*OFFICIAL* Alienware M18x Benchmark Thread - Part 2

New vantage submission, this should be good for the #2 spot right?

 

My bad Brother Joker. You we're already 2nd.... .

When I make these mistakes...just hit me up so I can make them right.
Man, I like seeing these high GPU scores as well. It makes my scores more and more believe able every day. And that they can be obtained.

 

Well, I have to keep flex VID at 25 to boot at 46x. I'm also having to force fans using HWiNFO64 to control temps (I wasn't having to yesterday) but otherwise all is well. Below are some screen shots. It seems running at 46x actually made my wPrime scores lower, but the system seems stable and passed a XTU 5 minute CPU stress test. Will try a Vantage run to see how that goes (or doesn't go) at 46x.

CPU-Z Freq. 4775.51 (103.8 * 46)

 

Awesome run, bro. You forgot your GPU-Z in the screen shot. What GPU clocks were you running?

 

Forget bclk. Just run multiplier only You are trying to run a 48x Multiplier and maybe 100.2 bclk for a flat 4800 mhz over clock. Bclk can make or break allot of over clocks these days. Use it for fine tuning or testing for the next multiplier.

 

I'm hot on your heels, bro! (Literally... got to get the CPU running cooler... might have passed you up if not for throttling.) Very close 3rd place

Brother John, I'll try lowering the BCLK as you suggested.

Vantage: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M SLI benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2920XM Processor,Alienware M18xR1 score: P31137 3DMarks

 

Ok bro... Was able to boot at 47x
Freq : 4701.53 MHz (100.03 * 47)

 

Now try booting 48x.

If you guys want to get numbers like i have you are going to have to do more than open a window...LOL

 

I will try that tomorrow, bro. Need to let the M18x cool down. I just finished a Vantage run @ 47x, but the temps are slowing down the CPU right now ( P30684 - GPU 31898/CPU 27539 @ 95°C). I think I might have pushed 32k had it been running cooler and not throttling.

I've been benching for hours on nothing but ambient room temps, so I'm pretty happy with the result. I've got a rubber shock-absorber bushing under each rear corner of the beast to raise it up, forcing fans with HWiNFO64 and that's it. Happy no more BSOD, LOL.

Thanks for your help today. Busy day at work tomorrow.

(It's about 29°F, so maybe I should leave the M18x in the garage and bench it out there as soon as I boot it up tomorrow.)

 

You guys are looking real good!! Im impressed!

Oh yeah, you can bench pretty damn high with no extra anything. And dont need dry ice either. Another plus.

 

Good work Brother Brian!!!

 

Help !! My first time do benchmark.

I don't know why I got so poor score compare to the others P6392

Is that because of core clock and memory clock only run @ 100/150 MHz

Any idea ??

 

That looks like a normal run / score for your specification to me....

 

It just dawned on me this morning that AMD is now in 4th place benching Vantage. Wasn't Shaden's beast in second place before Joker and I displaced his score last night?

I agree with steviejones... that score is not bad and it's typical of your configuration, bro. Nothing to worry about from what I can see. You may not realize it, but there are a lot of folks that would be very jealous of your P6392 3DMark11 score.

 

CPU-Z Validator 3.1

no idea what i'm looking at, just ran the cpu-z software and got the following

 

Hi poohkies. CPU-Z Validator is way of documenting your CPU clock speeds. Some folks like to document their core speeds that way and it's a neat tool for doing that.

The down side is that it captures the current state, not the maximum state, which in the case of what you captured is an energy saving speed step. That is why the clock speeds are so low. To capture the maximum speed of your CPU with this program you would need to either disable C-states or run a single-threaded app that loads the CPU enough to reach its peak clock speeds and run the validation while the CPU speed is peaked.

 

no problems, thanks for the update Mr. Fox will work on it more

 

Well... this bad boy boots at 48x and idles at 65°C... CPU-Z Validator 3.1

Freq : 4800.33 MHz (100.01 * 48)


Going to have to get the temps under control before I can use 48x, LOL.

 

Wowzers! Great job Mr Fox! Now we have a solid group of benchers gone past 4.8Ghz! Hopefully, I can join you soon, my room temp and lack of any extra cooling at the moment doesn't allow it... Even at 45x I'm hitting 90C+ in Prime.

 

Very nice. Now add 5 flex and try 49x. If you can't get it to work, then turn HT off.

We are not benching this right now...Only trying to find the chips max ghz. Then fine tuning can start after that.

 

i thought u were returning your system johnksss

 

OK, will try that. Will come back and report on it shortly.

FYI - I did the 5 minute XTU stress test at 48x and passed. The CPU package was hovering between 89-91°C through most of the test and CPU was clocking down to 3.7GHz when any one of the cores hit 90°C or more.

 

I did return and got a brand new one.

Dont worry about testing anything yet. Your just trying to find it's max over clock.

 

49x is a no-go. I had already used up flex (max 25 was already set in BIOS) and disabling hyperthreading did not help. I get a 0x124 stop error BSOD with HT disabled. Without disabling HT, Windows boots to a black screen with no BSOD. I tried booting twice both ways and got the same result each time.

 

Now...here is where it gets interesting....
keep adding 5 flex...Up to like 50 or so. Make sure amps are set like 160 or so.

