M17x DPC Latency

Yep, he replied the following:

 

He got back to me in about an hour, but my guess is that Monday he will have a swollen inbox.

My priority is to get ownership of my M17x transfered to myself. I have tried a few times, but I'll have to keep trying until its done. They keep sending things to the wrong place, I would hate to lose my M17x or a replacement because of this silly issue.

 

How do i PM him? i added him as friend, but i dont see any PM button.

 

After he accepts your friends request you can PM him.

 

You can tell him about the problem within the friend request, he said that was OK to.

 

I re-spawned to Vista and playing MP3 files for a few minutes my biggest spike was 1022.

My 3dmark scores are exactly the same (with the old Dell driver). So I am going to install Batboys SLI update and just enjoy my computer until Dell figures out what is wrong in 7.

This really makes me think the problem is software.

I'm running windows update - maybe that will break it.

[edit] 15 min without a spike

 

I am still looking at this issue - have started over from scratch and began testing with A00, A01, A02 and A03. Vista testing is complete and I will be moving on to W7 tonight. I most likely will not complete my W7 testing for at least another day at min., however I will share this -

- Use BIOS A03 (have identified what changed and how it reduced the constant 'minor' red spikes we see with A00, A01 and A02)
- Use 186.82 (this is the best driver to use at present, using modded SLI Profiles from the current release driver, 186.82 will handle any recent game - with the exception of those which NV has not released a valid SLI profile for). The 195/196 series are not playing nice with the M17x and HybridSLI
- Disable Visualizations in Windows Media Player or Media Player of choice. No Visualizations as this will cause GPUs to upclock and then D/C which will cause the audio skip/pop/crackle - whatever you want to describe it as.
- The 9400 can be left enabled or disabled. The only advantage to disabling it while on AC is lower thermals and less chance of FPS drop-offs (which by the way has nothing to do with DPC Latency).

If you don't want to use A03 + 186.82 and disable Visualizations - well, have fun with the 65k+ spike and audio pop. Its that simple.

More to follow.

 

I am sticking with the stock 179 series driver that came stock with the M17x.

When I get a minute I will test your SLI update to see if it works (it should right?).

 

Yes it should have no problems with the 179 stock driver. I don't suggest 179 due to the wake to black screen issue. Up to you of course.

 

I found the 179 drivers to perform very poorly in Bioshock 2 but it might be related to the recent patch. I have the 196.34 drivers now. But I think I'll go back to the verde notebook drivers.

 

lewdig I have the exact same config as you do, and from what I understand you do not have any spikes using vista x64 from the respawn partition? Using what drivers to be exact?

 

new issue here. right speaker light doesnt work. i ve done a new format and nothing.

Also when i woke up this morning bios kept booting with all my fans at at full speed. No difference when i forced to shut down. Finally after removing the power cable for 5 minutes i tried again and speed was ok. but it still doing this when it wants

 

Hi Batboy, been lurking on this one forever and very grateful for your research here. Do you have a link to the 'SLI fix' that Lew mentioned?

Cheers.

 

Hi Brad... I am unable to link directly to it in posts as it violates the forum rules. Personal blogs, sites, etc. can only be linked in the Signature line.

 

Ahh I see, thank you for your transparency!

 

Are people still getting their video cards replaced with the Ati's for the stuttering and locking up and have they fixed your problems?

I had my nVidia cards replaced with the Ati's about 2 weeks ago, I am still getting the stuttering, the locking up, the dpc latency is still high the last high spike was 1,979312427. I have the latest video drivers, fresh install of windows. I guess it will be another call to tech support but I am not sure what they can do as I have also had my mainboard replaced.

 

Using A03 on Vista x64. Tested all last night and no spikes, zero. Re-spawn drivers (no Dell updates) and all windows updates (except SP2).

Using WMP (like Batboy says, visualizations off is VERY important) or iTunes.

Using 179 re-spawn stock driver, 195.62, or 196.34 (tested all three last night). I might try 196.21 as it gave me the best in-game performance in Bioshock 2.

Hybrid SLI Performance Mode. All AW bloatware installed (not the latest versions).

I can type all I want and no spikes.

It seems A03 fixes Vista. I still get 15 second green spikes. Audio is clear and smooth.

I am going to apply the black viper Vista tweak guide and just stick it out in this OS until Dell says the DPC is fixed in Win7. I am optimistic that the ACPI driver or Nvidia driver fix will cure this in Win7.

