*OFFICIAL* M15x Owners Lounge - Part 5 (see post #1 for links)

Cool. I think this will be by angle of approach then!

Sorry for the ignorance, I'm finding the acronyms overwhelming but I'll learn fast if you guys maintain your seemingly unbreakable patience!

 

Yeah, the default pads will suffice until you can buy some good ones.

Once you get some good pads you'll definitely notice a temp drop. 805 is pretty nice, especially if you haven't changed the voltage yet. Maybe that one will be a better overclocker than my current one! lol

I haven't pushed mine too much since i haven't come across any games (aside from Metro2033 which i already finished) that would benefit from an intense overclock. I leave it at 5870 clocks and it's more than enough for what i play.

Glad to see you're having fun with the card =D

 

When benching at 805 core clock I got serious image artifacts hahahaha . I just played half an hour Black Ops on the new Zombie maps, stock clocks, already a huge improvement compared to the 260m, I'm definitely having fun with the card!

 

someone mentioned their 260m is sad, my 260m outperforms a std 460m. and a gpu temp around 60-80C depending on the game. all settings high and fullhd resolution. So OC the 260m will give u an amazing performance boost and no problems.been running overclocked for 5months. I have recently come into a problem tho with latency.

Playing movies it stutters every so often. audio stutters and picture freezes. In games it previously fps dropped to 8fps then back to 100fps. I rolled back to a previous Ghost image that was a base install and then uninstalled the graphics drivers and put the new ones on the 267.76 from nvidia. the same stuttering doesnt seem to happen to audio played in winamp. I havnt tested games yet thoroughly but i dont remember having a problem with league of legends which used to drop badly. will check it again. I play movies with vlc player will check with another player. same with windows media player. but audio seems perfect in winamp.

Any advice on what software to use to check for latency spikes or anything to diagnose these lags?

 

DPC Latency Checker

have you check your temps?

 

lol yeah u might want to becareful with those clocks without increasing the voltage, i tried a while ago and my screen went black, after a reboot my card wont go over 775...lol

 

Ok, sorry to hear that bro.... weird. I'm probably going to try it with a higher voltage when I find time.

 

After a restart my latency seems to be normal between 170-300us. with no spikes. so weird. all seems normal now. thanx for the DPC link.

 

i ve oced my 5850 to 800/1000 stock voltage, seems to be stable. just for record can someone tell me what an graphics artifacts looks like thanks

 

Artifacts are simply graphic errors, you'll notice when you get them... it can be yellow squares, black areas, flickering... shiny colored dots, whatever... in all variations. You're bound to notice if you have artifacts.

 

I'm stupid.. I have been hating my M15x for the past three weeks because it was sluggish and my video card would only work downclocked. I changed my gpu driver thrice and made a tons of clean-up and maintenance..
Turns out it was on stealth mode this whole time.
Bah, silly me.

 

My Clevo card is incapable of downclocking.

I still remember when I first bought this M15x. I still had the GT240 in it, and I couldn't figure out why COD4 was lagging badly on super low settings.

 

i am having hectic lags. running dpc latency checker and every so often it does spike but not regular at all. like typing this message the text would not appear for a 1-2seconds. I have just reloaded an image that used to work. any ideas? music also seems to pause for a second. where do i start? I dont really wanna diasable everything one by one. is there no program to detect this kinda problem and what is causing it. super frustrating have a quad core i7 but cant surf the web without lag. In games it lagging the same as before. I have an esata card plugged in and a usb hub with wireless G700 logitech mouse wireless logitech keyboard. but i have been using my system like this with no lag for 3 months with all the attachments.wierdest thing, gonna format see if that works. fresh install.

 

another question, if u bought a m17x R2 and swopped the cpu with a m15x would dell still cover it under warrenty or would it void it? say the m15x had a i7 820qm and the m17x had i7 720qm.

 

check stealth mode.

just swap the cpu back when you need warranty repairs.

 

A number of us who had the Clevo 5870 and were frustrated by the absence of PowerPlay, achieved the same effect by using an AMD GPU Clock Tool shortcut to automatically downclock at Startup, but there are many ways to use it to get the same benefit.

