Does the Overclockable Dell XPS M1710 Deliver?

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by Sinan Karaca

I purchased the new overclockable Dell XPS M1710 gaming laptop, which ships with a &quot;non-roadmap&quot; part from Intel - the T7600G Core 2 Duo processor. This processor is identical to its T7600 brethren, with the only difference being that it is overclockable (and a $275 price premium, which was $350 at my time of purchase).

Dell XPS M1710 (view large image)

Intel probably figured they can squeeze a bit more juice from their Core 2 Duo architecture, so they delivered this part. In Dell’s machine, the overclocking is done through the BIOS, where the following clock speeds are available from a dedicated BIOS screen:

2.33GHz, 2.5GHz, 2.66GHz, 2.83GHz, 3.0GHz, 3.16GHz

Another Dell BIOS setting enables/disables SpeedStep Technology, which is normally used to control processor throttling. Unlike other systems though, this BIOS setting has a diametrically opposite effect on the Dell system: When disabled, it locks your CPU at the 1.0 GHz speed setting - whereas with other laptops, disabling SpeedStep locks the CPU at the maximum clock speed. This fact will become more relevant later on, but is quite surprising in its own right. So the total range of clock speeds supported by the machine comes out to:

1.0GHz, 2.33GHz, 2.5GHz, 2.66GHz, 2.83GHz, 3.0GHz, 3.16GHz

or at least, that's what it looks like on paper. Hint-hint

Preliminary Results

The 3.16 GHz speed setting was unstable, even under regular use of the laptop. However, I was pleased to find out that the 3.0 GHz speed setting did appear to be stable, even when the laptop is put under heavy load. While this was initially very encouraging, I ran into some oddities. In particular, the laptop clocked at 3.0 GHz was actually taking 2 hours to complete a compression task which my control system similarly configured but with a regular T7600 processor clocked at 2.33 GHz, took slightly over 1 hour to complete. Repeated testing confirmed this result, so I was forced to undertake a lengthy investigation - which yieldedsome very disturbing results.

I won't make it a surprise ending for you. Due to a combination of factors, this notebook often ends up performing worse than most of its regularly-clocked counterparts, as we shall soon find out. Some heavy duty tweaking and experimenting is necessary before the overclocking even begins to pay off.

Once the optimal settings are found, Dell's BIOS still does everything it can to get in your way and reduce whatever speed gains you would otherwise obtain from a regular overclocking process. So let’s see what exactly is going on under the hood here...

The Computer that Lies about its True Speed

I normally use CPU-Z to identify the true clock of a processor. This is a rock-solid product that always reports the accurate GHz/MHz of a processor, and dynamically - it correctly updates the reported speeds as Intel's SpeedStep technology throttles the core clock up and down. So you can directly see how your computer is performing under various load conditions. Feel free to grab a copy of CPU-Z here, and try out for yourself:

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

One of the first things that I experienced with this laptop is that the machine actually lies about its own speed. Even when CPU-Z reports 3.0 GHz, the machine would actually be working at a lot less GHz, sometimes as low as 266 MHz! Yes, you read that right - 266 MHz, which I believe was one of the original clock speeds of the Pentium II processor, about a decade ago.

 

While we'll soon find out exactly how that disaster happens, the tool that correctly reports the processor speed is called RMClock. This tool seems to be the only one on the entire web which Dell’s XPS BIOS cannot fool.

http://cpu.rightmark.org/products/rmclock.shtml

Leave it to your trusty Russian hackers to figure out the truth As you can see in the screenshot above, the tool captures the reported clock speed, the real clock speed, the temperature, and the voltage of each CPU core, real-time, and graphs it out like Task Manager's resource utilization charts.

The Computer that Doesn't Want You Setting its Speed

Another one of my trusty tools which has stood the test of time until Dell's overclockable XPS is SpeedSwitch XP:

http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/

This great tool puts you in charge of your CPU's speed, instead of having Windows with its cryptic and obscure power management settings run the show. It has 4 modes of operation: Maximum Performance, Maximum Battery, Battery Optimized, and Performance Optimized. With the last two normal throttling does occur, with the first two the processor is locked at the fastest and lowest speeds respectively, so you know what you’re getting. With games and other resource intensive tasks, I've always seen performance gains when running under Maximum Performance. And to turn that annoying CPU fan off, or to maximize battery life, nothing beats Maximum Battery.

SpeedSwitch doesn't use any magic; it just internally creates and manages Windows power profiles, without having you pull your hair out. These profiles produce the desired result, and all you ever do is just choose the performance mode you want in plain English. Unfortunately, with this Dell system, the tool had no effect. In fact, it was so powerless, that even CPU-Z reported idling CPU clocks (1.0 GHz being the lowest for this model) when Maximum Performance was set in the tool (expected GHz being 3.0).

