M17x-R2 4870 250/300 wrong speed?

I seem to have an issue with my M17x which has an i7-720Q, 4Gb DDR3 and a single 1Gb ATI 4870 card and running w7 x64.

It seems to show clock speeds in the ATI Sidebar gadget as 250/300 (gpu/mem). When i use CCC and turn off Powerplay it switches to 300/400, a bit higher but still nowhere what it should be i think.
I also seem to miss all the fancy options in CCC, which i do have on my desktop (ATI Overdrive is completely missing for example).
It also does not seem to switch higher when i run a game, this is it.

As a reference, i ran 3dmark Vantage to see my score, hoping i can compare it here with someone as a reference to see if the card might still be working as it should or not. The scores i get are in the low P6xxx's, around the P6100 mark. It feels to low, but that could also just be because i think something is wrong.

Does anyone have an idea, any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Yes, the mobile version of CCC is missing some options. I see this is your first post, so welcome to the forums. I don't know if this is your first gaming laptop or not, but don't compare your desktop to your laptop. They are two separate worlds, and will likely always be.

Your clocks are too low. Make sure you are not in Stealth Mode, and that Windows power management is set to 'High Performance'. Also make sure that you don't have any of the CCC sliders under '3D' set to the far right accept for 'Cat AI' and 'Mipmaps'.

As a last resort you can do a complete power drain by removing AC power, and both the big battery and the CMOS battery. Then hold the power button for 30 seconds.

And lastly, you've got a low-end CPU and a single 4870, so you shouldn't expect blazing performance. That 3DMark score does look too low, which is probably attributed to the low GPU clocks. Hope you get it figured out.

 

Thank you.

I have had gaming laptops before, i started with a dell M1710 which gave me alot of issues due to parts getting defective one after another the whole time. I replaced this after 2 years with an XPS M1530 which worked fine.

Recently i bought this M17x which is awesome, does not give me any problems whatsoever, except for the feeling it isn't working as optimal as it should.
I am not a 3dmark score hunter, nor an overclocker, but I do want it to work as intended and not on half power. I am quite sure the 4870 in it's full glory suits to my needs.

I posted the 3dmark vantage score to maybe reference it agains someone with a similar m17x so I could/can compare our scores which could prove something is wrong (or not, then i can have peace with it), a P8000/P9000 score would be more what this system should give as a score as far as I have found by googling a bit.

I will try your suggestions and get back to you.Thank you for your time.

 

Allright, i had the time to test some things you mentioned. Here are my results with 3dmark06. Note that this was all done on a clean install of w7 x64 with the official drivers from the alienware site. I made sure everything you mentioned was done, power plan on high performance etc.

- with a clean boot ran 3dmark06 and got 10799. The 3dmark06 report showed the clock speeds as 250/200 as well as my ati gadget.
- i continued by testing stealth mode, which i turned off, reran 3dmark06 which gave me the score of 3966. Pretty obvious Stealth mode is not the problem. The 3dmark06 report showed the clock speeds as 250/200 as well as my ati gadget.
- i turned off Stealth mode again, and ran 3dmark06 again to make sure it was off, i got 10840 as a score, so turning stealth mode off again succeeded. The 3dmark06 report showed the clock speeds as 250/200 as well as my ati gadget.
- next thing i wanted to test was turning off Powerplay, since that seemed to at least increase the speeds in my ati gadget from 250/200 to 300/400.
I turned it off in CCC, and ran 3dmark06. To my surprise, the score i got was 6100. I am not sure yet what conclusion this should give me, but i started to wonder if the card indeed wasn't working as it should, or that it just might be exactly working as it should.
- I turned on Powerplay again, ran 3dmark06 and was in the 10000 score again.

while watching all the benchmarks at work, near the end i started noticing between switching scenes that the gadget showed the correct speeds.
I am starting to think that the card is working, and under load starts to operate on the right clock speeds.

Only remaining question is the scores, if i could find some data from people with comparable systems, non overclocked, it could prove that everything is fine, and i can enjoy my laptop from now on instead of worrying something is wrong.
I just want to make sure it is in fully working order, before i decide to upgrade to 4870x2 cards which or maybe let it as it is.

 

jiggymf,

If I understood correctly, you are worried because you are not seeing the clocks where they "should" be. But the clocks change with respect to load. Try the following. Open GPU-Z. If you are not doing anything your clocks should be 250 Core, and 200 Memory. Now open a browser, play a YouTube video in HD in Full screen, while keeping GPU-Z open (click Continue refreshing this screen while GPU-Z is in the background). You will use your clocks jump to 550 for Core and 887.5 for Memory.

Easy test to check if your card is clocking up and down correctly.

 

Yes you are correct.

My only worry now are my scores, i have nothing to compare to so i can see if everything is allright or not.
My feeling tells me the scores are a bit low, but in games everything runs smoothly on 1920x1200 on highest or near highest settings.