~GX660(R) Owner's Lounge~

Besides, both the 920xm and 940xm can be used unlocked with throttlestop, bringing them up over 3Ghz on each core, all active.

And overclocking them is easy so it doesn't make sense to get the 940xm hehe.

 

Yeah, I miss the 920XM. I just couldn't control its temps.. =[

It's a monster!

 

That seems to be similar to the 2920XM and 2960XM since they have different clocks at default but can be overclocked to the same limit huh?

 

Yeah, all extreme versions of i7 both sandy bridge and previous are "unlocked". It is the reason why they are the most powerful ones.

And the same reason a 920xm still rivals and even beats most sandy bridge processors except the 29XX from sandy bridge, as they can be overclocked more and are faster per clock.

Sandy Bridge ES CPUs can sometimes be overclocked too, with great performance.

 

I've bought a cheap i7 840QM (ES) because of the big power at a low TDP and Watt cost compared to 9x0xm....
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmarklist.2436.0.html

 

Sandy bridge is faster clock for clock.

 

Of course it is, but it is barely 10% and up to 15% depending on other factors on the cpu model.

If you have over 10% faster clockspeeds, they perform about the same.

So a 2.6ghz quad core sandy bridge, is going to meet a powerful rival with a 3.4ghz quad core lynnfield. So at quad core, unlocked 920xm is faster except the faster sandy bridges like 29XXqms.

But on single core, since Sandy bridge's upclock a lot, they perform better on single threaded tasks unless I somehow manage 4Ghz OC haha.

 

Theoretically you are correct. Though it would only be faster if you have a portable liquid nitrogen system cooling it down, as on 3.2Ghz on all cores it will easily go to 100 at full load w/ stock cooling and then throttle down because of the heat, on the GX660. It was awesome but the amount of heat it produces is mad! I was using it to render videos so that's where the full load was coming from, gaming certainly would never require that.

Also for some reason if I went to 3.3Ghz and higher on all cores the GX660 would eventually restart itself a few secons later during a benchmark - maybe the motherboard just couldn't handle such power draw with the 6990M in there as well (w/ 180w PSU). It wasn't the chip because someone else has it now and can OC it higher.

If you test the 920XM on passmark OCed it will score as much as a 2670QM due to older technology. Also kinda silly but look at the WEI score of the 920XM - max is 7.5 I think. 7.6 for me. It's not about the Ghz anymore because mobile phones can work at like 2Ghz now OCed? Clearly they are not fast at all.

Another thing about the sandy bridge CPUs is that if you are able to you can unlock the turbo function indefinitely, meaning it will turbo forever as long as temps are fine. My 2860QM runs at 3.3Ghz on 4 cores and on max load temps never get higher than 75 on stock cooling.. I can easily work with that temp. The 2920XM will run at like 4.4Ghz max 95 degrees, too high to practically work with.

I hope I mad some sense

 

Does that apply to any brand at removing turbo time limits?

 

You need an unlocked bios to override default turbo settings and Intel XTU 2.1 on top of that to set it in stone.. There is an unlocked bios for you I think, should have the options?

 

Where can I get XTU 2.1?

EDIT: Got it.

 

Hmz, yeah no option even in the fully unlocked bios :/

 

Hello

I am thinking about change my DVD Drive to a Blu Ray Drive.

Anyone know which DVD Drive fits in the Gx660? (Cover an so on)

Thanks

 

I am selling mine if anyone is interested.

 

Any standard notebook bluray drive Tera, pras there is a market section of the forum where selling should be kept =)

 

I use this in mine:

Sony Optiarc <BC-5500 Series>

You will need to use the original drive bezel because the bluray drive bezel wont fit.

 

Hello!

I have been using my gx660 for quite some time now and recently, while thinking about a format, I saw that I got a partition shown in the disk manager, which name is " ╗§ ║╝Ę² ". It has a FAT32 file system and a capacity of 58.56GB (And its shown that it is 100% free, although at closer look it shows that 237MB are in use. Its status is Healthy(System, Active, Primary Partition), while my current C: and the only partition (that I was aware of) is where my copy of Windows 7 is installed and its status is Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition).

If I bought this laptop it had free MS-DOS on it, since I bought it without any OS. Is this the reason of the partition I was not aware of and which is not shown in My Computer? Can I just delete it or may I not as its shown to be a System partition...