So again, I had to scout around and find another tool which could force the right speed setting. Notebook Hardware Control to the rescue:

http://www.pbus-167.com/

Just like RMClock, this great tool is able to bypass whatever custom protection Dell's BIOS has, and imposes one of the 4 performance modes mentioned earlier forcibly. As an added benefit, it also adjusts the core CPU voltage...which became a vital need down the road. So, kudos to the makers of Notebook Hardware Control!

First Accurate Results, Recorded without Voltage Regulation

Armed with the right tools for the task, let’s take a look at some results. All screenshots were captured live on the Dell machine. The program used to stress the machine is 7-Zip, which is unique in that it can perform dual core compression (or n-core compression, for that matter). If you're still using RAR, or - gasp - ZIP, 7-Zip provides better compression with faster speeds thanks to its dual core features. For our purposes however, we don't really care about the compression so much, just the fact that it will fully utilize both processor cores. I used the CompreXX shell around 7-Zip which makes the tool a little easier to configure:

http://www.CompreXX.com/

As you can see in the following screenshots, without voltage regulation, the following happens:

Rising temperatures and drops in clock speed directly correlated

 

Peak temperature appears to be 93.2 Celsius before BIOS-forced throttling begins

 

The lowest speed I was able to observe was 266 MHz – yes, .2 GHz!

 

The average clock speed during full-power compression comes out to slightly less than 1.0 GHz!

 

1. The CPU seems to have a peak temperature tolerance of about 93(C).
2. This temperature is achieved within the first two minutes of full system load (for both cores).
3. As soon as this temperature is reached, the BIOS forces the CPU to throttle down.
4. No tool that I have been able to find can prevent this forced throttling.
5. Only the RMClock tool is able to even detect that the throttling is occurring at all.
6. While the throttling occurs, the voltage fed to the CPU remains the same.
7. Thus temperatures stay more or less constant.
8. CPU speeds fall dramatically and linearly over time, as low as 266 GHz.
9. As the CPU cools off, Dell’s BIOS slowly increases the core clock speed again.
10. As the core clock goes up, so does the heat. Another cool-off cycle begins, and the same mechanism repeats thereon after.
11. The CPU returns to its maximum speed only when the processor starts idling again, which is quite useless since when idle, the CPU isn’t even being used!

This explains why the laptop performed twice as bad as its lower clocked, on-the-roadmap 2.33 GHz counterpart! But what it doesn't explain is:

1. How is Dell achieving this magical under performance? My guess is its some kind of BIOS magic - the BIOS not only lies about the true system speed, gets in your way of setting its performance to a desired level; it also actively and un-overridably underclocks the machine.
2. Is Dell not aware that at best, this is a bug? I can understand that whatever mechanism they have put in there is to protect the machine from overheating. However, the mechanism is flawed, because even at 266 GHz clock speeds, it is still being fed the full voltage of the 3.0 GHz clock speed. Needless to say, this doesn't help much with the cooling.
3. Has Dell never tested this system in the real world? At worst, this can be thought of as false advertising, because while the BIOS and a plethora of other Windows tools report a 3.0 GHz clock, the system is running at extremely low speeds, resulting in extremely undesirable performance.

In the last analysis, especially with an overclockable system, it's extremely disappointing to see that Dell is &quot;doing what's best&quot; for you, deciding on your behalf. While they obviously do this to reduce the number of fried computers and support calls, their implementation is buggy. This results in an almost unusable system for all practical purposes.

It is also important to mention that with most synthetic benchmarks, and especially those that exercise only one processor core, the heating problem isn't as bad, and the underclocking isn't as bad. This might be why Dell's own engineers failed to discover this major issue with their system - yet, this excuse would be worse than the disease, if indeed the cause

Methodology for a Cure

Since the issue seems to be heating, and how Dell is forcibly lowering the CPU clock to countermand that, I figured the only chances of getting more juice out of this computer is lowering the CPU voltage. That way it might be possible to delay heating and actually receive some kind of performance gain.

Initial tests with lowered voltage

 

System idling before beginning work

 

After barely two minutes of dual core compression, system takes to underclocking

 

Extended compression consistently lowers processor speed, even beyond its rated clock speed of 2.33 GHz, despite voltage control

 

Occasionally, the CPU does return to faster clock speeds – even touching its peak of 3.0 GHz - but only briefly

 

The system returns to the true speed it always reports, 3.0 GHz, only after the CPU has been idled – not much use at that point!

