Vista x64 Macbook Pro 2.2 Overclocking Adventure

Let me start by saying a few words, and giving a little bit of an explanation of my findings. One thing that is important to realize - 3DMark does not take in consideration the usable 800+MB of VRam that is usable via turbocache and Vista. The primary reason for the large gap in performance in 3DMark specifically is do to the 2.2GHz MBP only having 128MB of ram (I'm sure all you know this), and 3dmark tends to chug in quite a few areas because of it. HOWEVER this absolutely does not translate into real world performance since increased vram would theoretically be taken into account when playing games or doing 3D design, etc.

At least compared to Bear Feats, I think you all will be pleasantly suprised at the overclocking results of the 2.2MBP. I am not sure if he was pushing his test machines anywhere close to their limits, but I decided I would throw this little beast into the mix as well. Much better results BTW If you account for a much higher amount of usable VRAM in games, with the fantastic overclocking power of the lower end model, it is feasable that some games (this has not been tested, so no fighting ;p) might even be better performed on the 2.2MBP as apposed to It's two big brothers.

I took the liberty of running each benchmark three times each, and the pics you are seeing is the one in the middle. It is possible that I might be able to get a little more out of the machine, but I figured I would save it for another time. Let me also mention, that no extra cooling or anything was used on the MBP, everything is standard.

Well, without further adue, I will start with just my base Vista x64 score, nothing special. This was at my default res of 1280x854.

Next in line would be the 1024x768 benchmark, with 610MHz Core and 730MHz DDR memory. I didn't get down to the fine details, or go mhz by mhz, but this is a good representation of the flexability of the 8600m GT.

After that is my default resolution, at 1280x854 with the same core and ram speed (Seems to be a sweet spot on my system specifically. Again, 3Dmark ran nice but you do notice alot of hicups do to lack of VRAM, that brings the score drastically down. This would not happen in real world performance to my knowledge and experience.

Next up is my LED screens native resolution of 1440x900. Still a respectable score in my opinion, even though it is being limited. I did not see a need to apply any type of AA or AF to this one especially, everything looked nice and smooth and pretty even though it had it's hickups.

I went ahead and threw in a pic of my Windows Experience benchie, a little dissapointed at the 120GB hard drive performance, but that can always be changed in the future so not too big of a deal.

Anyways, Enjoy the pictures - I will try and get some of the same game benchmarks as bear feat for comparison just to see how powerful a nicely tuned system can be. OH yea, one last thing. TEMPURATURES were fantastic, I think I saw my macbook get at the most 3-5 degrees hotter during the benchmarks, and it stayed relatively cool since the fans were on all the time.

EDIT: oh yea, I know someone is going to ask, this was done with the laptopvideo2go version of the 158.45 drivers available there. They seem to work great in x64 vista, but you cannot adjust the brightness with them installed, even with input remapper.

EDIT: EDIT: I made a mistake in a couple of things I said, didn't not read the bear feat review correctly. I guess he was just posting stock speeds for each model, sorry! But either way, the 2.2 MBP should be a fantastic performer. And per request, the stock high speed mode is 470 core and 635 memory, so overall this is an overclock of 140MHz on the core, and just shy of 100mhz on the memory - might try and squeeze out 735 oc just so it is an even number ;p

 

Awesome! Thanks for spending the time to do that for us. I know a lot of people on these boards will appreciate it (including me).

Josh

 

Yes, thank you for posting these... I appreciate it.

Also, (and I haven't checked my other threads where I have asked this yet), but I was wondering if you might be willing to run a Lost Planet DX10 FPS bench for us.

Might I ask what is the normal clock speeds for the 8600 GT? (Otherwise it's hard for me to compare your clock speeds to normal speeds).

 

Hey, ya know, thats what I do ;p

I am trying to hunt down my copy of Oblivion since everyone wants to see some performance reviews on this one. Will have to wait till tommorow though since I have to go to bed and be at work at 8AM EST =( So, yea, any questions or requests, just ask

On average, by overclocking the video card increased each different resolution bench by ~ 7-800 3dmarks. In other words, heck yea its worth it!

EDIT: Yep, I'll DL the demo tonight while I sleep and follow up tommorow.

 

Sweet muffins! Halleleuiah!

What software did you use to overclock?

 

Is there anything not working in the X64 vista version? I couldn't figure out how to get internet at all when I had it on my new MBP??

 

I was able to find drivers for just about everything. The exceptions are the Touchpad - No scroll at the moment. If anyone has an idea on how to get it to work feel free to post or pm me. Vista just does not recognise the drivers as being for my specific hardware. As previously mentioned, the current display drivers out (that I can find) do not support brightness adjustment in Vista x64. Everything else I was able to find the drivers for.

 

was your wireless working as soon as you started vista or did you install other drivers?

 

I just posted a thread in here.

But, according to GenTech PC, the 8600 line really increases in performance when 3 GB is in the computer. FEAR got double FPS.

Granted, this was the 256MB versions of the 8600GS and GT, but I hope the same holds true for the 128 versions.

 

Nope, downloaded the AR5008 drivers from Atheros directly for that one.


Lost Planet benchies coming soon. Gonna hold off on posting scores because I need to make sure I get a range of DX9 and DX10. IMO the DX10 scores were kind of low and I am trying to find out why, so im gonna see if DX9 is a big improvement.

 

Ok, here are some DX9 screens of the Lost Planet benchmark. Having some serious issues with the DX10 version - getting an invalid display mode message whenever I try to run it full screen, and if I alt-enter to window mode, it seems to give horrible performance in both DX9 and DX10. So gotta wait to figure out how to solve this problem for the DX10 benchmarks.