GX660 (no R)
i5-460m
500GB 7200rpm HDD
GPU - 5870m
(all stock stuff)

Thank you for you help.
ChiilllY

 

Thank you.

But I am looking for a Blu Ray Writer.

Would this one fix in the Gx660??

BD-5750H - Sony Optiarc America

 

Should be ok. Only swap front flap.

 

Hey all,

Sorry for my first post being this lengthy, but I will try to provide as much info in the hope that you can help.

I've been a happy gx660-284UK owner for almost a year now with the laptop handling every game and task I threw at it.

Recently I've bought Battlefield 3 and started playing it. It turned out to be a less than pleasant experience since I kept getting big fps drops during the game. So i started dialing down the various graphics options, but while the average fps increased the drops still kept occurring regularly.

So I did a bit of research and downloaded msi afterburner to monitor my temperatures. Turns out the card was reaching 100 C and the core clock kept getting throttled to 400 mHz explaining the fps drops. Thus it was obvious that I needed to clean out the fans. I bought a can of compressed air and just gave it a good spray from the outside. I saw some dust coming so I thought all was going well.

I downloaded furmark and did the 15min burn-in test with the peak temperature peaking at 87 C. This was much better and afterburner showed no more throttling. The fps drops in battlefield also stopped.

I ran battlefield as well monitoring the card and the temps usually maxed out at around 81 C, which I was quite happy with and everything ran fine for a day or two. Then the fps drops returned, yet the temp of the card was still only 80 degrees max.

I thought at this point that the drops might just be an optimization problem with the game and played on... until the laptop just shutdown completely. So i decided to check the CPU temps and they were now hitting high 90s on one core and about 15 degrees less on the other. I tested the cpu with prime95 and it became clear that the problem was here since after 5 min the laptop shutdown again.

The symptoms are quite strange since I don't understand how I can have idle 47/49 C on the cores and then after about 10 seconds suddenly be up to 80/93 C. I thought the heating up would be more gradual. After this the temps do go up a bit more steadily to about 82/98 around which the laptop tends to turn off.

Thus I was left with no choice but to open up the laptop and try to clean out the fan again. When I opened the case though I didn't see much dust. I cleaned what I could and put everything back together. When i ran the benchmark or game again I got a slight improvement in that I lasted about 10-15 min in prime95 and maybe 40 min in battlefield before the laptop shutting down, but the temperatures were still atrociously high and reached the 90s quickly. Btw I did all these tests with the turbo fan on.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be the problem here?

EDIT:

Another thing I noticed is that when I go into BIOS the the fan speeds up and within 30 seconds hits full speed.

 

maybe you got a loose heatsink? also make sure your fan speed is normal maybe theres gunk in it(slowing it down). Make sure to give the keyboard and space under the keyboard a good cleaning(usually traps alot of dust).
i repasted my gpu and cpu it worked wonders to my maximum cpu/gpu temps lowering by as much as 15C

 

The loose heatsink does sound plausible considering the air cooling is doing very little to help the problem. I think the fan speed is fine because after I cleaned it my graphics temps max out at around 80C, which I think is quite acceptable. Also the temperature graph looks like a square root function which, unlike the spikes in the cpu temp. I'm including the temp graph from SpeedFan showing the two cores.



Notice that this is all over only a two minute period. The spikes correspond to the cpu throttling itself down to 1.2Ghz

If I were to take off the heatsink and try to re-seat it would I also have to re-paste it?

 

Yes, you would have to repaste. Usually after long periods of time thermal paste will becaume dry and brittle. Reseating the heatsink would cause it to break apart. To make sure you have good contact you will have to repaste. Theres alot of procedures online(videos) on how to properly clean and apply.

edit: i would also recommend using thermal paste that is not electrically conductive even if its not the best in the market. tunic series are pretty good i have used the mx-3 before. Currently i am using the Antec Formula 7 on my gx660 it loweres the temps nicely but theres large temperature differece between my two cpu cores which is strange.

 

hmm anyone had issues playing borderlands...i cant max it out at 1920x1080p...only 1600x900 which only then gives 30-40 fps...this is with no AA and bloom and amient occlusion off aswell i duno just seems strange

 

@yamayee

I was experiencing the same temps as you before i repasted. Exactly the same temps.

If you have a core i5 first gen, make sure not to let the paste ooze over the two little dies.

 

Hmmm I remember that you cant max borderlands at 1920x1080 per se, mostly 30fps if everything goes well.