 

The maximum tolerated temperatures before BIOS-forced underclocking occurs is about 82 degrees Celsius – about 10 degrees lower than when native CPU voltages are used

Complications

Lowering voltage has the undesired side effect of making the system unstable. If you go too low, you will start seeing odd crashes with programs that are currently running. Fortunately, the Notebook Hardware Tool can be used to bump up voltage dynamically as this happens, so at least you don't need to reboot your system every time that happens. Even then though, the process is time consuming and error prone.

Another issue that affects voltage is the number of USB devices that you have connected to the system. In particular, devices which do not have their own external power source seem to cause some issues. They dramatically reduce the tolerance of low voltages, making your system unstable a lot sooner. Unplugging these devices seems to let your system go down to lower voltages safely.

A final issue that I ran into was that my voltage which had worked well initially &quot;degraded&quot; over time. The initial voltage I settled at, after substantial trial and error, was 1.3125V. This yielded, in my real world usage, only a 4 minute time savings compared to the 2.33 GHz control machine. However, after a couple weeks I found out that even this voltage was causing rapid overheating. The new &quot;stable&quot; low voltage seems to be 1.2750V. It's interesting to note that this voltage was previously unstable, but now it appears to be stable, and any higher voltage still causes dramatic heating issues. Again, the real world benefit is only about 4 minutes, the same that the previous &quot;stable&quot; voltage had yielded. I don't know if this last issue means the CPU is fried, or something else. I find that unlikely, as I run the processor at the lowest speed setting most of the time (forced with Notebook Hardware Control). So it might just be another mystery.

Best results I was able to obtain – an average clock of 2.4 GHz with a very low voltage of 1.275V

 

Low voltage set through Notebook Hardware Control

 

A momentary lapse of BIOS interference

 

Throttling resumes, inevitably

 

Best-case long term powergraph; sustained speed is barely 2.4 GHz

Final Results

As seen in the screenshots, even with optimal voltage settings, the system averages a core speed of 2.4 GHz at best. It keeps fluctuating between 3.0 GHz and 2.0 GHz in an attempt to &quot;cool&quot; its heat. Our reduced voltage certainly helps with this, but the net result is just about 60 MHz of real overclocking.

The system simply performs as a 2.4 GHz machine overall - and that is, with multiple utilities, tweaking, and crashes in between on the road to getting there. I’m going to have to call this a disappointment.

Additional Experiments

I tried two other types of experiments. The first was to attempt to get 3.16 GHz to run stably through reduced voltage. This never worked. The second was to try out the lower speeds, starting with 2.83, and scaling slowly down, to find a sweet-spot where the BIOS might not interfere, and where one might see more than a 4 minute performance improvement on a task that takes 60 minutes on a 2.33 GHz machine. Unfortunately, even at the lower speed settings, the BIOS continued stepping in to &quot;cool&quot; the machine.

It seems inevitable that, when you are utilizing both CPU cores, heating will occur. Heating is a natural process that cannot be prevented with any processor, after all. The moment that happens, Dell's BIOS steps in and under-clocks the system, without reducing its voltage. The slower your original clock, the worse your overall performance. So 3.0 GHz appears to be the sweet-spot after all.

Closing Remarks (to Dell)

It is my hope that someone from Dell would read this article, and publish a BIOS update, or something similar, to solve the problem. I get the feeling they had the best intentions in trying to prevent people from frying their systems, but their implementation is so poor, that without special tools, the CPU throttles all the way down to 266 GHz (hey, that might be an interesting battery life technology there). And even with lots of patience and tweaking, the CPU barely manages 2.4 GHz on average. This is not the CPU's fault - it seems like one solid piece of hardware - but the BIOS.

Most programs fooled by Dell’s BIOS into reporting incorrect clock speeds

If the Dell engineers manage to at least feed lowered voltages to the CPU as they forcibly underclock it, I suspect it will be a lot quicker for the CPU to cool down, and therefore a quicker return to faster speeds. At a minimum this obvious bug in their implementation must be fixed. Above that, I would like to see them stop lying about the real clock speed of the processor, and to add in an option that disables the BIOS throttling mechanism altogether, leaving the machine to Intel SpeedStep's native devices, which seem to work just fine on every other system. I’d rather suffer system crashes in exchange for predictability in clock speeds – compared to the BIOS lowering my system clock all the way down to 266 MHz in exchange for “crash-free reliability”!

If you have one of these machines, please install the tools, and report your own findings. Hopefully with this article you can squeeze every bit of performance from your XPS M1710 machine - despite Dell's best efforts to not let you do so!

