*OFFICIAL* M15x Benchmark Thread

It is indeed true. That's the reason the Extreme CPUs are in a league of their own. With the help of ThrottleStop, you have full control of your turbo multipliers and the turbo TDP/TDC settings so when fully loaded, you can run all cores at the same multiplier. The i7-720QM and i7-820QM and everything else falls way behind when you do this.

Here's a good example from 5150Joker while all 8 threads are fully loaded running wPrime. ThrottleStop confirms that the CPU is fully loaded becaue all 8 threads are reporting the same 100.0% C0% value and the FID column beside that shows all 8 threads locked and running at the full 26.00 multiplier. An i7-720QM would likely have the multiplier locked at only 12.00 on all 8 threads. The TDP limit is locked and not adjustable in the i7-720QM so once you go over that, you get zero turbo boost and are left running at the default multiplier of 12 and that's it.

 

@Inap - wondering what benchmarks and gameplay is like. Games - BFBC2, Just Cause 2, any game with built in benchmarks... 3dmark06 and vantage scores if possible.

I want to compare this model to my m11x. Thanks so much for your time and effort!

Best wishes, StevenX

 

is there a bench mark built in for bfbc2? i have vantage and 06 that i can do.

 

Inap - sorry.. BFBC2 - most folks install fraps and enable logging to see what multiplayer fps is like. No rush and thank so much. Just when you have time.

 

Ok I got ya, I'm guessing you want me to set it to dx10 for bfbc2.

 

new score for my gtx260m:
http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/121/13163.png
my gpu at 680/1000/1700, score: 13163
no laptop cooler and maxed at 70ºC

 

What TDC/TDP settings are needed for that?

 

A quote from 5150Joker.

Power = Current x Voltage

so if TDP was at 105 and core voltage was somewhere around 1.10 volts then TDC would need to be around 95A. If voltage was 1.15 then maybe 90A would do.

ThrottleStop should make it easy to test for this. Just do a longer 1024M wPrime run and then you can increase the TDP and TDC and watch the reported multipliers in the FID column of ThrottleStop. As you increase TDP/TDC, this should allow more turbo boost so the average multiplier will go up. When fully loaded, if the multipliers are all at their maximum like in Joker's screen shot then there is no need to increase the turbo TDP/TDC values any further. You are already maintaining full turbo boost even when fully loaded. That's the ultimate goal. A log file while gaming should be able to show you similar data.

 

here is i3/5850 combo stock: with 06 and vantage

 

Inap Thanks! Quite a 3dmark Vantage score! That rocks... Noticed the 3dmark06 score is 10k but I think that is because of the I3. I think the i7 users get around 13k. That is a good comparison. Again thanks so much! Have you played any games with the i3? BFBC2 or DOW2 or anything like that? Games released within last 2 years or so?

Best wishes,

StevenX

 

i have bfbc2, what settings do you want me to test it? i only have a 160gb ssd so i don't have alot of games installed.

i have bfbc2,tf2 l4d2,wm2 and sc2 installed atm. let me know which one you want and at what settings

 

i3-5850
wm2 pretty much max out everything
bfbc2 running dx9

think thats it for me 920 going back in.

 

just for those of you who might want the 920

Intel Mobile Core i7 I7-920XM 2 GHz Processor - eBay (item 170529278290 end time Aug-23-10 15:49:20 PDT)

check it out might be worth it =) when i get more money im upgrading

 

@Inap - Thanks! Added rep and will try to do so again when it lets me. The i3 is definitely capable. 1080p at 60fps average is outstanding!

Man I really appreciate it.

Best wishes, StevenX

 

hahah the seller is an nbr member too.

no problem, i wanted to test the i3 also.

 

Anybody named Inap with a new 940XM have anything to report here?

 

hahaha not yet, just did the swap like 5 mins. ago. probably gonna do a clean install tomorrow or when i'm free. but just swap the gpus and my ssd, ram and wifi card. everything looking good. maybe a clean install is not needed.

