*OFFICIAL* M17x Benchmark Thread - Part 3

I have shin etsu on there which is supposed to be the absolute best. I'm going to switch to MX-3 tomorrow. BTW I think Mandrake said IC Diamond scratches the CPU surface so maybe you should consider something else.

 

Yea, the diamond in it does scratch it, from what I've read. Which is the main reason I only intend to use it once. My GPU's don't get hot at all unless I run Furmark at large resolutions. I'm going to put an order in to Frozen CPU in the next day or two. I'll be sure to throw some Shun Etsu in the mix.

Although going through the site I came across this, Indigo Xtreme™ Engineered Thermal Interface (ETI) Kit for Core i7, I'd be curious to see how it works.

 

I might buy that kit to see how it works.I have replaced my paste with as5 and still get in the 90's while playing starcraft 2 if i have the cpu oc to the full 5% in the bios.

 

I stopped following this thread for awhile and just looked at the wiki now and HOLY High scores batman! The 19k gpu score was breached!

That's amazing work by you two!

 

Thanks Bluekornchips,

Heres my top i5 520M Vantage Benchmark. Done on the Cryo with the room AC going. Not serious enough about it to strip the notebook and set it in front of the A/C. or OC the GPUs to the extent that I can.

Vantage: P14010
GPU: 16733
CPU: 9415

 

Anyone have an idea why my wPrime 32M and 1024M times are so much slower then others on HWBot, yeat MY CPU is clocked much higher?

 

I have had the same problem, I think it comes down to knowledge of tweaks that I lack

Look at my T7200 wPrime submissions to see what I mean lol

 

Yea, but the people I'm beating I think just submit to submit and I'm at 30+ seconds and the next times are like 18sec. Oh well. Gotta get my hands on more hardware. Not doing to bad so far.

HWBot profile

 

Ya you should own the i5 520m........there is something not right in your system

Do you have the OS slimmed down and the page file turned off/reduced to 200MB? Those aren't even close to similar times lol. Also, do you have a set of 2GB DDR3 sticks? Did you consistently get those slow times?

And when you going to fill out your 920xm stuff and take out codebreaker?

update: DUH, did you go into advanced settings for wPrime and set 4 threads?! lol

 

I havn't done any of that optimizing lol, The benching SSD is pretty slim, though page file isn't slimmed or anything.

I didn't set for four threads lol I'll get to it later after the movie. I'm running through everything with the i5 520M. Just need to run aquamark. Then I'll get to the 920. I'm going to try and take him out as much as possible. We went back and fourth on the CPU-Z before I finally hit a nice clock.

 

dice gets very cold very fast. you cant just be walking away from the machine and thinking everything is gonna be alright...lol
but now that your getting the hang of it...you can give the dice a try, but i would put it on a table and watch it first. just to get an understanding.
and you can pretty much use an cup that will hold -78 degrees. and since your only doing cpu stuff. put your gpu's in power save mode.

try readjusting your heat sink first...sometimes this can go along way over changing paste all the time..

nothing personal guys, but ic diamond trumps anything else...but when going extreme cooling...-100, then it's not the best solution. (some would say)
also..it scratches far less than you moving that heat sink around on the top of the cpu.

hummm, let me know how that stuff works out. i may have to try some for testing purposes.

you didn't set it for 4 threads for i5 and 8 threads for 920/940..but scook already gave the correct answer..

yeah...^^^^^what he said!

now we are benching!
keep it up!

 

I gotta say....benching is more fun when you got some friendly competition

 

benching is more fun when you got friends benching together.


for you mr cook.

 

Thanks John, just did the wPrime runs with 4 threads. Can't believe I've overlooked that. Although today was my first day using it. I've also been doing a lot of reading about dice. I'm not so sure I'll go that route. May try and see if just running it in front of an A/C in winter time would help. I'll have to keep the options open. I've messed with dice before, just not on a computer, although I'd be able to use the foam to insulate everything pretty well.

Well just submitted my wPrime benchmarks and owned that section. the 1024 time was even good for 1.9 global points. Not bad at all.

 

I guess SS is cleaner than LN2? That seems like pretty minimal motherboard prep compared to what I have seen before lol

 

with 4 threads enabled i was able to get in the 14.3 second range on the 32m prime run without seriously tweaking, i started to do it today, but my machine started acting funny, now when i shut it down to reboot it turns on then off then boots....sigh i guess ill have to watch for a while till i can afford to get another m17x with a warranty....=(

 

i just submitted my cpu-z to hwbot but they dont have a 540m listed !? i submitted it as a 520m maybe theyll change it.