 

Okay, a system that drags itself down to 266MHz is unheard of, let alone for a machine sold as an overclockable system that you pay a premium price of $3K+ for. All I can say is WOW! I thought Dell had already gotten a ton of slack on this issue and can't believe they've seemingly botched it again.

Did you try contacting Dell about this? It seems all of your efforts have been individual research based on this review. And well done on all of this research, it's obvious you put a lot of time into it.

 

I bet the thermal throttling is being done by the CPU itself, and has nothing to do with the BIOS. The CPU will take steps to protect itself no matter what, and 93C is definitely high even for a mobile part.

The laptops cooling just isn't up to it. The voltage issue is a Dell thing, but as you saw, even when reducing the voltage as much as possible, the laptop heat sink + fan just can't move the heat fast enough.

This is a clear cut case of putting a part in a chassis that puts it outside its thermal envelope. It makes me doubt if Dell even TESTED it before selling it to you.

 

'botched' would be an understatement. I understand why they have the aggressive BIOS underclocking/cooling; they don't want you to fry your precious new $3000 system while overclocking. I daresay that while it is alright that it underclocks, one would think 266MHz is just a *tad* bit on the slow side. Combining that with the fact that the voltage isn't lowered (thats bad for both heat and battery life [which may be unimportant to an XPS user, but still]) makes this seem all the more ridiculous.

I hope they get a fix out for it soon!

 

I find it hard to believe that this laptop could not effectively cool the processor. After all, ton's of users with "normal" chips do not have this issue, and this 17" monster does house one of the best GPUs out there.

At worst, setting the BIOS to not overclock should have configured the system to be error free...but according to these tests something is still very wrong.

Regardless of thermal envelopes, Dell should be testing these notebooks for stability at those clock speeds before even releasing the system into the market. Shame on Dell, if they did screw up here, for not really testing it the way they should.

You are not the only one to have ever had a problem with Dell BIOS. I could not use the "wake-up feature" on my Dell BIOS on my old machine because it would constantly wake itself up at odd times during the night...which isn't nice when you're living in a small dorm room and you cannot isolate your computer.

But yes, something does seem screwy here...and possibly the best option you have is to return this laptop and get one without the overclocked processor.

 

they need to shove that chip into a inspiron 9100 formfacter if It could cool a extreme edition P4 then it could cool that.

 

Very true!

 

I think you have to use Arctic Silver, along with a Pacific Breezer or something to get better results.It seems that when C2D CPU's go under heavy load they suck much more power than they have said in the TDP...
Mobile intel parts are extremely overpriced, So intel always did it's best to prevent overclocking.Now that they added this capability to their top of the line CPU (after they got all the money they could get from someone and charged him for unlocking the multipliers too) all they give out it this...

 

I almost sounds like there is a hardware issue with the machine. From the data I see it appears the CPU is shutting down so as not to self destruct. To me it sounds like there is an issue with either the CPU or more likely the heatsink and fans. I would check to make sure there is good contact between the CPU and heatsink. Even better I would suggest some AS or a good thermal pad (I've had better luck with pads in notebooks). What are the fans doing when these tests are ran? Are they controlled by the BIOS or a different program such as fangui? Maybe there is a BIOS issue that is causing the fans to not run at the proper speed? The idle temps are way too high. I had a 1710 a few months ago, albeit with a normal 2.3 GHz, and it idled at 40-45 C. Sounds to me like the cooling solution can't handle the load.

 

Can you not just disable speed step, so the CPU will not underclock itself? I did that with my desktops CPU, but I'm sure it is much different.

 

so all u have to do is buy a freezer like cooler that keeps the laptop super cool, therefore preventing the cpu to clock down.

 

Ok I understand the test and review
but what i dont understand is why dont you ask for a full refund?

you have all the information to show dell this thing is bogus

thats the part of the story I dont understand.

And the other thing is if this thing overheats int the xps 1710 it has to be even worse in the alienware 5790

 

The way I understand it, is it overclocks via the multiplier. Now Core 2 Duo's are "quad pumped" so 166x4 would be the effective FSB - ~667Mhz. So the lowest it could go is 166Mhz, if the multiplier was changed to 1x. But 266Mhz is between 166Mhz and 332Mhz. Speed step also works via multiplier, so I don't know how in the world 266Mhz is possible.

Also, a C2D running @ 266Mhz is well faster than a P2 @ 266Mhz. More like a P3 500-600Mhz. Still quite slow.

 

I think the problem is that his CPU is overheating and shutting down. That is controlled within the CPU itself. You can't over ride that setting. The solution to the problem requires getting the CPU to run cooler.

 

Well you should at least be able to tell it to not underclock under the stock 2.33Ghz...

