*OFFICIAL* M17x Benchmark Thread - Part 3

different setups is all...and 18 and 19k is nothing to laugh at in the laptop world.

the mobile fermi?

i dont think you can beat any of their every day machines either.. . the ones that run folding@home over clocked 24/7.

 

My desktop rig could give it a shot maybe?

Nightbringer 3 fully watercooled SFF

As for the name - the original nightbringer was so called because it used to dim the lights in my house when i switched it on (old house). I was also into warhammer at the time so... nightbringer stuck.

Im a stickler for portability. I like to lan a bit. Nightbringer 3 is just too damn heavy. Lots of water in that thing. Hence the M17x. Nightbringer3 is now going to be sold asap.

-Ash

 

man, i apologize!!
i thought you were just doing allot of talking without really knowing. nice setup!
nothing wrong with being portable at all..but extreme benching is benching and 24/7 stable is something entirely different..

your selling that machine?

 

Yah, I dont use it anymore since I got the M17xr2. Just no need for it.

I get more use with the M17xr2 plugged into nightbringer3's mouse/keyboard/monitor, and I can take lappy to work and play games when Im working after hours.

Plus, I dont have a car so getting to lans with that thing in my backpack on the train is far easier.

-Ash

 

i hear ya.
i dont really game like that...but i do bench.

 

Yeah, I used to bench a little with it. From memory I was getting over 20k in vantage extreme preset for 24/7 use, and a little more than that for semi-suicides.

Those cards overclock like champs and the cpu is golden.

-Ash

 

great job on modding the case. i had to jump back to page one..lol

so what cha doing with this m17x r2?
no mods?

 

Hahaha... well, I bought it to break my modding addiction.

Its already had a few mods though, mostly to do with cooling.

The blower fans in the R2 are not a sealed unit against the cooling fins. Lots of gaps around the sides for air to exit, and thus less airflow over the fins.
Fixed.

Tonight im gonna re apply my as5 (went overboard, need to put on less) and do something about the ram cooling for the cards. The stock ram cooling is way bad.
Im also going to install a new ODD->HDD caddy and put my 7200rpm lappy storage drive in it.

After that, we will see - im thinking maybe a power switch mod so I can switch it on with the lid closed.


Addiction breaker my foot.

-Ash

 

Yup, I've seen my system artifact like that, for that 15K vantage run a long time ago. LOL, I thought it would have crashed but it pulledthrough
Haven't run vantage with the newer drivers or the throttlestop trick yet though.

 

ummmmm....sure you did...one of the top of the line laptop computers....and you were just going to sit and watch it not be modded....YEAH RIGHT!
after seeing your case mods...i think not...lol
and sure enough...you already started. nice! can anyone do these mods?
why the power switch with lid closed? add a pcie remote? the one that slides into the side. or this wouldn't work?

might be getting pretty close to time.....for you to make that move then...

 

Will try to do a vantage run soon DR650SE is a handful already.

BTW, DR650SE i give in, that wprime score is unmatchable, what did you do to get it

 

Reborn.. Can you STOP spamming every thread with that?

 

LOL, they've got a name for it, something-rather-syndrome

but thats cross posting.

 

Lol yea.. I just thought.. hey some guy's being really active.. then I see the posts and go.. oooooh.. right.

 

So far I havn't seen that yet with my 5870's. Even on a 19K+ run I havn't gotten it. Maybe I just need to push harder.

Which wPrime score? 32M or 1024? for the wPrime 32M I was cranking the TDP to ungodly levels. I think I did the run with a TDP of 110w-115w on the CPU. 80+ TDC all on top of a SetFSB and multiplier overclock. I kept running and rerunning it to get the lowest score possible. Now that I think of it, the CPU-z shot might be off since opening throttle stop reset it back to defaults.

For the wPrime 1024 run it was finding a balance of SetFSB and multiplier overclock that would prove stable, and then cranking up the TDP just enough so that under max load over time, it would come just shy of the throttling point in the CPU. It was done in front of a frigid A/C.

EDIT: Just looked at the wPrime 1024 screen shot and it looks like throttle stop reset my multiplier. I might get a run done in the next few days when work slows down (yay for Ramadan) but as i recall it was running at around 3.7GHz. As long as you can keep it cool, sub 5 min, should be easy with the 920. With the 940XM overclocked I got 4:59, but that was sitting in my room with no extra cooling. for the 920XM I had the A/C 4 inches away. Cooling really is the key here since your stressing the CPU for an extended period of time. Gotta balnce the OC with the temps so you walk the fine line and don't step over into the throttle point. That will really hinder your time.

 

I thought you might have been playing with the threads or some features in task manager.

Now that i think of it, it does get awfully hot, and it starts to throttle, on the first 3 cores, goes down to 900 mhz and then jumps back up to the full overclock. I will crank up the TDP to where you have it set to, but i was worried about how hot it was getting. And this was in the fridge, with how hot it was getting, Im thinking about removing the keyboard and letting it sit right infront of where the air comes out in the fridge, but im worried about water gathering inside the system from condensation. Its either that or getting a portable AC Unit. How cold is the air coming out from your ac?

