*OFFICIAL* M17x Benchmark Thread - Part 3

use the throttlestop only to set the TDP limit (right click inside the program's interface)

also run a maxxmem with and without throttlestop to check your memory, ie Imageshack - 5percentoc.png to

the CPU will throttle if you can't keep it cool enough and it will drag the GPU scores with it

 

if HW info is reporting correctly then yes, you're throttling, your CPU hit 100C which is the thermal junction for 998pin processors. It's not something Throttle stop can correct as it's a hardwired function in the silicon of the processor afaik.

if he's hitting 100C, it is definitely *not* a good idea to try to raise the limit, I doubt it would do anything, but 100C is the design limit of the i7 mobile processors, it's definitely not safe to go past that.

 

I didn't mention anything about raising the TDP limit, that's your assumption. He has checked a couple of features that are not by default checked on throttlestop.

That's the reason I mentioned about cooling because his temperatures are too high

 

The patch notes for 1.0.2 say you can disable the system info scan in command line front end, but how do you do it? Part of the reason I don't like running these syn benches is because of the loading times. Please do tell.

 

Maybe, so what if I am

lol

 

Did you swap from a Dual Core to this new Quad? You are only running on 2 of your 4 cores and 4 out of 8 threads. Find the rest of your CPU and your scores should go up.

If you go into msconfig, Boot, Advanced options... you might have to change that or look in your bios to see if there is an option there to enable all of your cores.

 

or just uninstall all the cores in device manager and restart

 

Actualy I did, that must be it. I swaped a 520 out yesterday and then went to bed.

Thanks guys, I'm going to do that, As it stands I was wondering what was going on as the 920XM was scoring lower than my 520 and getting worse with each run. Going to do that now, then maybe get to bed, it's almost 4am here

 

Whenever you swap CPUs in a system you have to uninstall all the cores with the old cpu, then shut down and swap cpus, then power up and it will load the new cores. It is stupid but that is how MS seems to have deemed it should be done.....

 

actually....when you swap cpus in a laptop, you only need to load default settings in the bios (f9 or f10 or something or the other) then the os sees it as a new cpu for the most part. (could be only with going from i3 to i5 to i7...wont know for sure till someone can test the idea.)

 

Hmm still not reporting 4core/8thread as it should. Loaded defaults (bios), unistalled the cores (device man.), this is using CPU-Z 1.54. Perhaps I need to update, but Argus monitor is only reporting 2 cores, and Eleet is report the same as CPU-z 2/4

 

what's the task manager say? That's the only one that really counts anyway.

 

I'ts showing the 8 cpu's so I'm confused and the bench scores are not where they should be.

 

I would run Prime 95 or some similar program while task manager is open to see if all 8 threads run(you'll have to manually assign 8 tasks for prime 95 specifically). The OS sees 4 cores, so the programs should too. have you tried CPU-Z 1.55?

 

does it show 4/8 in the bios?

and thanks for letting me know the bios thing didn't work...so that only works for i3/i5/i7 620

ht is on right? and all cores enable right?
make sure nothing is in the advanced settings of msconfig

 

I believe hyper threading is on. In msconfig advance settings I have it set to four processors. Right now my Vantage CPU score is around 9 K which seems low to me with a GPU score at 15K+ Theres nothing in the bios either.

Heres a shot of my desktop


Is it me, or has the forum traffic slowed down? Everyone is probably just enjoying their laptops.

Somehow between lastnight and today i seem to have lost my bootable thumb drive. Time to make another

 

It has slowed down. We all got the benching out of our systems now lol (in both ways)

 

Guess I'm late to the party lol

Ok, I got another question. I just now put my factory image HDD into the M17x, and opened task manager and CPU-Z. It's reading 4 cores and 8 threads. I'm the HDD is Win 7 Ult. On my benching SSD I have installed Win 7 Home Premium. Is it possible that it's an O/S issue? I've disabled updates, so is there something I missed? I've looked into Vantage, and it's only picking up half the cores as well, explaining my low scores.

 

Have you made sure you have all of the OS updates on your benching OS? The OS may need to communicate with a server so that it knows how to interface with your cpu.

Kind of a shot in the dark but can't hurt to try. Having a seperate hdd for benching is really unnecessary for the most part ( ALL of my benching records have been done on my regular use OS). Just turn off the resource hogging services and you are good to to pretty much

 

I got it checking now for updates. I got ahead of myself and picked up a 40B Intel SSD cheap. Then I really had no use for it, so I figured I'd just insatall all the benching tools and such and just remove and change drivers when I move it from computer to computer. Right now all I have installed are wifi and GPU drivers.

 

If you were in msconfig and set that to 4 cores I think that is actually telling it to use only 4 threads which is of course only 2 cores. I just have the number of processors box unchecked so it uses them all.

 

good call...should be 8 or left blank.

 

Woooooowwww. I knew it was going to be something simple. +1 unclewebb, I'd give you +4 if I could. I spent all day messing with settings, restarting, looking in the bios, and kept going back to that box. Don't I feel foolish. Live and learn, thats why I'm here That did the trick.

 

I'm not sure if I did you any favors. Keeping 2 cores cool was hard enough. Now you have to try and keep 4 cores cool.

Looking forward to some new benches to see what difference it really makes. Now we'll have some data that will be a fair comparison between a Dual Core XM and a Quad Core XM.

 

I'll be working on that tommorrow. It's almost 2 am, but now that I know how to shut down 2 cores, I'll be testing it out. Here is what I remember, in Vantage with two cores, the CPU score was around 9300, Now I'm hitting 17K with four cores

 

wow, no credit for the msconfig/advance setting fix...*sniff* *sniff*
lol

 

Benchmarking never worked for me, i overclock the cpu and i get a so so score or it freezes etc.. So i just gave up.