 

The throttling is something like panicking for the CPU the previous Presscott CPU's throttled to half the clock when they got too hot (before downclocking further) so it's something of an improvement.This seems to be a common design idea between all their CPU's.
And AFAIK the maximum thermal endurance for Core 2 Duo is 100*C...

 

With every other laptop that I've used, and I've been through a few, disabling speedstep does exactly that - lock the CPU at the fastest speed that you bought it for. But as I wrote in the article, with this Dell system, it locks it at the slowest speed (~1 GHz). Which leads me to conclude in the first place that Dell's BIOS is the culprit of the issues here, and not the processor, which really appears to be a solid part when its *allowed* to run fast by the BIOS

 

Unlikely. Without voltage control, the CPU slow-down occurs at 93 degrees. With voltage control, the CPU slow-down occurs at 82 degrees. The results aren't consistent. I would think if its a hardware issue, the CPU would either reset the machine, or it would crash first before frying etc - what happens on every other overheating machine that I've seen.

Are there any users of this system with their own feedback? It'd be great if you could run the same tools I found and see if the results are consistent with mine. That would help further refine our understanding.

 

Fascinating. Something is seriously wrong.

However, I think it would have been useful to have included the usual SuperPi and PCMark05 benchmarks for this 3GHz machine just so people can see how bad things are.

I would much prefer to have one of these CPUs with an unlocked minimum voltage and frequency and see how slow they will go without falling over.

John

 

The thermal system in the laptop is designed to handle up to 2.33 GHz. Power consumption/heat dissipation begins to rise faster then clock speed when overclocking a Core 2 Duo. So you slap a 3 GHz CPU in there and expect the same cooling system to be able to do the job? No way - that doesn't make physical sense.

Uhm... P4s and C2Ds will downclock to protect themselves if they get outside the thermal envelope. The crashing or resetting is a function of the BIOS or other components on the motherboard overheating and causing instability.

Haven't you ever seen the video where they pull the entire HSF off a desktop P4 ? The game being run during the test slows to a crawl, but the system doesn't crash, and normal operation is resumed when the HSF is put back on.

There was a good thread on Silent PC Review where they were discussing how C2D CPUs report temperature. The CPU itself has a thermal diode that only reports how close it is to thermal throttling - it doesn't report an absolute temperature like AMD CPUs do. It's up to the motherboard/program being run to take that and turn it into 'degrees C'. It's quite possible that the calibration of that changes with different input voltages. It's a design decision to do this - the motherboard manufacturers can just connect the diode directly into their cooling solution and use it to spin the fan up and down.

I still believe what you are seeing is hardware throttling of the CPU to protect itself from damage. It looks exactly like that in RMClock. It also explains why other CPU speed monitoring programs don't see the difference - the CPU is in panic mode and it is not reporting what it is doing to protect itself. Here's an rticle that covers the original version of the thermal throttling in P4s:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/intel-thermal-features/atmm1.html

Here's what they saw:



If you run the Intel Thermal Analysis Tool ( http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/392/mirrors.php) it will tell you for sure if the CPU is thermal throttling itself.

At any rate, I'd return for a refund.

 

Wow, that RMClock article was very interesting! I will also install the Intel tool from the link you provided and report my further findings. Thanks!

 

Great review and analysis! =) Very detailed!

I wonder if any other Dell systems suffer from this problem? I think we all can take the video game industry as an example of how testing is done in the real world these days. Dell likely just chucked this system out to the public with only enough testing to make sure it "works". For $3000+ I would be beyond furious. Definitely record as much information as you can and then send this thing back to Dell for a full refund. This sort of performance is NOT what you paid for. Reporting the CPU frequency wrong is below the belt too.

I had hoped this wasn't something being done in the PC industry, but I wonder how many other things have been incorrectly advertised by carrying higher specs than what they actually have? In the constant push for more speed, more power, and more versatility, there isn't anyone stepping in to comfirm companies like Dell, Intel, and others are actually delivering what they promise. It's scarey how easy it is for them to just chuck something out to the market, charge a huge premium, and have it perform half as well as what it was supposed to be.

 

...did you SERIOUSLY try to overclock more by REDUCING the voltage?

Have you ever overclocked before? You won't achieve stability by lowering the voltage unless you've got headroom!

It's clear that the thing just needs better cooling, but it's a laptop so you've really got to be realistic about it.

 

I applaud your detailed article. I couldn't help noticing a small typo in your post though.

" that without special tools, the CPU throttles all the way down to 266 GHz"

It is repeated quite often too

Again, I applaud your perseverence to get to the bottom of this.

 

Wow those are some pretty disappointing results.