And yes LOL, ramadan is coming up, more summer holiday

 

Haha, yea it'll make some time available for more benching lol.

As far as the A/C, it's on high fan, as cold as it can get. I've seen my CPU temps drop down to 20*C before. The more air you can move across the system, the faster it will dissipate the heat. I think during the wPrime1024 run I hit a max of 92* which is just under the throttle point, but that was at 80 something TDP. for the wPrime32 run is when I had the TDP between 110w and 115w.

One of these days I'm going to lift my M17x up to find the CPU having melted it's way out of the bottom of the system

 

How many BTU is your aircon if you know DR?

And I'm wondering.. will it help if the power adapter is cooled as well? like near the aircon.. because I know when I was pushing the score's higher than ever.. and it was on the FINAL test the power adapter gave way.. and it was hot hot hot. Unplugged and it was up and running again...

 

Hmm thats a good question. After doing some googling I found some very similiar units to what we have here. It looks to be about 18000 BTU. Here is a pic I posted a few weeks back. You can see that I have the PSU there for the cooling as well. This was in my old room. My new room the A/C isn't as convienntly located. It's above my bed. So hard to stack boxes to a point thats stable. Not that it stops me. But in this ic I had the box on top of a mini fridge. IN my office I just pull the fridge up to the A/C and it's at the perfect hieght.



The one thing I need to do is figure out how to rig the A/C so it doesn't shut off when it gets to a certain cold temp.

 

Yea I see that. Mine's not even 18,000 BTU's.. less powerful. Just bigger.. much bigger.
You can see here! I even tried creating some sort of wind tunnel effect here but it didn't work as well, it did help though (a tiny bit). As you can see.. I haven't gone to all the effort to take ANYTHING off except the main grill. So yea.
Please ignore the book title lol.. its my dad's not mine.
And yes my comp is quite dirty in those pics, but I didn't bother wiping it till after the testing was done!

 

Nice, I'm going to see what I can find when I get home. Maybe something like that. Gotta look around.

I also just tried to increase the GPU voltage from 1.15 to 1.16 and that just BSOD upon windows startup. Bummer, I was hoping to get more out of the GPUs.

 

Yea, I've heard someone else tried to do that, and it BSOD. Unfortunately they just can't be pushed furthur at this point of time

 

that was me with my 4870s, it is an issue with the video driver and how it is reading the voltage registers on the card I believe

 

yep....
which translate to....voltage is hard coded on board....(speculation of course)
hey mr cook, try this program and see what you can see with your computer.
http://rweverything.phpnet.us/
this should allow you to read just about everything in the computer.

 

It is curious though that the GTX 280m's never had this problem (although in Vista they did have an odd issue where the whole screen greyed out from time to time lol) when overvolting

 

im thinking it's because it might not been fully coded the same way...:
example..you can try this:
when changing the registers...do a bigger jump than you normally would.
so 1.15 is now 1.17 and you try to edit it in a way that it stays where the original registers were or right after where they are suppose to change.
i tried with the 9800m gtx and i had it volted up to 1.2 and nothing. no performance gain no better over clocks... nothing. same watts on the meter as well. the cards were hovering around 12C and maxing out at around 70C which is well with in reason for over volting....i gave up after a week trying to get it to work...then was told that all mobiles are hard coded and changing registers does just that..make it hard for the os to read the voltage of the card...lol

prove them wrong and make it happen..lol

 

This may be going off topic a bit, but my for those who do a lot of gaming and have driver issues, would upping the voltage from 1.05v to 1.1v help out with stability for gaming? Keeping stock clocks, it may help out. Was just doing some thinking.

 

couldn't hurt...but it can also be conflicting profiles...the game has profiles and the computer has it's version of profiles...stuff like aa/af/lod/quality/ and forcing these things on the image....when they dont agree...driver crash..to many things fighting to be number one...(speculation of course)

best to set everything to high quality and let application control in ccc/nvidia.
then set everything to normal in the game...and play a few minutes to see if it's stable....then start upping the candy in game part by part to see when it starts acting stupid....this may help you find the actual problem...

 

I just got this score, which tops my best one by a hundred points with just my laptop cooler. Ambient was probably around 68° - 70°. I'm not so sure about this whole A/C theory. Before someone starts flaming, I'm NOT saying that cooling doesn't effect overclocks. I just don't know about this system in general.

 

Are you guys volt modding your graphics cards to get those overclocks?

-Ash

 

Yeah. We're all running at 1.15v instead of the stock 1.05v. That's as high as it will let us go.

 

then keep pushing to find out your cut off point....
you kind of have to remember...this is all a work in progress sort of thing...and no one knows the max yet......