Then report back.

Also, Drop down to 2 cores 2 threads and try it.

 

Guys, so the only way to set multiplier past 45x is to hex edit the BIOS? No workarounds?

 

John - just sent you a PM...

Aiki - you can use XTU to set multipliers higher than the BIOS allows. Look at the previous screen shot I posted showing the settings in XTU.

 

Wow, I have been away for too long, lol. So does it mean, you can change all the settings, including amps, vid, Short and long PWR without touching the BIOS? BTW, what version of XTU are you using?

 

I could only get XTU 2.1 to work but maybe the latest one will now

 

You can ignore the PM. I found the flex setting on the other menu that goes above 25. Amps is pri plane, correct? I have flex at 50 and pri plane at 1600. I have HT disabled, 2 active cores and booted 49x no problem.

I am using XTU 2.1. You can set most of these things in XTU, but the numbers look different and some of the nomenclature does not match what the BIOS uses.

 

Freq : 4903.33 MHz (100.07 * 49)


Also, note the 1.501v in GPU-Z...

 

Very nice run Mr. Fox

 

I was away. They have me working in a data center at the moment...

Looking good Brother Fox!

Now run all your single core test if you can.

 

Thanks, Brother John. I'll try again tomorrow. I tried running 50x on 1 core with HT disabled and could not boot. I'm starting to get the hang of it. I also tried 49x on 2 cores and bumping up BCLK to 5GHz and Windows locked up. I know there has to be the right combo, just haven't found it yet.

You know, running at a level 3 OC by Dell standards I am not having temp issues and that's more than I really need for normal use. I am wondering if the temps I am seeing is just because I'm not doing anything special to cool at these insane speeds.

I just beat my own 2nd place NVIDIA 3DMark11 run. Will post it here in a bit.

 

This iis only for numbers....at the end of the day...Set it back to stock or above stock and your good to go.

 

3DMark11: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M SLI benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2920XM Processor,Alienware M18xR1 score: P8140 3DMarks

 

@Mr Fox,

Awesome result Bro! So, let me get this straight, with the XTU working you don't need the unlocked BIOS anymore? Are you using the latest BIOS then?

 

Hi Guys new score on 3dmark2011, after a repaste made some good increases on the clocks AMD Radeon HD 6970M / 6990M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2960XM Processor,Alienware M18xR1 score: P8613 3DMarks
Cheers

 

I'll get these scores posted in a bit.

Xtu runs on the bios, but you can only make gains on using cores 1 and 2. To make real gains you will need to use the unlocked bios.

 

3DMark11: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M SLI benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2920XM Processor,Alienware M18xR1 score: P8159 3DMarks

 

I was looking at the 3dmark 11 scores and noticed they were dominated by amd systems. I'm assuming this is because they have tessellation turned off. If that's the case, I think perhaps this shouldn't be allowed just like how we can't use physx for vantage.

 

That is why their are two categories for it. Until There is a way to rule on it, we decide to let them slide. For the time being.

 

Nice job, though your graphics speeds show stock.

Here's a run I just did for 3DMark 11:

 

Yeah I see that but the overall category is almost entirely AMD. Just makes you see how unbalanced it is in their favor with tessellation turned off.

 

Thanks... yours is pretty awesome, too. I did not think I would beat my previous score, but I did. I cannot seem to pull another Vantage run like my last best one.

 

We are allowing it here because they do on other leaderboards, correct? In your circle of influence at places like HWBOT, is there much chatter about this? Are the other leaderboards allowing ranking of AMD cards with CCC disabled even though the benchmark run is invalidated by Futuremark?

I agree with that comment. Since NVIDIA Control Panel does not provide the ability to disable tessellation, AMD owners should be forced to run with tessellation enabled or we should be able to run with PPU enabled to help level the playing field in benchmarks. Either way, it is an inaccurate comparison of performance when these conditions are not equal.

Below is what I ran for CPU and GPU scores with tessellation disabled within 3DMark11.

Detailed scores

3DMark Score 0
Graphics Score 8611
Physics Score 8484
Combined Score 4836
GraphicsTest 137.75 FPS
GraphicsTest 240.5 FPS
GraphicsTest 352.92 FPS
GraphicsTest 427.2 FPS
PhysicsTest 26.94 FPS
CombinedTest22.5 FPS​

To your point about the inequity of the situation, it is rather interesting to note Futuremark will not calculate a benchmark score like it will on an AMD card with tessellation disabled in CCC.

I am wondering if behind the scenes influence focused on marketing has come into play. I think this might be giving us a false read that the performance of the 69X0M is similar to the 580M when it may not be quite as similar as AMD wants it to appear. The true test to this would be for the AMD owners to turn on tessellation and re-run their benchmarks to see if they can hold their spots on the leaderboard. I don't think they can.

 

But it is further wrinkled by establishing what amount if tesselation needs to be enabled? As it can be fully on or fully off then there is a lot of gray area in between. We need to figure out what is the minimum acceptable level of tesselation that can be enabled.

 

Do You know how long it took before they ruled on PPU? It's was not over night in the end...

 

Level of tessellation should be default ccc setting. That would be a good starting point.

 

Isn't that default set in a inf that can be manipulated though? So you could make that default zero/off.