I expected something slightly different after reading this review of the T7600G:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2113238,00.asp

 

I noticed that as well. Great review by the way! Really enjoyed it. It would be nice if it did "throttle all the way down to 266 GHz".

 

LOL! That's pretty funny I *did* proof-read...I guess can't get everything

 

Something should be done!

Will it?

No!

Unless of course you make it public , i.e. by posting on Dell's suggestion site/sending it to the inquirer !

 

I think something is reading the clock speed wrong. I'm pretty sure that it's physically impossible to reach a 266MHz clock speed since the lowest multiplier in any Merom based chip is 6x which means that there is no way Merom's can clock lower than 1GHz through underclocking, SpeedStep or throttling.

Throttling is controlled by the CPU itself and is implemented in 2 steps in modern Intel processors. I believe the way it's done on Merom is that once a certain temperature threshold is reached, TM2 kicks in and will begin downclocking the CPU through SpeedStep. This should involve drops in both clock speeds and core voltages. If the CPU reaches the lowest the lowest multiplier (6x in Banias, Dothan, Yonah, Merom, etc. or 14x in Prescott and Smithfield or 12x in Presler) and the temperature is still the same or rising than the old TM1 method is implemented. This maintains the lowest multiplier, but begins filling the instruction queue with empty clock cycles. Since the processor won't be actually processing anything it should cool down. If is still doesn't and the temperature continues to rise then the chip will automatically shut down.

 

ltcommander_data: Totally agree.

No way in hell this processor can go to 266MHz. A Core Duo ULV cannot even go below 800MHz (one of my major gripes about the chip in fact). The only case where I can see it POSSIBLY lowering to such a slow clock is if the computer is overheating (again 166mhz would be morelikely than 266). Even then the notebook doesnt have to go down to 266MHz. Iv played with RMClock alot before and sometimes the readings on it can be wrong. In fact I would trust the CPU-Z reading more than the RMClock read. It would have been VERY helpful if you just did some benchmarks on the 266MHz. SuperPi would be great. That way you can tell easily which reading is the correct one. Also was this done under Vista or XP?

p.s.

It will take alot longer than 2x the time if the CPU was at 266MHz. In fact you will be hard pressed to run WinXP at that speed.

 

I think the original reviewer has unrealistic expectations. You want a 700 mhz overclock on a mobile processor using stock laptop cooling? You've got to be kidding me. You sound outraged that the machine isn't stable at 3000 mhz, and the fact that when the CPU reaches 93 degrees it tries to save itself from burning up seems to piss you off. The way I see it, kudos to the CPU and/or BIOS for taking measures to protect itself from your completely stupid, dangerous, and unrealistic overclock. Yes, Dell sells its 7600G processor at a premium, but at no point do they make any sort of performance guarantee. Just because a processor is unlocked doesn't mean it has headroom for overclocking, and just because the cooling system is fine under stock conditions doesn't mean you should expect more. Dell's responsibility ends at stability under stock conditions. That extra $275 you paid is for the unlocked processor ONLY, you are not paying for guaranteed overclocking headroom, nor are you paying for guaranteed overclocking stability. It's different if the machine is FACTORY overclocked, like a Dell XPS 710 desktop, but that's not the case here. And I agree with rwei, trying to cool your overclock by reducing voltage is a horrible idea. If you have no headroom or adequate cooling, just don't try to overclock, period.

 

Can anyone actually confirm that there is a "T7600G" in this Dell laptop? After some research over the net "T7600G" does not appear to exist. Nobody else, including Intel, has it anywhere (except the Dell-owned Alienware). It appears this is just one of the oldest tricks in the book and something I recall Alienware loves to do. It appears as if the $275 premium (if not higher) is NOT for a better piece of hardware. It's just for a different bios that allows you to reconfigure the CPU clock settings. As far as I can tell, unless someone takes a snapshot of this thing in the flesh, that the "T7600G" is either a regular T7600 or even a lower model clocked up plus the premium price tag. I know Dell is in financial trouble and taking advantage of gamers is one of those popular things companies do.

Even if the clock speeds are getting read incorrectly, that doesn't explain why the "T7600G" would be beaten out by a T7600 running the same task. It's not even a close result according to this review. Also, we know how popular pin-modding was back on the earlier Pentium-M's. It's entirely possible Dell just took some lower model CPU and used this bios and possibly something else to create a false impression of a higher model CPU. That would save Dell money just like how people used to save money overclocking Athlon 1600+'s (cheap) up to 2400+ (double the price at least) speeds. I wouldn't put this past Dell. Hey, Sony did this same stunt on some of their notebooks many years ago and got caught. Dig deeper and I bet you'll catch Dell in a similar situation.