 

I had the same problem when I tried to submit the 940XM, I couldn't because it wasn't available on the database.
Coincidentally I mentioned that problem to a friend of mine on a different forum and he told the guys who run the site to add it. If you send them an email with the specs of this CPU (link them the Intel web site) they will add it so you can submit your scores properly

 

Yea, you'll need to delete the entry. I had the same thing happen with a video card and I sent them a message. Just needed to post a screen shot of it in the new GPU-Z and they will be adding it.

Hmm am I doing something wrong with Aquamark? I guess I'll need to install the 920XM for that test. Only scoring a 117K with 900/1150 GPU overclocks. and a CPU overclock. Though I don't know if the 920XM will score much higher. i dropped it to 1 core/2 threads and it scored a 113K. Not a very good test IMO

 

try 2 cores 4 threads

but I think it is more of a dual core test, like the old 3dmarks where a quad was slower than a dual

 

Yea, thats how it looks. With 2 cores 4 threads I only gained about 4K pts.

 

they matter!

lol

 

HOPEFULLY I've got a potential buyer for this M17x. He said he may be able to work out the system + the i520 it shipped with originally. I'll unload the 940xm on eBay or the forums and get the X7200 barebones + 980 from Fry's. Woot! I'll have to deal with Clevo's ugly brick design but I'll finally be rid of ATi/Dell's horrible driver support. 480M SLi..drool. As long as Clevo can push out the X7200 this month, I'll be back in this thread to compare benchmark results


Speaking of benchmarking, is anyone going to try a single 480M from say babyhemi in the M17x to see if it works? The bios has support for the 480M so it could work. It would be interesting to see what kind of numbers the M17x pushes out with the 480M.

 

Scook, how do you get a screenshot of Aquamark? Everytime I ctl-atl-prtscrn, I get a solid black screen shot.

Joker, I thought about going the same route, but just couldn't handle the fugliness of it. Though i do like the idea of 3 HDD bays. Does it even have an RGB screen? and is it 16:9 or 16:10. I perfer 16:10 by a lot. I figured this notebook is the last one I'll buy for a few years.

 

It's 16:9 but 120hz at native resolution. I know, I dread the fugliness of the Clevo as well but I'm honestly fed up with ATi's shoddy driver support. Wait until you get into playing games with the M17x, you'll feel the same way, it's very hit and miss. Not the M17x's fault of course, the blame is with AMD for writing crap drivers and Dell for not updating fast enough to the newest ones.

Anyway as not to go OT anymore, I plan to repaste today and hit that 21k CPU I've been chasing after. So I may take it to the extreme this time and do the keyboard/control cover removal since it will be all apart anyway lol! Yes yes I've finally caved, I NEED that 21k!

 

I can hit 22K on my CPU, but I would trade that for my GPU clocks to not be crap.

 

aquamark is cpu based and you really need to bench it under windows 7
the kicker
1: start bench
2:alt tab out of bench
3 pen task manager
4:set affinity to all cores
5:close task manager
6:alt tab back into bench
7: bench away
8:hit print screen
9 pen up paint
10: hit crtl v
11: put up your cpuz and gpuz screens
12: snip it and save it.

the more cores and faster speeds are what you need here...

go on ahead and do it. we have faith you can knock it down.

yours may be a few things.
paste
screws not tight enough
driver
ccc settings not right
maxing the psu
temps are to high to keep a good over clock
just to name a few.....

just bench the gpus with out over clocking cpu and see how high you can go.

 

Thank you John. I haven't redone the pads or the paste on my cards, and I do know there is more I could do to raise the numbers. The 10.7 drivers were giving me really descent scores, but the other day I dropped to battery power to move my laptop, which was a huge mistake. I started getting BSODs pretty bad, and long story short, ended up having to reformat. I don't dare to reinstall the 10.7 drivers, and even a good run on Dell's current driver doesn't beat a garbage run on the 10.7. So I've got to wait until they get them sorted out, and hopefully they do.

 

no problem!

benching...we don't wait (unless we really have too..lol) we improvise..


mr cook.
here is my x58






if i could over clock this one(nv7915U)...it would have been under SS already...

 

Yes Sir, I agree. I haven't had a problem SO bad that I had to reformat in years, literally. I don't know what happened. 10.7 held a much better OC, and gave me much better bench scores than this driver at equivalent clocks.

