*OFFICIAL* Alienware M18x Benchmark Thread

There's no schematic available for the card, which makes it really almost impossible to figure out a suitable pencil mod (if possible at all).
Also a pencil mod can't be adjusted, and I can easily remove the mod whenever I want.

Pencil mods can be very great for CPUs just as in johnksss pic, or also for removing overvoltage protections on desktop cards if there are some more schematics / details available.

GPU-Z only reports the value what's in the VBIOS, the voltage doesn't get measured. Being able to accurately reading out the actual voltage is crucial for such a mod as it is the only way to make sure that you're still in a more or less healthy range.

The VR is on the back of the card... no way to do this with pin grabbers, also the pins are really tiny, I don't think it'd work, even if the VR was accessible.

 

There is no way you would even consider doing any of this closed up. Such mods mean your making your laptop open-air totally removed from the chassis. These voltages and clocks would be only for benching and on off runs to chase top scores. That alone. Which I can see is your passion.

I take it you wanted a medium-long term solution so you can have the flexibility to run it whenever you wanted, much like the old wire tricks with AMD Bartons or ink mods with the Intel CPUs. But even with those you had the means to regulate somethings from the BIOS.

Here its the pot and you change on the fly. Benching at this level doesn't interest me anymore, been there done that. Good old ASUS and Epox mobos.

Unless its something of a everyday fix to have the voltage bumped a little for higher GPU core clocks.

 

Congrats again svl7 but alas after reading the guide and checking the pictures I will not be doing this. Too much work, cords hanging out and external monitoring ... would be neat for a few runs, but then I would want it all off and out Besides my 6990s rock pretty hard as is ... maybe if I got SUPER bored ... but I am wishing for a D3 beta Key, and I think I have built up enough good karma for it

yea Mhar ... I am with you ...

Still an awesome accomplishment though

 

Ah then that's completely out of the question and on top of that you say its much too fine a leg pin arrangement. Fine soldering is not a problem I have the steady hand and experience, but high score benching isn't for me anymore. Thanks for the info +1 rep

 

svl7 ... ok, since I can't totally give this up.... is it possible that there is a more internal solution by adding voltage to the load at some point ? like if you added a constant .05 or .1 volts ... so that where it would normally power to .9v it would be 1.0 and where it would power to 1.1v it would power to 1.2v ???

Or do it at the .05 level ... would just give a little more room on the clocks since I am not heat capping but am volt capping.

Whatcha think ?

 

Shaden, you planning on putting a fixed resistor to the VSEN and ground? Well if you are looking for just .05 volt bump that would work for you. 400-450 ohms should do it by the looks of slv7's measures. Sort of a permanent voltage bump. You can bend the fixed resistor into place at the back of the card against an insulated area of the PCB (insulated with electrical insulation tape)

I might consider doing that if the market value drops too much in the future that it turns out to be pointless to sell my 6970Ms. The M18X has room to add more heat pipes to the existing GPU heatsink structure. Hmmmm.

 

Yea Mharidas ... see ... now we talkin. And yea there is tons of room for more heat sink but I doubt it would even be needed ...

*** even adding the potential 4 pipe CPU HS might make a nice difference...

 

Yes, it'd work without having cables coming from the system etc., you could simply use a resistor instead of a potentiometer, but it'll affect all voltages, no matter whether 2d or 3d, that's the nature of the mod.

You'd need to figure out the needed resistance for the wanted voltage increase, for +0.5V it is probably somewhere between 200-300 Ohm, I could measure it for you, but you might want to measure it yourself to confirm it 100%, I can't tell for sure that your card is 100% identical to mine when it comes to the circuits. (Though it probably is)

EDIT: mharidas beat me, very well explained, that's the idea.

 

At volts of 1.2 and above it will be needed to have more heat pipes, for every 0.1 volts we increase, temperature out put usually increases in an exponential curve.

The relation between metal resistance and temperature alone is linear. The more heat the more excited our electron friends get (collisions resulting in more heat dissipation). Which means more voltage is needed to get the SNR in balance. Which in-turn leads to even more heat as a result. Hence the exponential tendency for temperature rise against very high voltages.

 

Yes yes that does make sense..... I am a Political Scientist not a physical scientist

Hrm, this sounds like a good approach. svl7 I am guessing there wouldn't really be much danger in increasing the voltage in all apps ? I mean, the cards run quite cool a .5 volt increase might crank out smoe more heat but to cooling is quite good in this beast ...

Thoughts ?

 

If you ask me I think a 0.05 bump is perfectly fine. As svl7 reported it when he is at 1.25V things get really toasty, so 1.2 should be the precautionary limit. 1.15 should be good enough to touch 900 or maybe even more on your mutants.