T7600G, a Dell exclusive that Intel doesn't recognize, no other vendor or OEM sells on their models with the exception of the Dell subsidiary Alienware who admits right away "T7600G Overclocked to 2.66GHz" and "Run the Intel Core 2 Duo T7600G processor at a silky-smooth speed of 2.33GHz or punch it up to 2.66GHz by easily turning overclocking on or off! Performance upgrade? Oh yeah." Doesn't sound like there's a different CPU. It sounds like you don't need to hex edit the system internals to overclock. My old XPS Gen 2 locked you out of overclocking unless you could hex edit.

 

thank you quiong! I think mods need to take a look at this "review" or whatever it's called because it's just full of inaccuracies, and no one seems to realize it. Some newbie is going to try to overclock their laptops, find some way to circumvent thermal protection and burn down their house if they read this.

 

I'm pretty sure the T7600G exists. Even Dell couldn't lie about it and get away with it. Besides, Intel has lots of processors that they don't officially advertise. All the cut-down models like the T2250 never show up on Intel's website and the 3GHz Clovertons with 1333MHz FSBs that Apple uses in the Mac Pro also don't show up on Intel's website.

Also, I don't think the review claims the T7600G is slower than the T7600 at the same clock speeds. It's just when the T7600G is clocked too high that it overheats and throttles at which point the CPU is spinning empty cycles which is why it performs slower than stock speeds. This was backed up by the Extreme Tech review. The laptop just doesn't have enough cooling to run at 3GHz or 3.17GHz properly which shouldn't be a shock since even desktop Extreme Editions aren't running that high yet.

 

Read the review at extremetech, might be ur system that is messed up. They got pretty huge performance boosts.

 

Is there a newer version of this tool somewhere? It wouldn't run on the overclocked Dell machine. Shuts down right after loading up, no error messages shown any time.

 

Is this some kind of Dell-sponsored effort to discredit the review?

I've reported everything in facts only. Instead of calling the findings stupid, you both should try to stick to the facts.

Otherwise, you're only making yourself look stupid by talking about a laptop which you don't even have physical access to.

 

I would like to send this to the Inquirer! How does one go by doing that?

 

Quote from that review:
Here's where we run into an interesting anomaly: The scores at the highest clock speed for the standard test are barely faster than at 2.83GHz. The CPU scores are actually lower at 3.17GHz than at 2.83GHz. This behavior is repeatable. What's going on?

Even at idle, the system fans are spinning at nearly top speed when running the system at 3.17GHz. When the 3DMark06 CPU tests kicked in, the fans got even louder, yet the scores dropped. We believe that the Core 2 Duo CPU was throttling down at some stages of the benchmark, which of course will affect performance.

This seems to confirm my findings. But why are my findings more extreme?

One of the first things I stated in my review is that I was using a dual-core compression tool. Most of these synthetic benchmarks utilize a single core, in particular SuperPi (I'm not sure about the 3D ones). In my real-world application that I purchased this notebook for, both CPU cores are fully utilized.

And that's how we go down to 266 MHz - MHz with an M

 

I don't know if there is a newer version of TAT available - it wasn't even supposed to be publicly available, so I doubt it.

 

This review is already public. The question whether to bring it to wider attention. I've just emailed the link to this review to L'inq. Let's see if they bite.

John

 

You may be right, but again I wouldn't put it past Dell, plus this is one of Alienware's old tricks. Don't forget about the 0% financing to "well qualified customers" using the Dell Financial Services thing 2 years ago. I never met a well qualified customer and have/had a FICO credit score that should have put me into that category. Plus, their current financial trouble and market loss makes this appear like the perfect little stunt to net them extra money. I probably never would have come to this conclusion had I not gone through "Dell hell" with my system.

If someone does open up their XPS M1710 to do stuff with the CPU, please confirm what model it actually says it is.

 

Before blowing a gasket and shouting to the world, have you tried adequately cooling your laptop whilst testing? And contacting Dell? You may have a faulty system.

Processors will become unstable and downclock if they are pushed too far. That looks exactly like what is happening here.

 

This is John, a Customer Advocate at Dell headquarters in Round Rock. I must admit that the article and the comments it generated are both very fascinating reading. Given the tone of the original post and the ensuing conversation, I felt it was necessary to chime in and hopefully alleviate any confusion.

The first item I'd like to address is the overclocking itself and the results as given in the original post. While it is true that the T7600G does allow overclocking on this system, it is important to note that overclocking may cause system instability and/or thermal problems. As a result, Dell only recommends and supports overclocking on this system for overclocking to bin +1, or 2.58 GHz. Any overclocking beyond this will see various results, and is not something we support or recommend.