 

did you even run a check disk?
that might have saved you
or a system restore?

please say you tried these first before reformatting...
and tell the truth too...lol

 

I was in a BSOD loop, and nothing would stop it until I booted into safe mode and uninstalled the 10.7. I reinstalled the crud off of Dell's site, but it only remedied the issue for a little while. I was getting Machine Check Exception BSODs, which are bad news. I don't keep restore points, honestly. Maybe it would have saved me. Check disk wouldn't have done any good, it wasn't that type of problem.

 

yeah, allot of people over look check disk. and 90 percent of the time...check disk would have helped. allot of times your files get corrupted after a bsod and not just the driver. it's always best to run it it first, then mess with drivers afterwards...else doing it the other way around can lead to more problems..a day or so later. due to putting a good part of a file in a corrupted area marked as allocated. i do about 500 reboots a day..i have a pretty good idea on this....lol
and restore points are a must have!!
i mean, i have all my os's on usb high speed flash drives and i have images of the drives, but a check disk/restore point is still faster.
and dont let microsoft lul you into thinking everything is a hardware (it's broken) issue...they are good for that sort of thing when it comes to benching parts..

 

LOL, you never give up do you DR650SE Now your on to the m11x benchmarks too... Ill take a wirl at it now
But your right that cpu-z clocks kept crashing at any higher, thats how my system crapped out Looking to buy an i7 620m seeing as you dont have that, and i can get some easy scores with that or maybe buy the m11xR2

 

oh hell to the no!

lol

damn, now i have to get me a i7 mobile board and start going after your guys records....lol

 

Thanks lol.. but I'm so dissapointed mine crashes everytime i push it that bit furthur...

 

LOL, just noticed you had a 620m Okay probably not that. I just wanted something that would give me points on hwbot. I mean, the thing that got me the highest points was a pentium 4 m 760 processor in a crappy acer laptop.
EDIT: BTW john, what was that paste you had a round the cpu and where can i get some ?

 

lol
it's all good.
that's not paste, it's art eraser. it helps keep water off the board.

 

I thought it might help keeping the system cooler. I was willing to try that on my eee pc
I'm guessing thats for the liquid nitrogen or dry ice which i am willing to do on the Eee

 

didn't you post in another thread that you weren't impressed with the 480, and its wasn't worth buying? i couldn't imagine owning one of those things, its a ugly, ugly machine clevo does build some quality stuff but they are not without its issues either. at the point of buying a x7200 arent you just really buying a desktop with a screen attached to it? i mean your not even using mobile platform CPUS anymore. soon they will be throwing miniAtx boards in laptop casing.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/487376-pic-gtx-480m-3dm06-test-27.html#post6355291
pretty funny what you said about the guys using the ac units as well lol

 

The Fermi's performance doesn't live up to expectations, that's still true and initially when it was announced I actually had high expectations for it. The crossfire 5870s (when/if given a proper working driver) will keep up with it in games (margin of 10% IMO) and probably lose only slightly in synthetics. However, the biggest problem for me is the AMD driver support or lack thereof for the 5870 Crossfire for the M17x.

As for AC, if you read up above I said my goal is (if I keep this M17x) to mod it so that I can run what I bench 24/7 instead of AC runs. AC runs are fine for number chasing but I want peak performance that I can actually use. BTW I made fun of people that ONLY used AC without coming up with their own optimizations (e.g. setfsb/rivatuner workarounds that I came up with to get higher performance or kevin's tdp breakthrough). Otherwise it's not really overclocking at all, it's just pointing your system at some cold air using a stock configuration that everyone else has access to--my 5 year old cousins could do that. Desktop OC'ing of course is in a different class of it's own and when you use LN2/DICE/H20 with a desktop, you have to think of a million other variables to go with it. I used to build my own custom desktop water cooling setups back in the day when I was really into getting the most out of my hardware and that was a lot of fun but it also required effort. I'm sure John can relate to that.

The X7200 is no doubt a fugly machine but if it works as advertised with reference drivers, then that will make up for it. What good is a flashy Alienware if you're stuck with drivers that don't work properly in games? There's only so much benchmarking that can be done before you're bored of it and actually want to use the system for what it was marketed as. And we all know how enthusiastic I've been about AW, it's taken over a year of Dell's screw ups to finally wear me down.