But! I do remember playing with your same settings except getting higher fps. Maybe your GPU is stuck at 500mhz? Mine did that when I put the PC to sleep then tried to play a game.

I will test later today and let you know my performance with 1920x1080 and 1600x900.

 

well my clocks defiantly clocking to 780/1070 while in game..its not overheating but yeh hit me up with what your gettin so i can compare

 

Huh.... I was playing on Treachers Landing with my lvl 25 char, 1920x1080 res all on, high, except Ambient occlusion and flare outs.

I was having around 45-60fps with the minimum being 40fps for that part, average being alms 50 fps.... I don't remember having such frames.

Funny enough I had the exact same fps with same settings but 1600x900, at least the same part I was playing.

I'm using Cat 11.12, 800/1010 clocks.

I wonder whats up?

 

How much of the extra fps can be accounted for by having the i7 over the i5?

 

yeh well i was gonna assume that as well...well im planning to upgrade it to 920xm in the next couple of months so we shall see then.
and thanks ryzeki for doing that much appreciated

 

I have special bios compatible with all SSD drives . For example Samsung F3 830 seriess only works in IDE mode on msi gx660. I have spent some time to mod bios and it runs SSD in AHCI and RAID mode! On oryginal MSI bios only Intel ssd works in AHCI mode (and some others). My BIOS unlock AHCI for all ssd.


Uploaded with ImageShack.us

 

Good jobz, but it would also be better if you can share it with your fellow GX660 users

 

Of course I was making some tests and bios is 100% stable.
MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service
For more option use ctrl+shift+alt+insert during msi logo.
BTW I was asking msi for help and they didn`t help so I decided to take things in my hands .
All user need to set option like on the picture below (hot plug enabled and port multiplier enabled)


Uploaded with ImageShack.us

 

ha. thats pretty cool well done. shame msi arn't to helpfull

 

You're going to have to re-upload because of the idiot US authorities.

 

LOL ! Time to make some noise people ! They are doing what they want and nobody asking us - ordinary citizens.
Hotfile.com: One click file hosting: mod.rom

 

does it fix problems with bios not detecting for example my phoenix pro ssd?

ps does gx660 have saa 3?(6gb/s) ?
im 99% shure that year a go when i was buying it i read about it and i knowed that yes but now when im seraching about it most pepoul says that no?
thanx a lot
regards

 

No only sataII 3gb/s. Try BIOS and tell us about compatibility. My samsung f3 830 runs very good with modded bios.

 

im not shure if i wanna lose my warranty just to try it;p

 

Nobody lost his warranty with flashing bios. Even bad flashed BIOS is realy hard to prouve but good service guy with skills and good knowledge of post code can check that bios was badly programed. So better wait for updated BIOS from msi maybe they will turn on by default options in bios to resolve problems with ssd drives. They have all instructions how to quick fix problem but as usual they have a lot of time .

 

is this bios also unlcoked?

 

thanks! is it the same

as 1st Gen i7 Notebooks:

GX660x (+rep Geocake for his help!)

30L Original & Unlocked: MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service

or is it onother one?

 

thanx for this mod bios i will try it
i dobout that it will help with problems with standforce ssd controler but mayby
but i see that it have a lot of nice optione is there mayby a way to set fan a litle down? fromdefault 30%at idla to mayby 25?
thanx !

 

BIOS is unlocked in 75% it is 30L mod. There are locked options for overclocking.Full unlocked bios can be achived by pressing 4 magic keys during boot.

 

What does the unlocked BIOS bring to me? Would it add extra features? anything for Intel 920xm?

Right now I have dual RAID 0 Crucial M4, would the BIOS affect anything a bout that?

 

how to flash rom file
can i rename rom file to e16f1ims.30l and fash bios via msi flasher afudos,bioschk,and flash.bat?

 

I flashed the moded bios works great
Thanks!

 

I have Gx660 And lcd full hd display but ..bad contrast ..colors washed out I want to upgrade Display can somebody sugest me which lcd panels 15.6 inch to buy? Is connector the same as Alienware full hd 15.6 lcd Display?Can somebody help me?This forum is great!Thanks!

 

I'd avoid dell displays. The best 15.6" panel is the now somewhat rare AUO B156HW01 V4 (matte) or AUO B156HW01 V7 (glossy)

 

Thank You MEAKER but can you be more specific in what brand laptops I can find those displays?