m17x frame rate drop and RAM capped

gday guys, i was refered here by dells support forums, iv been here a few times to solve my problem but i can't seem to find anything in search anywhere so i apologies in full if this has been covered, ill quote some of what was said from dell

the BIOS is Alienware A10 (updated via dell) i had some trouble identifying the graphics but he said it was a HD6970m running ver 8.851.2.0, he said i should post my problem on here and ask you guys

any help would be greatly appreciated to try and solve this problem, i don't really want to send it back to fix but if it has to be then it has to be, otherwise if i can fix it now then it would be great

thank you

 

Is the frame rate drop constant, or does it come and go in peaks and valleys of low frames?

 

constant, they will become higher if the quality is set to low and the other way around, skyrim was just updated to its latest and no change or effect

 

Hi jjm,

Sorry for all the problems you are encountering.

Looking at the driver from the dell website, it is a very old driver. So it might be a good idea to go to the AMD website and upgrade to a much newer driver to see if that has any positive effects. Since things were running fine at the beginning and now it's getting slow and not as responsive I doubt it's simply a driver problem, but definitely worth upgrading anyway... Especially since many of the newer AMD drivers are optimized to play a number of the newer games much better then an older driver.

Regarding the performance however, does it perform better after a reboot and then degrade? or does that make any difference at all?

Also, the temps that you reported...are those the GPU temps? what are the CPU temps while this is occurring? Are the fans running at full speed all the time? or do they slow down to a normal speed when you are not gaming (IE when sitting at the desktop)?

Good luck to you...there are lots of brilliant folks on this website, so I'm sure they'll have some ideas of things to look at as well.

 

gday Greywolf22

I've looked on this website for the 6970m drivers and all it is just the 6900 series drivers which is what i had installed, then replaced by the dell drivers which in any case made no effect what so ever, also it doesn't have a driver for it just the series (whatever that actually means?) honestly skyrim and everything worked just fine then one day decided to play an older game on steam (GTA:SA) and just slowed up ever other game

reboot seems to be taking longer these days but once its completely booted you go to play and its no different to before, no difference what so ever

those are the temps of the GPU, the CPU temps are around 50c - 60c average whilst play, its load is about 20% not even and ram still sits at 2gb capped, the fan's ramp up and down during game play (i also use a cooling pad, personally i don't think it makes a difference) otherwise until i switch back to the intel display it just idles normally

is it worth just reinstalling windows with its drivers then just updating the drivers from dell or is it just a waste of time

 

and you have updated your BIOS after you got the problem?
I have to update it often due to what the computer sometimes call "problems" with the power supply. It has even been swapped. (and the main board too, and still has the same problem so now i just do the new flash occasionally)
You will see it easily if you remove the power cable, running it on battery for 10 mins and plug it back in.
If it doesn't start charging a new BIOS flash can do the trick. I was told it runs into some sort of powersaving mode if its not running properly. (by Dell that is)

 

Hi jjm1987,

Reinstalling windows is definitely one option...I know it can be a pain, but sometimes it's the best way to clear out old stuff and start over. If you have another hard drive that you can swap out with your current one you could just do a base windows install, with drivers and then load one of the games and see if it makes a difference. One other option might be to run 3dmark11 or Vantage and post your scores here. That way we can look and see if the benchmarks are where they are supposed to be. If they seem really low then it might be something else to investigate.

I don't have an R3, so I don't know if Stealth mode is an option on the R3's or not, but if it is it might be worth verifying that it is turned off as that throttles the system down to conserve battery (maybe someone else can confirm this on the R3).

 

Trome71 - i haven't had it that long im the second owner, when i purchased it, games were running fine and everything was great, after installing another game (older game) it when to hell, as far as i can remember there were no updates that i put on to run it, as for that test it was inconclusive, it didn't have a problem charging, infact it played the game no different to wheather it was charging or not charing too and when you plugged it back in, it worked in the mode i had it already selected at high proformance the whole time

Greywolf - confirming via google search that there isnt a stealth on R3's (seems legit ), i just ran 3dmark11 and got to the combined GPU and CPU physics test and just say below 0.5fps, it did fine in the CPU physics test just failed with the GPU to the point it froze, got me really concerned now....mind you i did just run it at extreme and just on benchmark, i dont know how to read them them so score X904, graphics 806, physics 6428 and combined 1025, as you can see the graphics is the problem cause the physics worked flawlessly

its slowly tipping to a new windows install on the other hdd, i can't think i have put other patches over other games (mabye) that have affect skyrim in some way, i dont suppose theres a way to check that unless you just get rid of the game?