 

Take your time. Will be fun to see the final results. Interested to see whether a 940 is any faster than a completely unlocked 920.

 

everything looks good so far, kinda itching to do a bench now,hahahha

 

geez inap you do clean installs every couple of days it seems....

I on the other hand... DREAD doing them more than anything loll

Just the thought of erasing everything i have and putting it back on makes my stomach turn... lol

I am anxious though to see you bench that thing

 

I clean install like crazy. I always have. Spending years overclocking as a hobby, clean installs are a way of life.

 

im with you on that one... i mean i've done 3 clean installs on my system already... but i hate doing 'em. I know they're awesome, but soo time consuming. Inaps done at least 10+ by now... Lolz

 

hahahha yeah i've done way too clean installs, normally after changing components, plus normally i would do 1 every few months anyways, to clear out all the junk i have installed. oh well backing up my stuff as we speak.

 

what did you pay for the 940xm?

I was looking at maybe going to a 920xm at least from my 720qm

 

no i didn't pay for it, it just came with the replacement they sent me.

 

If you have a 920xm, going with a 940xm makes no sense unless it was a free upgrade.

If you're looking to move to an extreme, save some serious coin and pick up an ES from fleabay. I don't know what Intel did differently this time or if they just really scaled back Extreme OEM production across the board, but finding cheap OEM 920xm's is few and far in between on fleabay yet there are oodles of ES chips for both 920xms and 940xm's (which in these tough times really hits the OEM 920xm chips hard that do show up on ebay). I haven't seen an OEM 940xm yet pop up on fleabay.

My M15x is 100% Dell issued with a 940xm config. Only thing I changed was the HD.

 

wow so you got a 940 too, thats sweet. are you gonna do any benching?

 

Probably. I always end up coming back to benching. Mine has the 260M in it, so it will be interesting to see how A08 affects it. If not, I'll be camping out the tech line screaming for a 5870/5850 or get my boy's secondary 5870 in his M17r2 since the two games he plays aren't really Xfire optimized (SCII / WoW).

SCII has been running fine, though as has EVE (gameplay notwithstanding). Can't really test WoW since account has been deactivated for 2 months now.

Sweet to see the 940xm natively churning away at 3.33x2 while gaming. Warms the heart.

 

Just tried a cpu vantage run, only got 18k @ x26. Kinda lame maybe it throttling, have to spend some time to check it out.

 

inap: Have you started playing with the TDP/TDC setting in ThrottleStop? That's where the magic lies in the Core i7-920XM/940XM. Run ThrottleStop with the Log File option when benching and you will have a good idea how well the multiplier is staying up and how much turbo boost is throttling away.

 

Yeah I have been using throttle stop with the tdp and along with the oc tool. On my old setup I got over 19k easily will throttle stop at 25x. Just ran a the with the 940 with t stop at 26x and only got 18k on this setup. Gonna make a log of it tomorrow.

 

Here is pre-beta drivers/VBIOS and beta BIOS:

And here is post:


I couldn't run it stable at the same clocks as the pre-beta stuff was downloaded. Idk why. Will try again now.

EDIT: Here we go:

301 Marks increase... Pretty good performance increase and the only things that changed were my drivers, VBIOS and BIOS. Clocks and everything else were the same.

 

uncle webb, this is a log of my 940 running 26x with throttle stop. the new system seems to throttle big time. A07 bios with 10.8 driver.