The original poster was overclocking this system far beyond this supported speed, to bin +4. As a result, his CPU core temperature was rising to dangerous levels, and the chipset was clocking the processor down in order to prevent damage. This, far from being a design problem, actually prevented processor or other component damage to the poster's system. I would recommend he step his overclocking down a bit in order to improve system performance overall. If he were to see similar results when clocking the processor to bin +1, then I would recommend he contact our support to troubleshoot.

The second item I'd like to address is the documented experience with Speedstep. By simply disabling Speedstep in the BIOS, it is possible to see various results depending upon which power scheme is selected in Windows XP. To completely disable Speedstep not only must it be disabled in the BIOS, but "Always On" must be the selected power scheme. If both of these things are true, then Speedstep will be disabled.

As for the use of third party tools to monitor processor performance, we can't really vouch for the accuracy of any particular third party tool, nor can we support their use. I believe that comments from other people on this thread demonstrate quite adequately the vastly differing opinions and experiences with the tools that the original poster used for his review.

All in all, though the review was interesting reading, it voiced dissatisfaction with the system based upon attempting to push the system far further than we actually promised it would go, and then further dissatisfaction after attempting to disable Speedstep in an incorrect manner. I hope that this clears the air a bit.

For those who are interested, Dell Community Forums has an entire section devoted to overclocking Dell systems: http://www.dellcommunity.com/supportforums/board?board.id=game_overclock

John
Dell Customer Advocate

 

Thanks to the folks at Dell for stepping in and explaining the company's take on this issue and recommendations. While some might be disappointed that overclocking to 3.0GHz is not supported regardless of the 7600G, it's understandable. I wonder if there's anything included in the documentation shipped with the system indicating exactly what is and isn't supported.

 

Thanks for stepping in, John. As the official voice of Dell, I would like you to help clear up some confusing results...

About Speedstep, I have already tried what you said. I disabled it in the BIOS, and I did set the Windows power scheme to Always On. This is not explicitly mentioned in the article, but it had no effect. The processor was still locked at 1.0 GHz speed.

This was one of the original reasons I suspected your custom BIOS might be doing something a little extra behind the scenes...

Another reason being that the thermal thresholds are not consistent. Without voltage manipulation, the CPU starts throttling down to 266 MHz at 93 degrees (celsius). With voltage manipulation, the CPU starts throttling down at 82 degrees.

Can you offer any explanation for the above oddities? At least, why Speedstep locks processor speed at the lowest setting? I understand your policies may prevent you from answering the second issue.

 

If it cannot handle the higher overclocking options then why offer them?

 

Well, the largest issue here is 'how can this system at least be OCed to bin+1". It is definitely nice to see John from Dell here, and to him I want to say remain involved with NBR and you'll be surprised at what you can learn to make your systems better!

 

Well, if it can get to 2.58GHz on stock cooling, I imagine it could go higher with a cooling pad.

 

Our BIOS is written in a slightly different manner than indicated in Intel related online documentation. Turning Speedstep off in the BIOS places the system in the lowest performance state, and this is actually stated on the BIOS screen where the feature can be disabled from. While you are correct that this is different than Intel's documentation, I have seen from testing here that if you enable Speedstep in the BIOS and then change the power profile to "always on", the processor will stay in the highest performance state perpetually. Turning off Speedstep will result in the CPU running at 1.0 GHz, sort of like a "safe mode". This is obviously not what you're looking for, so my previous answer wouldn't really give you the desired end result. Try turning Speedstep on and setting the unit to "always on". I am sure you'll get what it is you're after. Looking at my previous post, it was incorrect of me to say you were disabling Speedstep improperly, but instead I should have said it was incorrect to disable Speedstep to gain the result you desired. As a side note, OS Speedstep support provides the mechanism used to overclock the CPU in the first place, so turning off Speedstep will actually block overclocking in the OS.

As for the voltage regulation, disabling a feature the system BIOS uses to regulate the performance of the CPU could cause some problems with CPU throttling. Tampering with this using third party utilities isn't really what I would recommend. Engineering has told me that at 80C our BIOS is designed to throttle the processor for 8 seconds in an attempt to bring the core temperature back down to safer levels, and the throttling continues if safer levels aren't reached. Having your CPU run at temperatures higher than 80C could result in some very disheartening STOP errors.

I would recommend you test applications at all speeds from 2.33Ghz up to 3.16Ghz, and select the speed that provides the optimal performance. The highest CPU speed may not provide the highest performance for some applications. It's one of the many reasons that overclocking is considered by many to be an art form.