M15x GPU Overclock Thread

Thank you,

I will be sure to pass on your wisdom. So, what settings do you reckon for games? I will reset clocks afterwards, so just a nice and smooth gaming period. Plus, how do I rep you?

 

You might try either 700/1000 or 750/1050, but even stock clocks will work pretty well.

 

To rep, you click that button just below the profile on left of his post.

I think you'll be fine with ultra/high settings in majority of games with stock clocks. Try 700/1000 first then, go above if you feel comfortable.

EDIT: I hate crossposting :/

 

Great minds and all that . . .

 

Thank you to you both, plus rep done! I'll have a play with some games.

Have either of you changed your OS theme to an Alienware theme. Looks pretty good!

 

Thanks RJ. Enjoy the games.

 

Hello everyone! Im new here! Before i overclock..it safe to ask few question here

I just grab my15x (kinda low spec i think?) last week..but i really not satisfy playing Star Craft 2. Kinda noob in overclocking but will learn slowly

Here my spec



For my Nvidia Gt240M, how much it safe for overclocking? I have been googling around for 1 hour++ but i dont find what i want to know. Thanks in advance!

 

I overclocked my 240 up to 645/917/1575 core/memory/shader. its stable (furmark 2 hour run-no errors-occt 1 hour test-no errors) and running great.

i had an increase of 5-9 fps playing crysis warhead on high specs. not ultra. My temperatures max at 72 when playing crysis. I deffinatly notice a big increase in smoothness when playing other games too.
every once in a while though my screen gets tons of tiny pixel size dots that make my screen look fuzzy. once i restart it goes away. Ive only gotten it 3 times. its not a big deal for me cause im getting a new card anyway. i Only pushed the card hard because i plan on slappin a 5870 in. I would suggest clocking a bit lower than what i did. for longevity i would clock to 630/900/1500.

 

wow pretty impressive oc for the 240m. nice going.

also i have a clevo 5870 for sale, if your interested. just posted it today, link is in my sig.

 

im deffinatly interested. right now im selling a gtx 285m that i tested on my system but completely didnt work. not recognised by the bios. i would have to wait for the sale to finalize. im selling it for exactly $260 bucks too haha. go figure.

thanks for the praise on my OC. it seemed that noone overclocks there 240s.

 

most 240 users don't game that much, so thats why they don't oc it.
wow so the 285m didn't work, thanks for that was thinking of getting that card to test. strange 280m has been tested to work, why wouldn't the 285m.

 

i have no clue. i saw that no one has done it before so i tried it out. It was completely not compatible. My bios didnt recognize it, drivers would install with it, total fail

heres the thread
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...-cards/507275-gtx-285m-alienware-m15x-r2.html

weird because the guys at MXM-upgrade got a 280 to work. I asked them about it and they said they had no clue. just told me to try a ton of drivers. oh well. the 5870 is better anyway....so ive been told anyway

 

was it able to boot into windows or even into the bios screen.
I'm was waiting for the throttle fix before i was gonna get the 285m.

 

Nice..so any software or tool that you recommend for me for OC? (for my 240m)

 

Evga Precision. (I'll get you a link in a second)

Edit: *LINK*

 

well i just used ntune but recently ive been fine tuning my card with evga precision. its easy to use and works. make sure stealth mode is not on. if it is your clocks will just reset back to the stock frequencies. dont push the card too far though. you should increase the freqs by 10-15 increments and run tests for stability every time. i used furmark and occt. i ran them for 25 minutes until i got to higher frequencies. then i ran them for an hour.

 

it was able to boot windows. when i loaded my desktop it installed the drivers for Video Graphic Adepter. when i tried to find the card in device manager it said that it was not there and it was running on integrated graphics. i chatted with an alienware tech and he said that the card is not supported in the bios. i would have had to flash the card bios and get a modified system bios or something for it to work.

 

thanks man!

well..i just run my futuremark (before OC)..any comment?

ORB - World of Performance


i just run evga precision i notice that

550/1210/790 core/shader/memory

is that my gt240m currently core/shader/memory?

 

yes it is also i saw a post with someone who oced their 240m with 660 core as a place to start

 

I just oc my gc what Oldakowski recommend..I test again with futuremark, sadly just increase around 300~400 points..so sad

 

thats way high. it might be fine temperature wise at those clocks because of the 40 nm technology buy it would be full of atrifacts and cant be good for the card. he probably didnt run any stress tests.

ive been tweaking my clocks and ive been stable while gaming up to 655/933/1490. i cut back my shader clock and increased mem and core. its stable in furmark but occt i got 7 errors which doesnt seem bad to me. temps were fine. it runs fine gaming.

 

there is a quote of where i was ball parking for core frequency which was 645 i may have been pushing it saying 660 core though

 

Ok, so I've done the following for my 5850:

1) Disabled Powerplay via CCC

2) Used AMD GPU Clock Tool to change the clocks from 300/400 to 700/1000

3) Clicked on Set Clocks and then OK

4) Reboot the Laptop and then when I reopen the Clock Tool, the clock speeds reset themselves back to 300/400

Any way I can make them stick?

 

You will need to flash your card to make it stay.

 

And to flash the card...how do I do this? What tool do I use? And is it straight forward? If not, can someone give a step by step thing?

Thanks

 

Check joker's throttling guide.

I wouldn't reccomend it if you have no experience doing it, it involves making a bootable usb and firmware file then flashing it in dos.