[update] SP2 was not yet installed. It just popped up as an available update. I am going to apply these patches and report back. I have a bad feeling about this.

 

Dell gave me absolutely no grief about swapping to 4870s and after a 5 minute call in January tried sending them to me 4 times (1x I was in another city for the week, 3x wrong address).

I have given up on that approach because i don't think it is a hardware problem. Plus the screw ups are annoying.

I have zero issues using all the features of this notebook in Vista. So I am optimistic that they will fix this in Win7. This is the first time I have tried Vista and A03 BIOS and they work great together to resolve the problem.

Having a technician over for half a day to install is a PITA. Opening this thing myself is too much trouble (it was not well thought out in terms of user serviceability).

 

OK - all patched up. When I first booted I got some big red spikes as the i/o was being hammered (startup items, maybe some other stuff related to SP2). But it's back to normal.

 

i guess i am lucky on this topic. You guys should ask for a replacement for sure. still get rare (one every 30 minutes) red spikes of 999000 though.

 

forced to use dox's 195.62 powermizer off and nvidia power management maxed. runs great and fans dont even kick in during the windows environment.

 

Did you play any games to see performance? If I manage to find an usb hdd to backup all the data on the laptop (around 300GB) I will try to respawn. At the moment I cannot respawn since I created 2 partitions and I cannot fix the respawn partition but I think the fix file should work once I merge the partitions I created.

I will first try to reinstall Vista using the CD the laptop was provided, using 2 separate partitions (1 for OS and 1 for data) and see what the outcome is.

LE: The respawn CD with the OS is it an unnatended setup or I get the options to chose partition and such?

 

It would be nice if they would do that but I will have to go through all the diagnositcs again and they will say well there is a fix on the way.

I will call them when I have a few hours to spare as by the time they run through everything they want it will be hours.

 

Glad to hear that you're making the best out of the situation. I am pretty sure those 280s are now doing a good job with your titles of choice. How are things with Mass Effect 2? Still getting the single-digit-dips?

 

kade
What os u using with 186.82 ?

 

diagnostics just say if something works or not (if its detected actually), not if it works OK or not. none of the M17X machines had a diagnostic issue.

From the Batboy observation i can say that everything that demands fast change of gpu power even if it is visualizations or even resizing windows in my case cause red spikes. This and something that someone in here was told by Dell it seems that transfering data from gpus to the chipset is the fault of the whole story. Of course motherboard is the most responsible as ATIs dont cause such issues on the intel motherboard of the R2 while most of us get red spikes higher or lower on the nvidia crap.

Thus i dont believe acpi.sys has strong effect on this as my netbook has never shown red spikes on win7.

For me or demand ATIs or your money back. the second case in one way for those who still have stuttering with ATIs. you never know if the motherboard they will send you will be better or not. I could ask for a new motherboard due to the huge spikes of 999000 μs that rarely occur but i can see many of you with much more issues and stuttering.


It seems that the light of my right speaker is dead. Is it easy to be replaced by the technician?

 

Turn off your powermizer with the powermizer switch. Your computer's fans will run all of the time, but the dpc latency is gone. Happens when the powermizer tries to turn up or down the processor speed and fan speeds.

 

This has been mentioned quite often. Killing powermizer and locking the clocks at max 3D is only going to shorten the lifespan of your GPUs not too mention kill your battery time.

Have you ever asked "Why are the clocks upclocking and downclocking in Windows 7 when just sitting at the desktop browsing a webpage or listening to music?"

Windows Vista has much less of this simply due to W7 implementing/changing the way the OS utilizes the GPU for basic rendering. This is why we see much less of the 65k+ spike under Vista even when Aero and other eye candy effects are enabled on Vista.

As many have noted, when running on the 9400 only, the 65k+ spikes which occur at each GPU D/C step are not seen. The 9400 will not change clock states based on load induced by the OS. Now dont mistake what I am saying here - I am not saying the solution is to run on the 9400 - lol. Would never suggest that.

Heh... I knew there was a reason why I chose to stay with Vista.

 

I am using Vista 64. I am just not content making the move since Vista does everything that it should be doing at this point. I am not a 'bencher', so I don't need the extra efficiency for points. Therefore, I lack the need to make a jump to Windows 7, or reserve XP as a backup system for 3dMark06. Besides, I am running Windows 7 in dual-boot with Vista 32 on my M1730; the differences are minimal. I actually prefer Vista 64.

