M17X R3 with 6970M - Poor Performance and FPS

Hi all,



Just got my new Alienware about two weeks ago and have had very poor performance with framerate in some games and all benchmark tests. This is to say that in 3D mark 11 it chugs at about 10-15 fps in all tests.

This is basically a maxed out m17x with the AMD Radeon HD 6970 2GB GPU in it and so far I'm just not seeing the performance that I wold expect from a high end machine. I guess that I'm having driver issues so I'd like some help checking if I need newer drivers and how to be sure I've cleaned out all the old drivers and have the latest of everything. I'll include a link to some attachments of the dxdiag to show what system specs are and driver versions:

m17x r3 Poor Performance - Alienware Forum - Alienware Club - Dell Community


Any help figuring out what is killing my performance would be great.

FYI, Among other things:

I have tried reinstalling CCC, setting everything to application controlled, disabling CCC and MON processes in task manager, reinstalling vid card drivers, diabling powerplay, plugging into power vs battery, checked clock speeds and chip temperatures and checked bios.

Hope someone has some ideas on how to get this beast up to speed.



Regards,



Steve

 

Try a power reset.

Take out your battery and your mobo battery. Hold the power button for 1 min. Then put the batteries back in, connect your AC adapter, wait a min or so then turn it on.

If that does not fix it, try doing an Alien Respawn.

 

My first guess is that you make sure DirectX is fully updated. Get the DIrectX pack from Microsoft and install it.

Did you run 3dMark and know for sure that you were running at the proper video clock speeds? Cause sometimes my card runs half speed and I have to plug/unplug and whatnot to get it running up to speed again.

 

Check power play. I had an issue where it was using the IGP instead of the discreat card ude to a setting that was stuck.

 

Thanks for the input so far, I've tried all these things and no luck yet.. I haven't removed the motherboard battery as I'm not sure how. Can someone tell me what clock speeds should be showing for the 6970 GPU and also what AMD driver they are running.

Would an older Intel integrated GPU driver or old cougar67 motherboard driver be slowing it down?

Thanks

 

You are using Dell's 11.5 afaik.

The 6970M has default clocks of 680 and 900Mhz however when it is in the 2D state it goes down to a couple hundred.

If software troubleshooting does not work your only hope is what I suggested or formatting your drive and reinstalling.

 

Hi I recently purchaced a M17xr3 with 2730qm with 6990m. I am also having similar problems. I thought something wasn't right from the start as gaming performance was realy bad. I then ran 3dmark Vantage to compare with this thread. My scores are P6827 GPU-5826 CPU-18k. I done all the basic checks. Plugged in to PS set power settings to performance. Checked graphics switching is set to ati GPU. Installed latest drivers(from dell). I know that the Discrete card is running because when i set it to integrated graphics performance drops even more. Games run OK but if i turn on AA on to even 2x it is unplayable.

Is there anything else I can check?

 

It's possible that you are seeing the same thing I saw, and posted a solution for here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...deon-6990m-core-clock-stuck-100mhz-fixed.html.

To know for sure, download GPU-Z, and look at the core clock speed (under the sensors tab) when the benchmark is running.

 

Thanx DavidInTx you are a legend. Saved me the hassel of dealing with dell.
I altered my clocks slightly using sapphire trix and my fps has doubled. new p score is 15k+ on vantage.