 

lol +1 for making me laugh.

 

Hey guys. I had a few quick questions which I've tried to find an answer to.

So I've successfully installed the 10.6 drivers thanks to 5150Joker's wiki guide. I haven't installed rivatuner or amd gpu tool. What I have done so far is to install furmark and stress test my GPU's are OK before my return window expires. Everything seems within norms up to this point with max temps in the high 80's to low 90's in centigrade.

However, my questions are, which tool (riva or amd gpu) do you think works better for overclocking?
Also, is it normal for the loads on each card to be slightly uneven during a multi-gpu test of furmark?

 

Hardly, my laptop is still with Australian customs, don't know when they're willing to release it, maybe somewhere between monday and thursday. Then I'll get it out of my system. As more updates come out, more scores will go up
And I just got back to Australia about 2 hours ago, so I'll be ready to go soon!

 

I was helping Mr Pras over on the M15x forums and we found a long time Windows bug that can affect some benchmarking software when using SetFSB. I'm not sure if the M17x has this problem or not but you can read more about it here and download a tool I wrote to test for this.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/6509013-post310.html

The problem is that when you overclock by using SetFSB, a high performance timer in some computers is based off of your BCLK speed so the most accurate Windows function used to measure time to compute FPS numbers can become completely inaccurate. I have no idea how many benchmarks this problem affects. It's possible for software to correct for this issue but not all benchmarking software does.

 

haha, no no, you still get credit and I forgot to mention that. I looked in there and since I figured "hey, the 920 is a quad," I logically had it on 4 processors. Like I've said, I'm a core-i n00b. I'd rep you too, but I apparently gotta spread the wealth.


On a side note... I just want to throw it out there to those with the 940XM...I nailed a 21K CPU score in Vantage with the 920XM during a bench run.
I have yet to play with the 940XM, though I doubt this system has much more juice to dedicate to the CPU. Sadly my GPU wasn't up as high a score as I had hoped. Although I have yet to kill any process' or mess with SetFSB.

I'm on the M11x at the moment and have to head back to the office for more benching. The blocked NBR Forum I can get on NBR, just not the forum, soooo Pics to come later

 

This is interesting. I bug I have noticed as well, again, going back to my CPU score in Vantage.

In the AI test, when I am running at 4.16 GHz, the OPS counter at the bottom shows in the high 1700 range for me yet reports in the 2200 range when the run is done. The PhysX score also seems to show higher than the final number during the run. When running at 3.33 Ghz (no ThrottleStop used) the numbers shown during the test are both perfectly in line with what the final numbers are.

 

OK here are my latest scores

Vantage:
Overall: P17236
GPU: 16011
CPU: 22366




3DMark06: 23,106




I'm not sure how you others got your GPU score up so high with the lower clocks. Maybe thats where the 940XM comes in to play. I flashed up to 870/1220 and didn't score as high. I didn't really mess with the GPU tonight though. I flashed it a few times and then left it to play with the CPU. I'm interested to see if I can actually score higher with the 940XM as the above scores were all done with the 920XM.

Thats it for tonight, 2am is late enough.

 

Nice scores, TDP 101? That's crazy... (I guess you won't mind if it melts...)
The most I ever used for mine was 94.
I don't think you will see any difference between 920 and 940.

*EDIT*
Use the 10.6 drivers to increase you GPU scores

 

Ahh, will do the 10.6 drivers tommorrow.

As for the cooling, lets just say that I was going to extensive lengths to keep temps down. The more you keep em down, the higher you can go. Once it hits 98* I think, it starts to throttle. It was't the average cooler.

 

nice job getting the numbers up!
looks like the making of an 18k gpu run once refined.

 

You'll need to follow these instructions to get 10.6 to work: Common issues & resolution - Alienware M17x Wiki

 

Thanks for the link Joker, I'll get to work on it tommorrow. Well see what comes of it. I want to try and nail an 18K before I throw the 940 in.

 

Cracking results from the 920XM.Well done

 

Latest rumour on net 10.7 on Monday.Hopefully Dell 5870's remembered this release.

 

I hope so though I have my doubts.

 

DR650SE: Great results so far. Next time you're benching can you check off the ThrottleStop Log File option? I'd like to have a look at how your CPU is doing to make sure that it's not being throttled. You can upload it to mediafire when you're done running Vantage or 3DMark.

You can also add GPU=2 to the ThrottleStop.ini configuration file so it will monitor and log your GPU temperatures too. Thanks.

 

where can this turbo power limit tab be found?

 

right click inside the window of TS

 

i was searching for this for long time and it was so simple. thanks!

 

I might make it easier to find someday but I didn't want the newbies finding it too easily and frying their new 920XM/940XM up.

It's a powerful feature. You have to balance turbo power consumption, overclocking, heat and throttling to get things maxed out.

 

Just thought I'd throw this in here, If anyone was looking at replacing thermal pads the dimensions for the Ram Gap Pads are:
1mm thickness (as verified via a feeler gauge) 2cm wideX 5.5CM long. The CPU moffset gap pad is the same thickness and I believe the PM55 heatsink is also the same thickness however I didn't rip them off to verify.

that's 1x20x55 in mm

 

i wonder how it came so many people with the machine are experts on overclocking.

 

First my 3DMark06 Score for the night. I think in order to make the top of the list I'll need to 940XM to assist in the GPU scoring.

3DMark06: 23,189


Next up is my Vantage score. Sadly it's not higher because 3/4 of the way through the first CPU test my CPU started to throttle.

Vantage: 18,332



And for Unclewebb I have my throttle stop log for my 18,332 Vantage run.