 

A/C helps if you want the absolute highest score possible. But I think the route Ash has taken with modding the system to be more efficient is the way to go. It ensures you can use your 24/7 overclock AND compare your results against yourself and your peers. Those type of benchmarks are meaningful because they can be applied for use.

Now don't get me wrong, there's also a lot of fun involved in simply pushing the hardware as far as it will go with extreme forms of cooling and that's fine too. Just two different philosophies on benchmarking and I don't see any reason why the latter should be considered the prevailing one.

In the next few days I'll be starting my CPU/GPU mods as well. I'm going to initially experiment with some slightly conductive copper tape to wrap around the sinks and then add ducting similar to what Ash did except using different material (possibly thin shaped copper). Also, since the memory modules are not fully covered by the GPU heatsink, I was thinking of ordering some thin copper shims and either welding them to the main sink itself or using JB Weld. Hopefully if enough of us start embarking on mods and post how-to guides, we'll be able to hit these high benchmark numbers AND be able to use the gains in games.


P.S. for extreme benchers, hard mods are also possible to get around the software. I did it before with an X1900XT back in the day when we were soldering resistors to raise vmem and vcore. Got some awesome overclocks otu of it too but I had everything on water cooling with 1/2" fittings. Take a look: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=236781

 

From what I can determine the main problem with the cooling of the GPU's is the memory thermal pads are about 1mm too thick.

Looks like the design was made to accommodate for thinner padding. With this extra thickness it throws the whole design out.

The heatsink is actually quite decent (as good or better than a desktop one). It just needs to contact the GPU die and memory properly, which at the moment it doesnt.

-Ash

 

joker...you should be able to use the ones already made..but you need to have them filed down...im thinking they may fit. they already have to stuff to mount...you might want to try that as well. this would be for the memory chips.


ash..your saying allot there...lol
75 watt heat sinks vs 280 watt heat sinks..
now if your talking about the gpu heat sinks in the d901 series and up...now that's a heat sink. lol

 

Monstrous! I love it!

Now how to shoehorn it into my M17x...

-Ash


EDIT:
Also to clarify, I was referring to temperature vs heatsink area. With my mod a HD5870m stays below the temps of a HD5750/HD5770/HD5850/HD5870 in the same circumstances.

 

really. now that it interesting. great job Ash.

 

Well here is my latest OCing setup

 

wow...so phase would work on that....interesting

 

Yea, I can get everything exposed using a wireless keyboard, but I think I had too much voltage for the clocks I was running because my cards started throttling. I gotta try something else, but I'm not so sure it's worth it if I can't increase the GPU voltage past 1.15 and the CPU voltage more than 150mV.

I can also disconnect the monitor, and use an external, but due to the display drivers, when it swtched scenes in 3DMark06, it would freeze. After the first GPU test. Basically it seems like a small desktop motherboard with a screen and keyboard attached.

 

Ya these laptops would be great for SS or LN2 john lol

Does the system post with the screen and or keyboard completely disconnected?

 

Last time I had my screen completely disconnected Scroll lock and numlock indicator lights on the power strip would continuously flash. This is one of the features of the M17x notebook mobo. Other combination of lights staying on and flashing mean other problems and things. So in this case it was asking me to reattach the LCD screen cables. Therefore I was not able to boot or post. I'm not exactly sure if it will post without the keyboard though. Maybe?

 

question:
at normal speeds...does it still only max out 2 cores and does the temps stay about the same across the boards?

 

When the keyboard is not plugged in it won't boot. If it's unplugged when the notebook is turned on it will shut down. But when I unplugged the monitor, I did so while it was turned on and I had an external plugged in so it may not boot with it unplugged. My R1 wouldn't.

John to answer your question in an hour or so I will post a 920XM stock intel burn test/Argus monitor screen shot. Watching some "Chuck" at the moment.

 

which chuck?
chuck bartowski chuck or chuck norris chuck?

aight, thanks.

 

It's gotta be Bartowski...

Anyways, did my first 3dmark 06 run. No external cooling (or ice or anything).
Was a pretty poor run imo with those stats. Tried pushing it higher but that failed.

 

Try harder jubbing, I beat that with my qx9300 haha

 

I know.. but I'm a real noob at the 3dmark 06.. as you can see lol.

I did like 5 tests just now.. and that was the highest.. guess I need external cooling, otherwise it either freezes or comes out crap.

 

Definately Chuck Bartowski

Well here is a run sitting on the Cryo at stock speeds +5% BIOS OC. This is for one of the cores, but the others followed in similiar fashion. I did just swap out the 940XM for the 920XM, maybe I need to repaste it.

Spoiler

Spoiler

Didn't take long to heat up.

 

chuck is the man!
now that he sort of knows how to use the intersect...lol

i was more looking for something like this



my chip is 3.33 in turbo mode...yet...it will not do 3.33 with both cores running at higher than 3.06 for more than 1 to 2 seconds top. then it settles on 3.06
im trying to see if this is what is going on with the 920/940