M17x R1 Power Fluctuations AC Battery Switching during Games

I have an M17x R1 with dual sli 260M cards and QX9300 processor. Probably the most buggy thing I have ever owned. I have currently installed 314.07 nvidia drivers on it but this doesn't seem to be necessarily related to the issue I am having....as I have tried the older official drivers too back from the heady days when Dell might have given a **** [if they ever did ;P]

Currently during any GPU intensive application I get irregular huge frame rate drops and sound problems where the screen darkens before it brightens back to normal and carries on i.e. when the power kicks back in again things return to normal. I have monitored the GPUs and they run 80-90'C which I am not unused to seeing during gaming but what I did notice is that during the battery switch the voltage over the GPUs drops from 1.0v to 0.9v. I believe this is the source of the problem, but my questions are as follows

1. What's going on? Has anyone seen this/dealt with this before?
2. Is there anything I can do to stop the AC/battery switching? or...
3. Can I somehow stop the gpu's voltage being dropped when I get off ac power?4. Is this related to nvidia "clever" power management control option...which I currently have switched on max performance at all times.
5.Is it something else.

Thanks for any input anyone can give me on this!

 

Try switching off the power management controls for your gpu. Check out this link as well When “smart” technology is dumb: a lesson in Intel graphics power-saving features – istartedsomething You could be experiencing a similar issue.

 

Thanks for the idea...gave me pause for thought and I went back into the windows 7 power management control panel. Tweaked a few things I hadn't noticed in there and got rid of the dimming on battery and also made sure that 100% power was on for the CPUs and GPUs running on batteries too. But unfortunately this didn't stop the random switching to battery and frame rate drops.

So....

I tried removing battery and running benchmarking tests again...to find that low and behold now that it couldn't switch to the battery it didn't just switch itself off instead so something is telling it to switch to the battery. Despite my tweaks to the battery settings this hasn't stopped the massive frame rate drops (30fps down to 8-3fps) whether the battery is installed or not.

Finally....
I tried a series of different nvidia drivers and eventually reverted to the dell nvidia drivers version 257.38. Low and behold now there are no problems and the frame rate drops have dissappeared. So it all comes down to the lack of support from Dell or Nvidia for M17x R1's I guess. Infuriating though that the best drivers for me seem to be ones that are 4 years old.

 

Glad to hear that you were able to track down the issue. New beta version of nVidia drivers is out so hold out hope that maybe they will work for you.