Just thought I'd explain the reasons behind my choice.

 

this is what I get when playing a movie, this is constant and then it does spike really high.

 

I never saw that 'playing a movie' under W7 with A03.

Give me details and I will try to reproduce. Player used? Physical Media (disc) or file or streaming?

Keep in mind those are just barely above 4k. Not sure why your checker shows a max spike of 1979312427 whereas the graph does not. Hmmmmm... something is amiss with your system.

 

I am using windows media player, windows 7, Bios A03, updated drivers for the Ati cards, I never reset the graph after it spiked, here is another one that was earlier in the movie. I have the movie downloaded to my harddrive and am playing it from there.

 

Cheers for the information reason i asked was been going through all drivers available to see the best results i get with win 7.My M17x only came with win 7 but i have oem vista 64 from last build maybe try that for some comparisons as not tried vista on 17x.

 

It was pretty much unattended after you you pick form three recovery options. It fixed the partitions and put re-spawn partition back for me. Takes a while.

I can't remember any major issues with ME2, I was stuck away from Internet with bad drivers that did not want to run SLI in that game. But it still ran pretty good and I finished it in less than a week. It runs 60 fps solid now.

In Vista I have no issues now. Windows 7 is better, but not by that much IMO. I can live with the current setup until Dell fixes these issues in W7.

I am very relieved.

 

OMG! No offense, but that is the funniest thing I have ever seen! WOW!

 

195.62 i get
spurious results like this 30 mins no prob .But can be severe when i powerup tomorrow never the same no logic to this .

 

mmmm Trixy Minxy

 

Aye she could sort all our problems easy

 

Hi all guys; im very surprise about all this great that you have maded to talk about this machine and that horrible issue, i've notice that you all (i think almost all) have their machines since the half of the past year, thats mean you got M17x r1 if im not wrong, i want to know if someone have already the R2 (you now, I5 or i7) and if this is happening in that system too.
Thanks in advanced for reply

 

Its happening however from the two folks I asked to test, its on a much lesser scale. The 65k+ spike is not typically seen nor is audio playback disrupted by any step changes in the GPU clock rates.

Some of you may find this a bit interesting

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...e/thread/437b7a7c-e7cd-4d39-a798-c8d8814659c7

 

Even running the aero effects off, I still had problems in win7.

My favorite Windows themes are Vista Basic Black and XP MCE Royalle Black.

All the fancy stuff just makes me angry.

 

So they basically say that DWM has the problem. I would say that the drivers cause the problem since they are not compatible with the DWM.
Too bad I don't have the Nvidia anymore and try to disable it.

 

cant agree more, i find w7 almost ugly tbh

 

Its not the driver... or the MCP79 for that matter

Look, the GPU is receiving instruction from the OS to ramp up. Its just like playing a game - however, the difference here is the clock rate doesn't need to ramp up to watch a .flv video on youtube or play solitaire or have some nice fancy swirly in WMP. While gaming your clocks will be at max anyway and will not drop so this is not apparent while gaming. The 2D stuff doesnt need it constantly so your clocks will jump all over the place thanks to DWM. Now, I'm not blaming Micro$oft or NVIDIA or Dell. Well, actually I do have an opinion on that, but I'll keep it to myself for now until I complete my testing.

NV as Aristotel and others have found, did implement a 'fix' to this with the newer drivers. You can lock dwm.exe at 'Prefer Max Performance' via the NV Control Panel - but, guess what? A bit higher temps and shorter battery life will be the result. Is this ideal? No. Will I be using this workaround? No. Sticking with Vista for now. Never did like that forced 'cant use classic view start menu' attitude of MS anyway.

If you are running W7 and want to fix this, then use the current driver and lock out DWM.exe, IE, FireFox, Chrome, WMP, iTunes, WinAmp from using Adaptive Performance.

More to follow...

 

That BatBoy is the same as turning off powermizer.

 

Thanks, then I will wait more time to get this, south America support is really hard, I will wait for a perfect fix of this ...

 

Yes, I know that. However, the difference being is that by using the CP its not constant.

You also run into issues with PM being disabled on both cards and this varies based on driver. Some drivers you can more easily disable PowerMizer correctly. In the end, its still not a solution.

I dont believe waiting will do anything. As I mentioned, the ATI cards have much less issue with this.