Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge, Part 2

Could some1 test this flashgame for me?

Jagged Alliance Online - JAO - MMOG - Free-to-play - gamigo

My E6400 with P9600 and Intel IGP plays this fine on low settings. The E6400 with NVS160 / T9800 can play it on low, but with 95° for the Quadro and on normal settings it's very slow. So I would prefer the Intel IGP for Flash, despite that the nvidia is faster and should be better for flash. But 95° is just too much especially the fan becomes really loud.

 

This is not a Flash game. It's a Unity game. Unity is a game engine which they made their own web browser plug-in.

On my side, with the Latitude E6400, Core 2 Duo P8400 2.2Ghz, 4GB of RAM, Nvidia Quadro NVS 160M, under Windows 8 Pro 64-bit.
My GPU does not pass 80 C (varies between 76 - 80C), as I play the game. I played the game at High settings. At Low settings I get the same temperature.

Your (and mine) laptop is ~4 years old, check the following:
-> Using a can of compressed air for computers and electronic, clean the laptop fan, and heatsink. Be sure to to HOLD the fan while you clean the fan and heatsink, as the air pressure form the can, can and will, spin the fan faster than what it was deigned for, and break it. You want to open the bottom panel to do this procedure. It's easy to open this laptop. It's a 1 screw and sliding out a panel.

-> Your current environment might be too hot. Make sure your laptop is on a clean surface, and directly on wood table or metal. Don't have papers or cloth which blocks air flow. If that is not possible, add a pen or pencil horizontally under your laptop, positioning your laptop in an angle, to help the laptop acquire more fresh air. But I doubt that this is problem.

-> It also might be time to change the thermal paste of your heatsink. Thermals paste is a compound used between the heat sink and a processor to help increase heat transfer between the processor and heatsink. The ones used in OEM systems in general are not great quality, and require to be changed every now and then. When you do this, be sure to remove the old one, and that you put enough so that it does contact between the heatsink and processor (This is a bit tricky, as you also don't want a mess. Some compounds have silver in it, so you really don't want it to touch the circuit board. I think there is a thread here on it I saw many many years ago).

 

ok, thank you so much

 

I think there are two "issues" here, one of which isn't really an "issue".

The GPU gets hot. This is generally well documented; the thermal pad between the GPU and the heatsink is kind of a piece of crap, an load temps in the 90s isn't really uncommon on dGPU E6400s. I don't think this is the causing the slowdown. The slowdown is probably caused by the "throttling issue", which is again fairly well documented. Use ThrottleStop or something similar and see if the CPU throttling and/or stop it from doing so.

 

Well at high settings the game is also slow for me, but playable. Anyway,

I have the solution for you. Check out my software Nv GPU Pro (Nv GPU Pro - Download)
It allows you to control your graphic card performance based on what you run. It uses a community support list of games and applications. Basically, what you can do, is play your game at low settings, and force the graphic card at lower speed than full. While it will reduce the game smoothness, you can perhaps find a good balance between smooth game play and keeping temperatures low.

However, as this is a plug-in in a web browser, my program can't really detect it. But you can force it to load a graphic card performance profile which you can create easily. Perhaps you can try 1/3 speed of your graphic card (all information is provided in the case you don't know the default frequencies). It's just slider bars that you set. The program is designed to be easy to use, and get started quickly. It's specially designed for laptop and desktop.

In my case, I use it to reduce system heat for both my desktop and laptop (help reduce system noise), and overclock on both my laptop and desktop on select games that require some additional performance.

 

Ok, it works with geforce drivers

 

The problem, is that the GPU is a Quadro.. exclusive model for Dell, for the Latitude E6400. So, Unity and the game developer didn't test their game with such GPU. It's being ignored. So no optimization is done. The optimization work is done for Intel GPU's. You can use the GeForce drivers, as the drivers are more optimized for games, like I did, which helps a bit. But, it's sadly no real solution, just helps. The game ran fine at low settings on my side.