All screenshots are done at the default quality settings. First Pic is stock MBP 2.2, second is overclocked to 610 core, 730 memory.

 

Thanks a ton! Is there any way you could try running it in 1024x768? I think that might bring the FPS up a bit (though it might look a little distorted...).

 

There's a gem of a find in this thread, I think. I, like others (I think) have been struggling with the question of 'is it worth 500 bucks for the better video card in the new MBP?'. for me, I'm eyeing it for Vista. More on why in a sec.

I found another thread that showed the windows experience index score of 4.8 for the 256mb vram MBP. Here, it shows 4.3 with the 128mb vram model. Not too shabby, right?

If I am interpreting this correctly, this saves me 500 bucks

Why am I buying a MBP to run Vista? I do some light software development (Excel add ins/macros, mostly) and I strive to have my programs work on both Mac and PC platforms. Having a MBP that could run vista would allow me to have a single machine, and I could then get my add ins working under office 2007.

My Asus W5a, while great, is getting a little old, and I'd like a larger screen as I dont carry a laptop with me every day like I used to.

not to hijack the thread (any more than I already have?), but as sort of an aside, I'm wondering if Parallels provides free updates? While not a requirement, I'd love to be able to see Aero effects under Parallels, so I'm wondering if they offer free updates for existing users. I looked on the website and couldnt track it down...

Thanks for this thread!

 

Wow, great work blull! Now that is making me feel a lot better about getting the low-end version! Gonna buy my MBP next week, and considering the scarcity of real information, this is really helping me with my decision.

One thing troubles me though, and it's your statement that 3DMark does not take into account the shareable system memory - how can this be? As far as I know, video memory management (dedicated and shared) happens at the driver level, and is totally transparent to the application... and I somehow fail to understand why a company in the business of making a software that essentially evaluates the gaming performance of PCs would purposedly put aside such an important detail.

Anyway, if this is true, this is really great news, and would indeed explain the huge discrepancies between the two models.

 

Just to answer and respond to a few questions..

1st, I am using Nvidia's Ntune to do all my dirty work. I found this card extremely flexible while overclocking and had zero stability issues when I found my sweet spot with very little heat or performance issues. Don't get me wrong, this sucker still gets hot, but not any hotter while overclocking.

2nd, I have not heard any hard evidence on the matter of 3dmark and the it sticking with 128mb, but it makes alot of sense. Alot of benchmarks do this to remove other factors from the equation and look at JUST the video cards performance for comparison. For example, running FEAR on with all high graphic options runs perfectly smooth, but this would NOT be possible on a card with 128mb, it would not have the texture memory. I don't own the real game, just tried the demo, and I don't think the benchmark is in the demo or I would post some results.

Been working alot lately (real job) so havn't had time to post other game benchmarks, but they are coming!

 

Hey Blull, have you thought about adding a 2GB single stick of RAM into your MBP?

 

thanks blull for the work and risking your pristine mbp to the fire. Like others have said, this makes the decision to go with the lower end mbp a bit easier.

I do have a question:

So for the macbook pro, is vista or xp better for gaming. When the mbp update was announced people were touting the xp over vista because of the unknown driver situation for the 8600gt. Yet the benchmark thread shows that vista scores higher than xp.

 

I have though about the 2GB stick test, I would love to try it if I had the cash after spending so much money on this sucker =/ Not sure how much difference it would make on the 128MB model, I assume it would be very similar to the 256 improvement since they are the same card when it comes down to things. If anything, a 128MB card might see a little MORE improvement off of the extra ram since it is at a deficit to begin with.

In my tests, XP still is a *tiny* bit faster in games still, than Vista. Although, the difference is basically negligible. I would 100% recommend sticking with Vista 32bit though for the moment, as I am fairly certain I am losing performance because of driver compatibility and such. In my personal test when I was deciding which to install for the first time, Vista 32-bit was about 200 3dmarks faster (again, mostly do to drivers). Unfortuneatly some of the stuff I do in Visual Studio requires me to stick with either xp x64 or vista x64. I chose Vista x64.

 

Sorry for semi-hijacking this thread, just read it before overclocking my MBP (2.4 GHz 15.4") and thought I'd share the results (too lazy to take screens however, so you'll have to take my word for it). And thanks for sharing your results and by doing so encouraging me to try it out

Before = Stock
After = 615 MHz GPU core and 730 MHz GPU memory
All settings and resolutions in 3DMark are default

3DMark01 - Before: 24700 points -> After: 28952 points
3DMark03 - Before: 9640 points -> After: 12200 points
3DMark05 - Before: 6140 points -> After: 7868 points
3DMark06 - Before: 3077 points -> After: 3869 points (4825 points @ 1024x768)

The temperature didn't increase one bit as far as I could see.

 

nice scores, but can you go higher on the core?

 

Can you guys actually play a game at these clock speeds for more than 30 minutes? Most people do not play games in 5 minute intervals.

I would like to see a FRAPs run after 2 hours of Oblivion. That would give me a clear picture about the gaming potential of these notebooks.

Benchmark apps are so pointless. They only capture a brief moment in time, and half the time there are artifacts all over the picture.

 

Most certainly, the temperature didn't even go up more than 1-2 degrees (if even that much).

 

I played Test Drive Unlimited for at least 4-5 hours after I did the benchmarks, max resolution, hdr, highest detail possible, sure, not as demanding as F.E.A.R., but it oughta prove something, the fan went on a couple of times but that was about it. Also there wasn't a single artifact during neither the benchmarks or the actual gaming.