1. Download AMD GPU Clock Tool for HD5870. Download AMD GPU Clock Tool v0.9.26.0 For HD 5870 | techPowerUp

2. Set clocks to Engine=200, Memory=300, click Set Clocks

3. To automate the downclocking process at bootup, create a shortcut to Clock Tool, then right click, select Properties and add the following to the command line contained in the Target box: “-eng=200” “-mem=300” (with quotation marks). Then drag the shortcut (as modified) into the Startup Folder. At boot, Clock Tool starts up, resets the clocks and exits. Happens so fast you can barely see it. Opening Clock Tool and clicking Restore Default Clocks takes you right back to 700/1000 or whatever other values you have set in the vbios.

 

alas i have read the many posts about stealth mode. when stealth mode is active it restricts your clocks of the gpu i have a desktop gadget which tells me my gpu clocks and they are running at full clock rate and not stealth mode clocks. steal mode reduces shader clock to 820 i am running at 1800 so it is not that. it is the weirdest thing. all i can think of is it is a rogue driver or program that is delaying and slowing something down.

 

Start Task Manager, go to the process screen, sort by CPU use/cycles and see whether something is monopolizing the CPU. If so, highlight and click on End Process and see whether that fixes things. If not, if you are running an antivirus program, disable it and see whether that affects the lag. If it does not, run a full virus scan. If nothing is reported, download one of the many free AV programs and recheck with it. Something is clearly intercepting or interfering with normal operations and processes. These should at least point you in the right direction.

 

I think i found one problem, it was my momentus XT harddrive that needed a firmware update it was SD22 now is SD25 and i also stopped the core i7 from parking cores so its more responsive. yet in crysis 2 i still have lags i am guessing it is the game. I still have latency spikes in dpc of about 1974. then some times just 900 which is constant every 10 bars. am running antivirus scan kaspersky.

The problem seems to be my harddrive. every stutter in audio u can see the harddrive working. that was with the antivirus working gonna try without it. the cpu doesnt go over 50% usage and no program uses more than 3%. harddrive temp is 42 C and that is with the back cover removed and custom fans cooling it. lags are back in browser. looks like it works with the harddrive lights on alienhead when they flash alot it freezes for a second then it stops.

 

I have an Ati Radeon HD mobility 5730.

I'm wondering if it is possible for me to upgrade to either a 5850/5870 or a 460m....

Like, can the cards fit?

 

Yes, any of these cards will work.

 

All will fit nicely. You can get them from Dell or a Clevo one.

 

I'd recommend buying one from dell since they are supported cards and will be covered under your systems warranty.

 

not only that, but the clevo one's require slight modification to the drivers to install and sound over dp/hdmi is not working.

at least not on my clevo 5870m

 

Yup problem solved. It was the seagate momentus XT hybrid harddrive that has micro stutters. I played black ops and it was fine but a spike here and there, were crysis 2 is totally unplayable. seems crytek uses alot of harddrive and bad buffering. thanx for the advice guys

 

Congratulations on identifying the problem, Rob7779. Tricky diagnosis.

 

i just got my m15x from dell took 8 days got it with the nvidia gtx 460m 1.5gb just before they removed it from there site, not sure why they did but no problems with the chip runs crysis 2 on max

 

sometimes they run out of stock and remove it or they get a bulk special of ati or something like that and will remove the one item temporarily. also the wait time for the item could be 1-2months so the rather remove it than get flak from people complaining why do they have to wait so long. could even be sued cause of consumer act. thats my guess. My Geforce 260m GTX is clocked higher than 460m gtx but crysis 2 only playable on very high graphics 1920x1080 not the highest option.

 

Yeah it's not just about clock speed though. The 460m has 192 shaders and GDDR5 vs the 260m's 112 shaders and DDR3.

 

yup very true.

 

in fact ive found nothing that stresses the 840qm i7 or the nvidia 460m gtx its actually good to know your not pushing it and heat is very minimal so overclocking will definately be an option in the future

 

Thanks again for this. I now have two shortcuts. One is for 800/1100, and the other is for 200/300. Rather than downclocking at boot, I just have the shortcuts pinned to the start menu to use whenever. One thing to note is that the additional values entered into the Target line do not need the quotation marks. I tried once with them and it gave an error, so I tried the values without them and it worked fine.

Now what I'm wondering is if I can also lower the voltage to .95v when I set it to 200/300. I just flashed a vbios for testing with 800/1100 @ 1.05v. I idle at roughly 55C at that overclock and voltage, and only drop to around 50C when using the lowered clocks.