 

it just seemed like a total 180 to me, you so veamietly defended your 5870 in that thread. personally i think what ever means you use to cool your machine, its fine, in that vein, using ln2 to cool is very vanilla, its obviously going to cool anything and its pretty easy to accomplish. i agree it would be MORE interesting to see someone machine some better heat sinks or add the the cooling in the system so that the cooling could be made everyday, but thats not what bench marking is really, IMO, its a gigantic E-peen contest, and no holds barred as along as you follow the rules.... its all good though we are all entitled to change our minds, was just surprising to me.

 

Looks kinda like playdoh.

 

It's not a 180 at all as far as my opinion on performance is concerned. Initially I had hopes that Dell would allow us to use reference drivers because that's exactly what they promised (I think I have a PM from Brian saying as much). Now they're backpedaling and basically making us beta test and enough is enough. The 5870s are awesome hardware but the lack of software support is killing them. If they give us regular updated drivers, then at least it will bring the 5870s performance and stability up to where it should be and I won't need/care for the X7200.

Edit: Here's what I was told in a PM-

 

Now that you mentioned killing... I have to add that the performance of the SSDs is not what it should be with the R2 either, according to the benchmarks...

 

I spent the better part of a day trying to raise the 4k benchmark results for my X25-M and I wasn't successful. It sucks to be getting half the speed we're supposed to be at.

 

Imagine if you paid $800 specifically for that speed and instead you get less than 1/3 of it? How much would that suck... (I am talking about me here)

 

I feel your pain, I'm right there with you. Spent $450 on my X25-M.

 

I wouldn't mind if I knew that things like display drivers (which should be monthly updated) or performance issues like that of the SSDs mentioned above, where taken seriously into consideration. More annoying is that Dell either ignores them ( I haven't received any kind of response from Dell, 9 days now, or from Dell-Chris M, DELL-Terry B or erawneila -Brian) or can't provide us with a solution in a timely manner. Either we like it or not, benchmarks are one way to figure out whether was progress made or not concerning our laptop's performance.

 

lots of stuff going on....
1:yes, that was him talking about the fermi, just like a bunch of other ati owners..lol
2:if you run what you bench...then your bench is considered far below sub par...
3:we have been going through this for the last few years already...lets face it..in the high end market..YOU are in fact..BETA TESTERS period! they sit back and let us push the machines, then try to compensate to either help make it better or make it worse.(depending on the user)
4: manufactures have nothing to do with driver making (they have some input as to what they want the driver to do). they get their drivers just like everyone else..sent to them with that manufactures specs. because laptops have a lot of power profile stuff that has to be adhered to.
5:everyone has access to ln2/dice/ss/cass/lhe/h20/chiller - and since your benching laptops..most want to bench it colder, but without having to prep the whole laptop to do it. so the easiest way is to use a frig/freezer/ac unit/or even ice cubs on heat sinks. what ever works.
6: all the machine heat sinks in the world is not going to help you keep up with anyone running extreme cooling. period! that aint even a reality! (example..they come out with some top notch heat sinks..whoopty doo...you get 19k and i take those same heat sinks and get 23k. your still stuck in the back field. sorry, but heat is the enemy (and subzero temps are the king) when trying to MAX out components. lets not get this mixed up with 24/7 use. they are not the same nor should they be treated as such.
7:when benching..there is no individuality..we all have the same access at parts and cooling mods and yes, using an ac is a cooling mod. a far easier one to use, but cooling mod all the same. if your just talking about games...that of course is something different. people bench to either grab records or get personal best for themselves. and that's really all that matters in the end...
8:ssd's and r2...must just be with them...my ssd's in the clevo kept up with my desktop


could be something going on with the controller being used..(speculation of course)
9:yep, i can relate. i have 4 bench stations now for different components. the key is having the right hardware and software for the job at hand.
10:fermi:.0850V/clocked at a measly 550 or so give or take/ is already out doing a 5870 damn near running a max over clock. lets not forget..just like the 3870s/4870s/5870 all had to be unlocked to find their true power...the same goes for the 480..who cares about pre launch..it's what happens when the card gets unlock. so give the fermi the same voltage of the 5870...and they can forget it. they will however trade blows with games no matter what. different engines run better on ati just as they do on nvidia...

this is just my opinion on it all. and from what i have tested and seen...going to say...it's definitely in the ballpark

ps: i wouldn't do to much more name dropping....unless they actually are doing something...lol...and from most of their stand points...they really cant. it lays on ati or nvidia in the end....and all these other people are doing...is sending emails just like the rest of us...sorry, but pretty much the truth. we did all this back in 07/08/09 and now 10
dell doesn't even control the bios..they out source (speculation of course)