M4400 BIOS A13 released, UT3 FPS doubled on my FX1700M

Hi!

First of all, I have no idea if this has already been covered on the "Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge" thread, I have not been following it for it getting longer and longer.

So, I opened a new thread to tell everyone that Dell has released BIOS A13 for the M4400. I installed it yesterday, and not only is my machine quieter under light load, its graphics performance is also higher - much higher, actually. I used to think that my FX1700M was not affected by the downclocking, but now I stand corrected. It WAS indeed downclocking heavily as it seems. When I was playing some UT3 a couple of hours ago, I suddenly actually had double(!) the frame rate compared to what I had with BIOS A12. I maxed out some settings to see what would happen, and at settings that I was not able to make it run smooth some weeks ago I now got 30 to 40 frames per second.
This could also be the reason for the fact that the FX1700M has had such a little performance increase compared to the FX770M when benchmarked. The only other game I have installed is UT2004, but that's running capped at 90 FPS anyway, no matter what settings, so I cannot try anything else now.

So for all you out there owning an M4400 you can report you experiences with BIOS revision A13 here. I, personally, am looking forward to reading some experiences from other owners of the FX1700M.

 

Nice lucky 13... I will try once I get my new system up and running. Thanks for the info

 

A13 looks good, no down clocking either with mine.

 

Just installed A13 and both CPU and GPU temps dropped by about 5 degrees at idle!

 

Yay. WOW Wotlk with 50+ frames on medium settings on northend dungeons. YAY!

no downclocking - so far so nice!

 

*prays that a similar BIOS will be released for the E6400 and fixes his overheating problems*

 

It's ALL software related problems...we've had some m4400 owners bail too soon I'm afraid