 

Well I am getting a 2920 CPU soon, so I am going be gettin in this thing, putting it in and repasting everything (haven't done so yet) and looking to tweak the Heatsinks for ensure the best contact ... if my experience goes well and I am comfortable cracking it open ... I may have to consider this, it doesn't sound as complicated and would allow for continued mobility and aesthetic appeal

 

A resistance of 160 Ohm brings me about +0.05V. This should give a nice little boost, probably ca. 50MHz on the core.

You can still try to undervolt the card, I don't know whether it works for the 2d voltage, but the 3d voltage can be undervolted per BIOS. A +0.05V will warm up the system a bit more of course, but the M18x has 3 piped heatsinks, I have only two in the M15x, you shouldn't notice too much at idling.

 

Is it alright to bust in on this AMD parade and give you something from nvidia? I have, however been following svl7's excellent work with the 6970m volt mod and he has made great progress, I used to own a 6990m and it was a devil to overclock anything other than a tiny amount.

Here is my voltmodded GTX 580m getting a GPU score of 18k in vantage.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/7927589-post1243.html

I challenge anyone to get this score on a single card.

 

svl7 wanna run your volt modded and crush that ?

Considering non Volt Modded 6990s in xfire can get 30K Widezu ... a volt modded 6990 should be able to crush that score.

 

I'd love to, but my board is limiting me... don't get enough power for this. The M15x was never designed for a card like a 6970m, not to mention a 6970m with a cranked up voltage and highly overclocked.

 

I bet it can. I don't doubt it for a second. It was a genuine challenge, not a "check me out I'm unbeatable" gesture. I was just expressing my will for some heated (or cooled ) competition. After all, what else is benching for?

 

Gents start your transistors...

 

as to voltage monitoring...gpuz/msiafterburner(team copy) was monitoring most of my new cards pretty close to accurate once i knew my range.(so if the actual voltage was 1.45 and windows reads 1.40, i would know what the true voltage is) although that could be very different with mobile cards. even though this does not constitute taking the place of a real volt meter...but it's not the worse thing either. (you will need the voltmeter first of course. )

side note: best i did was 15.7k gpu single card

 

John, when you use team viewer, are you running 3D Benches? When I do it seems to hose my display driver. I end up having to reinstall. Otherwise when I try and run Vantage, I'm getting like 10fps. It's quite annoying, I was trying to set it up to bench my R2 from my 11xR1 in the living room ... yea, i'm just that lazy...

 

hahaha...your crazy!

when you run the test...the mx11 will in no way keep up. you just have to wait it out. and see the score at then end.
just like bencing with an external monitor...does not really take away from performance like the old days. i pulled a 29k running dual monitors.

 

Hmm, I figured the M11x wouldn't keep up, but even after disabling teamviewer, and starting a new bench, it will be at 10fps intro to Vantage.

Then if I restart, same thing, and if I bring up Trixx, it will read card 2 as 0/0 for the clocks, as if its not there. I have to manually disable, and then enable crossfire. Even so performance is like running on an 4500HD. I just quite playing with it. Maybe i'll give it a shot another time.

Figured this way I could spend the evening benching, while watching chick flicks with the wife

 

what driver?
what version of teamviewer?

 

Driver 11.9 beta.
Teamviewer 6 on the M11x R1

I'm an idiot,

Got Team viewer 5 on the 17x R2 ...

 

hahaha

Hey John (or anyone) ... question for you ... Running HwinFo ... when I set my custom fan profiles at first all the fans kick on (I have them run at 4200 RPM at 20 degrees C) ... but then when I start bench runs often the fans on the left had side (GPU fan) shuts off ... but the one (or ones) on the right stay on ...

Any Idea ?

 

HEY you and Jonkiss never repped me in that 6990 vs 580m bench thread for my l33t rant. I feel like a used Rep "woman that is used or something PGish"

 

Heh. I don't know, I mean I would only recommend Johnkiss, DR650SE and other hardcore benchers doing this stuff. Honestly, nothing out right now requires any of this and when it does, the 7 series will be out. Only saying this because not all systems are built the same and it was a PAIN on my old desktops when I would mess with stuff (then again there was watercooling to contend with). However once one component goes or instability occurs, it is really annoying to check each component. I am no expert my any means but in a laptop I would take extra precautionary measures. I KNOW it is appealing to others to see these super high scores. However some new members might think it nets huge AND stable gaming performance and it really is about 6-7FPS MAX. Most OC net 3-4. Just be careful all...stay COOL

 

Yea its true, I am getting the 2920 going and I will play with that for a bit ... but ... I might just get bored. And the constant voltage increase actually doesn't sound all that difficult ... and my best friend/roommate did electrical engineering ... so I figure he should be able to do it ... LOL.