Remember if you screw it up by flashing it the wrong way, or wrong values then dell will more then likely not warranty it. I would reccomend staying with rivatuner and work your way up from there.

 

There is another way round the problem. ATI GPU Clock tool takes in command line arguments. These arguments are -eng=xxx and -mem=yyy where xxx is the desired main clock and yyy the clock of the memory.

The trick is to create a shortcut with the target:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\AMD GPU Clock Tool\AMDGPUClockTool.exe" -eng=700 -mem=1000

assuming your GPU clock tool is in the location "C:\Program Files (x86)\AMD GPU Clock Tool\". Then move that shortcut to your Startup folder (which can be found under Start->All Programs->Startup) and you are done. The ATI Clock tool does not open any windows when the command line arguments are given

 

+1
Good explanation!

 

this is a good work around also. but if you flash the card to 700/100. you can keep power play enabled and the 3d clocks will only start up during gaming. the amd clock tools would just lock his clock at 700/1000 the whole time.

to flash you will need a bootable usb stick and atiflash. rbe is used to make custom clocks. i will make a write up later on this subject.

 

700/100, you mean 1000 right?
But yep you are correct, however there must be a way to do this without flashing and manually turning on off AMD GPU Tools everytime you game.

 

oops hahahahaha, yeah i mean 700/1000. so far those are the only 2 proven methods that i know of. setting up flashing for the first time take some time but after that its really simple to flash back or flash other custom clocks.

 

BTW did you encounter ANY throttling while above 700 core with 5850?
The folks here are having problems with BFBC2 while above 700.

 

i'll check bfbc2 later tonite, i have to reinstall it again. I'm using A07 and the dell beta driver and so far looks good and very stable. but will post results.

 

Thanks, they got me worried because I haven't experienced any kind of throttling yet.

 

one thing i did notice from the posted pic, seem to be it downclocked when there was no load on it, so it could be normal but i will test it out.

 

right, but he disabled power play at the beginning so I thought he didnt want to use powerplay :x.

 

Oh yeah, sorry about that, I do want to keep PowerPlay enabled after changing the clocks.

inap, I look forward to the write up. I am keen to get this done asap because at the stock speeds, you do def notice the lower performance.

 

I'm having above high performance with the system in my sig from MW2, Fallout3, TF2, AlienSwarm, SC2.. all maxed and stock clocks. What CPU do you have?

 

I have the i7 Q840....I really notice the lag when playing Warhammer 40K Dawn of War 2. With the stock clock speeds, I get frame rates as low as 5 fps with all settings set on High (Can't go Ultra cause that would be insane)

 

5 FPS????
Are you sure you aren't touching stealth mode mistakenly or something like that? Dude this sounds EXTREMELY anormal.
I believe you have 5850 and atleast 4gigs of ram?

 

I'm not kidding you dude...if I boot up DOW2, go to the video settings, let it choose what it thinks is the best settings (some of them are ultra but I even change them down to High), and run the game's internal benchmark, at parts, the frame rate can drop as low as 5 fps. I'm also most certainly not enabling the evil spawn of hell that is Stealth Mode....lol.

Also yeah, I have 6GB of RAM in the notebook. I know it's weird

 

Benchmarks are usually known to be laggy. How is the in game performance?? How are you recording 5FPS? I don't think 5 FPS is possible :S There is definitly a software problem or hardware is broken :/

 

Sometimes I get issues like that in games and I just hit the stealth mode button a few times and it goes away one of the times I press it.

Even if you think it's off, try hitting it anyways. Sometimes it seems to enable itself (I find this happens very frequently when going from battery to a/c power).

I don't get why Dell even has that on there to begin with. It's really just a pain.

 

Hmmm, ok, I'll have to keep that in mind and give it a go. I'm in total agreement with you about the Stealth Mode....I don't see a logical reason in including a feature like that in a gaming laptop.

 

If you look in the manual;

That is their logical reason! Haha.

 

I am planning to use EVGA precision to oc it.
what is the correct ratio from ocing the core clock, shader clock and memory clock.
also what tempurature should you say is stable for gaming with out a laptop cooler??

Thanks!!

 

EVGA Precision can keep those clocks linked, so you only have to move one slider and the ratio is kept between them (for the core and shader). The memory clock is independent from the core and shader.

Around 80 Celsius would be a good point to stop.

 

what do you guys use ? EVGA or rivatuner and why

 

cool thanks sirhcz0r i am using 600/1472/1000. you told me that the memory clock is independent what value do you recommend is 1000 good. temp went up to 75 on mafia 2 demo benchmark.

 

That temperature is fine, so as long as everything is stable. Which often times it will be only slightly unstable, and cause periodic crashes or display driver crashes, in which case you should lower everything a little. I started with rather high clocks that turned out to be unstable, and every time the display driver crashed I would lower everything by 20MHz until I found stable clocks. You could be more exacting if you like though, but it will take a while to find the highest perfectly stable clocks.

What I did on my GT240M was run OCCT and change each value individually until I found it's maximum stable clock (core, shader, and memory runs while the other two stayed at stock). Then I ran all of them together at 660/1452/948. That worked for a while, but eventually crashed the display driver, so I tried 640/1408/930, which lasted much longer, but also eventually crashed the display driver. From there I went to 620/1364/900, which has been perfect. Stock was 550/1210/790, so it's pretty substantial.