8600 Speedstep Gaming

Ive read several posts about how decent the 8600 is for gaming and so far mine has shown promise. I have however had a couple of problems running games. From reading some other posts and google it seems like perhaps the speedstep is either reporting incorrectly to the game (if it uses that to set the game speed) or it switches up and down during play. The symptom Im getting at is a game like the original UT is will play super fast. Using the command line switches you can set a clock speed which seems to work if its on the ac power. When on battery makes it run really slow. Other games such as Deus Ex and UT 2k4 seem to exibit similar behaviors by speeding up for a split second during play then returning to original speed. I installed XP Pro on the new HD (got the 7200 RPM) and didnt see any patches for Speedstep as there are for the other models of laptops. I guess my question is am I missing some patch or do most people use a program like SpeedSwitch ( or whatever its called) to prevent these problems. Or is this unique to my system. Any input appreciated.

Thanks
Jptest

 

I can't speak directly for the 8600, but my understanding is that depending on the power scheme that you have selected, the cpu will throtle according to usage. You may want to check that you aren't set to max battery for d/c as this will keep cpu speed down to save power...thus causing games to go slow. Try setting it to "always on" or "minimal power management" for d/c mode, this will keep the cpu running at full speed. NB: your battery life will suffer.
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ASUS M6Ne 15.4" WSXGA 1.7 PM ATI9700 80Gb HDD 1Gb RAM

 

Hmm yea setting it to always on did seem to fix it. I guess I just assumed that if you had it plugged it it would set it to run at full speed. Oh well. Guess I just need to read up on how speedstep works.

Thanks
jptest

 

Download speedswitch XP. you can do a google search for it. It will let you set the speed for when you are on battery or when you are plugged in. It's a nice little program.