I also just like pushing the envelope. We went from svl7's crazy external system (which was required no doubt in order to create a base line and understand the effect of mods) to coming up with a simple way to constantly increase voltage on the card by like 0.5 Vs ... and probably gain quite a bit of Core speed with minimal risk or heat production... all from a little question.

Its good to know what possible out there, and I think if someone bites it and tried it ...(maybe me maybe one of the hard cores) and snaps some pics of it ... this doesn't sound like a very hard mod ... no more difficult then repasting ... which itself only probably 15-20% max people do ... but its totally worth it

 

Imagine a 920/1210 6990 with a JohnKiss OC'd 2920 CPU ... ??? 35K Vantage ?

 

LoL no doubt. It will be crazy. I will watch for sure 35K seems too high...maybe 32K but I could be way off.

 

I hear ya, I was once into this scene. I remember taking my 1.4Ghz AMD to 3Ghz+ on vapochil like custom refrigeration when some of the records were lower than that. But I wasn't very forum minded or literate about joining clubs and communities to share the news. We did somethings and I enjoyed it thats that.

Maybe if I was into this now, things would be different.

But now I am past it, I just need something that runs stable at high clocks for 2 years and thats it. But I always take my hat off to those who keep pushing the limits today.

 

I've seen this happen the remedy is it to put the FAN setting closer to 4001 rpm or lesser. But even then sometimes randomly your fan shuts off. Not sure why.

 

Just a guess but there is probably a process that signals that IF the fan gets that Fast it will shut off as it "assumes" another process is shutting down the CPU due to it reaching over a peak Temp. Just a hunch...

 

aeight thanks guys, I MIGHT get to do some benching on Thursday ... Wedding is on Saturday !!! then I am off to the cottage for a little bit.

Hoping to get the 2920 by then ...
All depends if my buddy can bring it up from the US ...

Anyone think there is any real difference btween AS 5 Paste or ICD 24 ??? I can get AS from stores around here ... ICD seems I would have to order ...

 

Hrm ... if I got the 2920 in time ... Temps are dropping near 0 right now at night up at the cottage .... I could .. BENCH THERE !

 

Nah mang....just enjoy yourself and the getaway. Your wife will appreciate it

 

On paper AS 5 is supposed to be partly micronized silver which is around 429 Watts/mk (watts per meter kelvin) thermal conductivity
And IC7/24 has synthetic diamond which in theory has 2000 odd Watts/mk

IC7/24 has the edge but its not by much, since both compounds are not pure silver or pure diamond.

Its good for marketing these absolute values of silver and diamond, but come on who are they trying to kid.

 

Now this is just wrong and cruel

44x, I can't wait for better temps, at this point the CPU is holding me back, if I can get that under control, I'm flashing my 580's BIOS for the extra volts.

http://i55.tinypic.com/2ptyv6g.png

 

I would stick to OCZ Freeze. It is relatively cheap and has all the strengths of AS5 and none of its weaknesses. You flat out will not see much difference between any of the big name silver based compounds. The variations you see in "tests" could easily just be the difference between different applications have varying imperfections as well as many other environmental variables.

 

Been there haha. My first big boy run

P28998
AMD Radeon HD 6970M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2920XM Processor,Alienware M18xR1 score: P28998 3DMarks

 

hahaha that would make me very very mad!!

 

Well, as you can see in my sig, I got past it quickly enough

I recommend doing several runs at those clocks, Vantage is pretty volatile

 

Yeah it's not the GPU that worries me though... I think 29000 is the most I can get before I have to flash it... however I was able to get 31500 on my CPU and cannot get anywhere near that with a full run... however I'm still at 44x... going to try to tweak a 45x to run as low as possible voltage wise and I think that should do it...

 

I needed 15 flex to do 45x, apparently everyone else has needed less, you should be able to pull it off

 

Too late I bought it already.... but thx for the tip, I shall keep that in mind.

 

Same here Scook 167 wprime @15flex 100.9bclk @ 46X and it should do fine at 15flex in vantage.

 

run custom and set the fans to 3900 thru 3000 and lower the highest temp by like 10 to 20 degrees. set the trigger to ia cores. and you should be fine.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to daveh98 again.

been there as well...now i dont even save these runs. i just do as scook said..keep running it...eventually it will pass higher...

 

I can do a couple of these runs before I see ice melting ...the funny thing is I can actually finish these runs on air anywhere but in my office, the temps aren't that different from the freezer (3-4c diff in CPU and GPU)

 

that's all it takes...remember...your throttle is 90C which would need to be hex edited to 95C. ill show you later today when i get back. if you haven't gotten it down yet.

 

Awesome!!