The reason why the temperature goes high, is because you have a second processor. Also, the heat sink for the CPU and northbridge chipset (one (the main one) of the 2 motherboard processors that work together to manage itself) are much larger than the GPU, so the CPU and northbridge are way better cooled. PLUS to make maters worst, the GPU is at the END of the heatsink. Thanks Dell. The GPU should have what the northbridge has, and the northbridge has the smaller.. or have both the same size (larger than the current one on the GPU). Also Dell could have put more and longer fins at the end where the fan glow its air. The room is there.

Oh and by the way, Intel graphic solution is in the northbridge for the Core 2 Duo. It only started to be in the CPU starting with the Core i series. So you need to check that temperature and not the CPU.

The interesting news, is that while it won't help what you are looking at, the Quadro NVS 160M is an amazing overclocker, with minimal temperature increase.. and I mean minimal. The Quadro NVS 160M is really a GeForce 9300M but with 256MB dedicated memory instead of using your RAM (well it has some extra Quadro feature enabled), especially when you use the GeForce drivers instead of the Quadro. The GeForce 9300M is a GeForce 9500M with some core disable and greatly slowed down (down-clocked). Also, the GeForce 9000 series all together has something very unique. It's a crazy overclocker. You can push that GPU to extreme without touching voltages (voltage increase would reduce the processor life, and can break it.. so we are not touching that) and with minimal heat increase.

Ok so where I am getting. You can overclock greatly the GPU to near it's "normal" speeds of the 9500M.. well the closest as possible. It won't match the speed for 3 reasons:
-> You can only clock the GPU memory by ~100MHz, due to lack of voltage and heatsink. So that means that the Core and Shader won't go higher (well the return performance increase will be minimal in real world results)
-> Dell put DDR2 memory instead of DDR3. The official specification of the GPU from Nvidia is DDR3. Also, Dell put slower memory (it should have 700MHz DDR3 from Nvidia site, but we have 500MHz DDR2)
-> You have less number of cores than the 9500M, naturally.

Here is my very old guide (this was way before my software)
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...ude-e6400-quadro-nvs-160-optimize-gaming.html

Anyway, so while you can't really help the high heat from the GPU, you can at least boost its performance, at the cost of a few degrees more. The GPU is fine at 100C. At ~105C the fail safe system of the GPU kicks in (will crash the drivers, to kill your game or app using the GPU, if that doesn't work, the GPU will turn off. So your system will lock up, or you'll see a BSOD from Windows). So while you have a hot GPU, why not boost it as we can, at the cost of few more degrees and get better and smoother gaming experience. It won't be anything massive. But it can help.

Now, I am not encouraging overclocking. I mean it's not my laptop, there is always risks, even with my software. But as the laptop is now 4 years old, and possibly more, depending when you purchased it. And you are ready in any case to purchase a new laptop. It might be worth considering, if you feel adventurist and crazy.

For me, I don't really care, and I do it, as I can sustain the temperatures. But I don't apply it all the time. I have a gaming desktop. I only overclock on occasion. So I don't know about your needs. If its like me, than your good. If you need to do it all the time or you really need your laptop: then do not do it, and ignore all the above about overclocking.

 

yeah, works with Geforce drivers

 

Correct.

I'll measure and get back to you.

This is not a BIOS feature. It is a GPU firmware feature. So you need something to extract the firmware of the GPU, change the value, and apply it. The problem with this, is that, if you screw up, you bricked your laptops (GPU is soldered on the motherboard). Alternatively you can use a program that communicates with the graphic card drivers like MSI AfterBurner or Nv GPU Pro. But Nvidia has voltage control blocked for this GPU. Perhaps a firmware for the GPU that unlocks this might be the solution, but don't hold your breath. This is a custom GPU used on a specific laptop... so unless there is someone that does this kind of procedure and has this laptop, and really wants to do it for this laptop over other GPUs, then you'll be out of luck.


The good news is that Quadros are supposed to be designed to run hot, 24/7. That is one of several reason why these GPUs cost more.

 

its much cooler now