I believe this would be yet another vbios modification, but I'm not sure what value I would modify. There's only one entry that I have set to 1.05, and since that's the only voltage option I'm given in AMD GPU Clock Tool, I suspect there's no way to do this.

 

Turns out there is a way apparently, although I've never played with it. If you start Clock Tool with the extension vctf, it displays options for startup parameters setting voltage, fans, etc. as shown. Select the one(s) you wish to set, specify the value and add to the end of the startup string. Let us know how in works in practice. (-vddc=0.95)?

​

 

I tried adding -vddc=0.95, and nothing changed, so I tried -vddc=<0.95>, and it still didn't work.

It was worth trying though, thanks for the finding that.

When you open clock tool on your 5850, how many voltage options does it show you in the drop down menu? If there are multiple values, try that isn't the highest by adding it to the startup string and see if they work on the Dell card.

Spoiler

 

I have two entries/choices in the supported Voltage menu:

​

But using -vddc= doesn't work for me either. I created a shortcut using "-eng=200 -mem=300 -vddc=.90". It gave me the 200/300 clocks, but set VDDC to 1.05v, the higher boot/3d clock voltage. Bummer. Long live PowerPlay, the main reason I switched from the Clevo 5870m to the Dell 5850m. Then I disabled PP, which sets the clocks to 300/400/1.0v (no dynamic switching), and re-ran the shortcut. That resulted in 200/300/1.05v again. So the flag does cause a change in the voltage setting, but the value seems to be ignored in favor of the voltage setting in Clock Info 00 (Boot/3d) in the vbios. Maybe just another limitation in the mobility version of these cards. Too bad, it would have been a nice refinement.

 

Is it silly to buy an M15X now? I've been looking at the M17X, but my 15" laptop just crapped out...and with ship times and other stuff, the M15X looks like it will ship out a whole lot faster and is cheaper overall.

Looking at the XM processor...does the 9 cell battery make the M15x sit up more? Like does it stand out?

Is the XM processor faster than the basic sandy bridge i7s?

 

Cross posting is irritating.
Let's answer this here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m15x/570903-m15x-questions.html

 

by what ive seen the 840qm and the 940xm are so close together its not worth the difference the L3 cache is the same only slightly higher clock speed and yes 9cell raises the laptop a little my guess is about an inch on the back side

 

You can OC one of those XM processors though.

 

There's a massive difference between the 940xm and the 840qm, primarily because of the ability to o'c the 940xm. The 940 can run all 4 cores at up to 26-27x (3.46-3.6GHz), while the 840qm is limited to 15-16x (2.0-2.13GHz). a huge difference. As a former owner, the 820qm's are excellent CPU's, but there is no comparison between them and the 940xm's. None at all.

 

ive clocked the 840qm at over 3ghz average is 3.1ghz with high performance power settings and from what ive seen forcing further over clocking is not good in laptops as the heat can burn them out

 

That isn't overclocking, that is turbo boost shutting down a few cores and boosting one of them to that speed. The 840qm can't be overclocked.

 

Forget CPU-Z for speed monitoring, it's not reliable at all, when you wan't something accurate for monitoring the i7 cpus try Throttlestop.

 

what would you recommend for gpu benchmarking i tried crysis 2 but run smooth on max

 

Try 3dMark11 and 3dMarkVantage, both from Futuremark and probably the premier GPU-centric benchmark programs. wPrime v1.55 is a pure CPU benchmark that is widely used. PCMarkVantage is a well regarded system benchmark, but is heavily influenced by disk speed. Lots more.

 

l1nkrx7, if you run your cpu at full loads with all cores... you'll see your multi drop drastically.

with the extreme series, you can keep the cores running at maximum (or beyond) depending on the chip and your cooling.

also in terms of benchmarks, 3dmark is the most common, this is great in that you can compare yourself to thousands of others. i like unigine heaven bench as well.
if you're more into production/modeling/rendering performance (opengl), look at cinebench by maxon.

 

ive not had chance to test that the chip seems to run each task with very little cpu usage

 

Hey guys, I'm looking for a copy of the Dell 460m vbios. Would be great if someone uploaded it or just send it to me.

 

how can i give it to you?

 

Upload it onto mediafie or something similar is probably best.