Acer Aspire 1830t i5 430 worse 3d than 1810tz !!!!! HELP !!

Hi there , i just bought an Acer 1830t with i5 cpu , and gave my 1810tz to my girlfriend , this is my experience after 3 days of tests:

i havent really noticed any particular performance increase , under win7 64bit ... both laptop have 4gb of ram .

what disappointed me most , is that we both play world of warcraft game and while previously with my 1810tz i was able to play very smoothly at low details, now , with this so great 1830t cpu i5 and 4gb of ddr3 , believe it or not , the game runs WORSE than on the 1810t

i downloaded 3dmark06 and run the benchmark it says 1259 but i wasnt able to compare it to anything , so , basically world of warcraft was my 3d test , and it sucked , really , i cant even play the game at low settings.... i reinstalled all drivers , still the same.

i could try by formatting all and reinstall win7 from zero without all the acer pre-installed , using the graphic drivers from the intel directly , but i think it wont make any difference... and i dont think it-s a hardware issue since everything else works so well....

since the 1810tz had the hd updated to a 7200rpm while the 1830t has a 5400rpm , but im sure 2000rpm more will not make any difference in 3d performance.

im very very disappointed , i mean , i could have bought another second hand 1810tz ... much better !!!

if anyone has a clue why my 1830t is worse than a 1810tz please help me out !!!!

 

that's strange: that i5 should have the intel HD graphic chipset (hm55), while you should have an intel 4500mhd.

On paper it should performs much better than yours.

 

It is not worse than the 1810, it must be to do with some settings of your laptop. I played SC2 fine on low settings 1360*768. The HDD speed is only needed for loading times, it should not effect FPS.
Can you take a look at your CPU frequency and load when playing the game? Maybe another program interferes with it. How are your energy saving options in windows and the intel driver?
As for 3D Mark 2006, I get 1290 with my i3.

 

i know ! on the paper mine should almost run double than the previous...

anyway , i also run a freeware benchmark (novabench) , on both laptops, and it shows this on my 1830t i5

3766MB system ram
-ram speed 4025 mb/s

(so i guess the intel hd card sucks about 320MB ram dedicated ...! ?? or should it suck more ?)

cpu test score 208 (while it does 90 or something on the 1810tz)

graphic test score 13 , 3d frames per second 49 at 800x600
(the 1810tz running same bench does score 9 , )

drive write speed 58/mbs

now i woder if there is any hidden option to change the amount of dedicated RAM to the videocard ! , or any sort of virtual memory ...

well thanks guys if u have any suggestion , i think i will be doing a nice format c: soon , before going to ask explanation from the vendor..

greetings from taiwan .

 

If I understand the Intel IGP correctly, it has 128mb dedicated RAM and the rest is variably used up by the system.
My only suggestion I have atm would be to set all energy saving options to maximum performance, disable every saving option and plug it in while having the battery removed. If that doesn't get you decent frame rates, something is seriously fishy :/.

 

Hi,

Is this really own memory, independent from the system memory (similar to "sideport memory" of some AMD chipsets)? Or is this still a part of the system RAM that simply cannot be influenced?

Michael

 

Hm. I did think it was dedicated RAM like ATI sideport memory. I went by what Acer used on their website, for example:
Products
"Integrated Intel® HD Graphics (128MB dedicated memory)"
But I cannot find anything on the Intel website or in reviews about the Core Arrandale chips. I don't think any Intel IGPs have dedicated video RAM anymore. What they do have as an advantage over their old companions is that they are much nearer to the memory controller, since they are both on-die. That helps with latency and bandwidth I guess.
Sorry.

 

guys , i may have found out what the problem was : after reinstalling everything from ZERO , even changed the hard drive , i put a 7200rpm instead of the stock one. so installed win7 x64 from scratch, and put all the INTEL DRIVERS , not that crap modified by acer... acer doesnt even have the last driver for graphic card on his website (6 months ago last one) , while intel has monthly updates...

it now performs much better (especially in 3d), even though i cant say the 3d is almost 2x more powerful than the 1810tz , as it was said in the reviews...

in any case it seems the driver was the problem, as for the rest , i havent encountered any other issues so far... ye the only thing is that i was expecting something better in graphic...

so what i can suggest to other ACER 1830T users is to absolutely REMOVE all the crap installed by acer when you buy the machine , do a format , reinstall everything with intel drivers from intel website!!!

i'll be testing the machine on other application these days ... will let you know if anything else fishy comes up...

 

That's why I was asking. Could be also marketing speech

Michael

 

Intel uses DVMT on the GMA series. It's 128MB is allocated by the driver, but never actually "dedicated". It runs Aero on usually 8-16MB of Memory.

 

Hi,

Well, that's what I think also.
I was asking since Acer is advertising their 1810

and the 1830

which is really misleading if a fixed part of the system's memory is meant instead of a separate memory chip.

Michael

 

Well with Intel's GMA, it's never going to be dedicated on a seperate memory chip. It will ALWAYS be a bite out of your system RAM. Some notebooks, including my older Acer 3680, has an option in the BIOS where you can select the maximum aperture size or another words, how much memory DVMT can take from the system's RAM. Another thing to consider is that the memory controllers have been integrated onto the processor die with the i-series, and that coupled with DDR3 1066 or 1333 brings pretty good memory bandwidth with pretty low latency. So IMO, I'd buy this over an entry level ATI card (4200,4225) because of the power savings, because they perform about the same. I'd even say the Intel drivers are going to me much better optimized.

 

Do you have some special provider for your dedicated drivers?