m17x slows down badly when playing

hi all

ive noticed this for a while and now its bugging the hell out of me.

it does not seem that my laptop is getting to hot as i also have a nzxt raiser and use cpuid hwmonitor.

one game ive found this to happen is left 4 dead 2. i never seem to have problems with it before but about 20 - 30 mins into game it slows down for about 5 to 8 seconds.

the game settings are only on 1200 x 900 and its defiantly not lag


i have 197 drivers

thank you

 

Welcome to the club http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/410440-m17x-stutter.html around page 75 the actual problem was finally discovered. Now its up to dell to admit the problem and correct it.

 

It was my understanding that people who had the stuttering issue were getting Dell to replace them with the M17x-R2!

 

I had this problem with my R1, It was really random. It happened with Dirt2, ME2, and Need For Speed: Shift. The games would just slow down to a crawl like 10 to 5 Frames per second, it was super annoying and really destroyed the games universe, I would just turn them off after It happened.

 

Thats the only real fix for right now until dell does something about the R1 and the reason that not everyone experiences the issue is based on the system they order. If you didnt max out your system (minus the SDD) when you purchased your system you probally wont have an issues. Those of us who went all out on our purchase received a system with a PSU not large enough to support everything they let us by. So dell decided to cripple the CPU using the BIOS whenever the power being used started to approach the designed limit of the PSU and dropping the CPU from 100% to 12.5% destroys the FPS in games until it goes back to 100%. So this "gaming machine" cannot game with the power supply and BIOS currently provided.

 

u can force the cpu to say at 100% through the command centre.
and u can overclock the cpu in the bios.

 

The machine still throttles using ODCM (On Demand Clock Modulation). The only way currently to semi-prevent the problem is to run ThrottleStop and lock clock modulation at 100%. You're likely going to be running your PSU out of specs, though (>240W) so it's a "use at your own risk" type thing.

 

It's easy enough to use ThrottleStop to monitor the performance of your laptop while you are gaming. Download it and start it up and it will be in monitoring mode. Check the Log File option and go play a game. When done, stop ThrottleStop and have a look for any signs of clock modulation.

This is a feature built into Intel CPUs that can be turned on and off by the bios to slow a CPU down to a crawl. A 3000 MHz CPU can instantly start performing like a 300 MHz CPU, or less. Games get a little choppy when this happens for obvious reasons.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/3/3/1794507/ThrottleStop.zip

Send me the log file or post a link to it here so I can have a look.

SendSpace can be used to upload to.

Also, as I mentioned on the other thread, I do not recommend using RM Clock with a Quad core CPU other than for monitoring purposes. That can also lead to a huge slow down in CPU performance whether running single or multi-threaded applications.

 

cool ill give it a go and post