembled mine,that a couple of the thermal pads connecting the 4 GPU memory chips to heatsink were not contacting [GPU and CPU don't use pads]....I put a little blob of AS5 on those two pads,not ideal,but can't imagine it would be worse than not contacting at all,probably a shim of copper would have been better to take the slack up there.

 

If we put better thermal paste on the gpu and cpu will that give dell any ammo to void our warrenties?

 

Personally, I do not believe thermal compound is a user-upgradeable item of the system. If your system messes up and they find out you changed the paste, I don't see why they would still honor your warranty.

I am thinking of doing it as well, but I'm not sure if it's allowed or not. I could be wrong, however. Maybe requesting a Dell certified technician to come do it (if you have a good phone rep) is a possibility.

 

Ok so i just ran the 3dmark06

All default settings (got the free downloadable version ofcourse)

No OC'ing i got 5257....with OC (620/920) i got 5730

I've seen some higher scores here, what variables should i consider? Running Vista Ult. 64....maybe other apps running? I closed all progs but i could close a lot more processes which are not needed, though that wouldn't give me the typical environment in which i would play games.

Temps reached a max of 89c on the GPU for both OC and non-OC....BIOS A03
does this all seem right, to be honest i don't really have a clue what i'm doing, just wanted to get an idea if everything's running like it should

 

This is a very special...
Do you have basically the same setup as me and my results are 6100 and after OC 7100 points....
send detailed results?
sm2 score
sm3 score
cpu score

Do you have enable support for speedstep in BIOS?

 

You can't compare default results made on WXGA+ and others made on WUXGA because the default resolution of 3DMark06 isn't the same.

Indeed, on WUXGA, the default benchmark runs at 1280x1024.
And on WXGA+ 3DMark06 doesn't runs higher than 1280x800.

 

Yup, true...that's what ive been told already. I can have pretty much the same setup but the res. difference is a pretty big one.

pro version's results, res set to 1280x800
6446 with OC to 620/920....

 

Could always ring your support contact's and ask.

 

Sorry for the late RE: I was reinstallind my system over the week end.

Fan and heat is almonst the samen on my old M4400 with the 2.53 core 2 and as for batt I will test to night the 9 cell is verry I do get over 4 hours with the led and ssd.

I know you are thinking of going with the 7200RPM but you would get sver 3:30 I had a ssd in both so I cant tell how long the Battery would last but from what I seen it's not that big of a difrence in power consumption from the ssd and platter drive.

Ok so I will test the bettery and let you know asap.