Dell SXPS 16 and Team Fortress 2

I bought a Dell SXPS at these specs:

• Core 2 Duo P9700 2,80 GHz
• 4 GB DDR3 RAM
• ATI 4670 1 GB
• 320 GB HDD

The first thing I did was to fire up Team Fortress 2, of course! The first 30 mins of gameplay: Awesomeness, my best TF2 experience ever, amazing graphics, v-sync on, AA on 4x - simply amazing... but after these 30 wonderful mins I suddenly had some FPS lag, for 30 seconds, then back to normal for a bit, then lag again and so on... now what is this? I just ordered a Zalman NC2000 in hope of making the gameplay better and avoid these FPS drops. This has to be underclocking issues right? Can I achieve lower temps by undervolting my CPU/GPU? I have never done that before and I would be amazingly happy if someone with the same laptop could help me.

I just hope the Zalman will work things out, otherwise I'm throwing this laptop away - I can barely touch the palm rests while I'm gaming!

Thanks in advance for all answers

 

You should go undervolt it the next time you have some time, it really helps. Other than that, the cooling pad should help, making sure you're got some space around it helps, common sense.

I actually have an M1530, so I can't say for sure that the palm rests are metal, but the palm rests feel hot because they're conducting heat, which is a good thing (even though it seems counter-intuitive).

Use HWMonitor to post some of your temps, that could say a lot abotu your problems.

 

It could be lots of things. The game asking for more resources at certain spots like lots of players and lots of explosions (although it would take quite some of this effects to kick serious lag into your HD 4670), your hard drive (if you got the 7200RPM, I've heard people having some problems with it) or some other configurations like mighty 1080p resolutions.

 

FPS spikes, I hate them. I had the same issue as you, but with different games (NFS Shift & Crysis).

Then I fixed it. How you wonder?
I went into the ATI Advance Catalyst Control Center and disabled the "Power Play" option. Also I made sure that my battery plan was on "high performance" plugged in of course and just to make sure everything was at it's finest performance I updated the HD 4670's driver to the latest which is 9.9 on the ATI website with the help of mobility driver. Also undervolted the P8600 processor so the heat won't build up as much when I game and running full blast on a zalman nc-2000 notebook cooler.

Good game.

 

@Ole_man: Yes, I will give undervolting a real shot. By the way, I had M1530 before, and the palm rests were absolutely fine during gaming. This Studio 16 is something a lot different, at least the way I experience it.

@m1n05_4: It's definately a heat issue, the game runs perfectly fine the first 25-30 mins, even on servers with 32 players. And yea I have the 7200RPM and RGBLED screen 1080p - it's amazing!

 

@Casual864: Nice to hear that you got it sorted. However, I don't think that by only disabling PowerPlay and upgrading to latest drivers will solve the FPS drops. I believe that the undervolting worked well together with your Zalman. I have tried to disable PowerPlay and such, without luck - but now, I don't have Catalyst Control Center installed anymore because I think it's a can of garbage, I usually only install the driver, which I've done now as well, bare bones.

 

The trouble with disabling powerplay is it lowers your 4670's 3d clocks. So this may have solved Casuals problem but at the expense of degrading performance anyway. Run a 3dmark with and without and you will see the difference.

I had the same downclocks with both my sxps 16 and my studio 1555 (ati 4570) both were het related. The only thing that solved my problem was AS5 on my CPU and GPU, undervolting my cpu and raising the rear (I didnt try a notebook cooler).

Open HWmonitor whilst you game and check your temps out. Before I did the above my cpu went into the 90's now it stays low 70's during heavy gaming sessions

 

@Ninja2000: Which temp do you think is the maximum on the CPU and GPU before the laptop downclocks?

And also, I wonder if the CPU and GPU are sharing the same heatsink on the SXPS 16?

 

On my studio 1555 the gpu would downclock at 95c

On the sxps 16 it was my CPU downclocking and that was at 93c

The have seperate heatsinks going to the same fan.

 

playing wow after a bit of time I saw some hiccups with my 3670, but after undervolting the CPU it seems to have gone away. Plus I am also using a cooling pad now. So yeah try getting rid of the heat some =)

I have some arctic silver5 sitting around but I'm wary of opening the laptop now since it's only a couple months old - my warranty would be gone too if I did this right? or wrong?

 

Shall I also undervolt the IDA multiplier in RMClock? The Intel Dynamic Acceleration thing, I'm not sure of what it is, even though I've googled a bit about it. If I don't check that IDA multiplier in RMClock, will that function be disabled all the time when I'm running undervolted with the software in Windows. I mean I think IDA should be enabled by default, when I'm not using RMClock - so by not checking that one - will it be totally disabled as a function? Could anyone please help me a bit

Thanks in advance....

 

I just got the Zalman, it lowers my CPU temps by 13 degrees, amazing stuff - but TF2 still has the FPS drops, I hate this laptop now!!! Could anyone help me please

 

put your laptop into the trash-bin. Hehe. But jokes aside, I also tried googling about this "fps drop" thing, but no one seems to explain it properly, seriously dude, this problem is common on old computers and laptops

 

guys, please dont give advises as "have you tried updating the gpu driver" cause we are not noobs in pc-hardware or software, but we are having this technical problem, which no one seems to solve however.

 

have you tried contacting dell or whoever you purchased from? Looks like you recognize it's a technical issue, then I'd go check that out. TF2 runs fine for me, no drops.

 

yes we have dude, dumonde is my mate as well. There has to be an software-explanation to this.