 

Here's an example from your log file inap

Code:

  DATE     TIME    MULTI   C0%   CKMOD  CHIPM  DTS
08/30/10 12:12:00  22.73   10.2  100.0  100.0   64
08/30/10 12:12:01  23.60   10.6  100.0  100.0   61
08/30/10 12:12:02  24.08   10.5  100.0  100.0   62
08/30/10 12:12:03  25.08   12.1  100.0  100.0   62
08/30/10 12:12:04  26.00   12.0  100.0  100.0   60
08/30/10 12:12:05  25.64   11.9  100.0  100.0   58
08/30/10 12:12:06  23.16   11.8  100.0  100.0   63
08/30/10 12:12:07  22.48   11.1  100.0  100.0   62
08/30/10 12:12:08  22.42   12.6  100.0  100.0   64
08/30/10 12:12:09  22.36   12.0  100.0  100.0   63
08/30/10 12:12:10  22.33   11.8  100.0  100.0   62
08/30/10 12:12:11  22.31   12.8  100.0  100.0   62
08/30/10 12:12:12  22.59   13.0  100.0   50.0   63
08/30/10 12:12:13  25.40    8.3  100.0   50.0   63
08/30/10 12:12:14  25.48    8.7  100.0   50.0   62
08/30/10 12:12:15  26.00   10.0  100.0   62.5   63
08/30/10 12:12:16  26.00   11.0  100.0   62.5   60
08/30/10 12:12:17  25.88   10.4  100.0   62.5   60
08/30/10 12:12:18  25.79   10.1  100.0   75.0   61
08/30/10 12:12:19  25.02    9.9  100.0   75.0   64
08/30/10 12:12:20  25.63    8.6  100.0   75.0   64
08/30/10 12:12:21  24.07    9.0  100.0   87.5   62
08/30/10 12:12:22  23.77    9.1  100.0   87.5   60
08/30/10 12:12:23  24.34   11.0  100.0   87.5   63
08/30/10 12:12:24  24.30   10.6  100.0  100.0   65
08/30/10 12:12:25  23.97   11.8  100.0  100.0   64
08/30/10 12:12:26  23.44   12.4  100.0  100.0   63
08/30/10 12:12:27  23.50   10.8  100.0  100.0   65
08/30/10 12:12:28  25.65   12.5  100.0  100.0   57
08/30/10 12:12:29  26.00   14.4  100.0  100.0   59
08/30/10 12:12:30  26.00   13.5  100.0  100.0   59

The C0% column shows that you are only trying to utilize 1 of the 8 threads and your laptop is not able to cope with that load. The DTS column shows that you are 62 degrees away from the Intel designed thermal throttling point so the CPU is definitely not over heating. This is when the Dell bios decides that it is a good time to throttle things back by setting chipset clock modulation to 50.0%. That slows your CPU down internally by a similar amount and if you were gaming, your frame rates would instantly go into the toilet.

As I've told others, clock modulation should never be used unless the heatsink falls off and the core temperature is in a run away condition and has exceeded the Intel thermal throttling point which is 100C. Dell has been using and continues to use clock modulation throttling on a wide variety of their laptops for the last 2 years because they continue to ship inadequate power supplies. Throttling is mostly being used to put a cap on power consumption. If you buy a simple Kill-a-Watt meter, you will likely see the direct relationship between power consumption and the start of throttling.

In your log file, throttling reduces the power consumption which allows the CPU to try and use the full 26 multiplier but that doesn't last for very long as it uses either multiplier throttling or chipset clock modulation throttling or both.

This throttling has nothing to do with the core temperature. Dell did a power adapter recall for the XPS 1645 which had similar troubles. If your laptop is throttling this badly when lightly loaded then that's a good sign that there's nowhere close to enough power available to run the CPU and GPU at full speed at the same time. In a Prime95 + Furmark test, you will likely be down to Pentium II speeds. I guess Dell doesn't understand that any modern game is multi-threaded and will be trying to load both the CPU and the GPU simultaneously. When designing a gaming rig you would think they would be testing with something a little more demanding than Solitaire but obviously they're not.

With the bios you are using, you would probably get better overall gaming performance by turning off Turbo Boost in ThrottleStop and running with the default 16 multiplier. I know that sounds completely pathetic but you have to avoid clock modulation because of how badly it kills performance. I wish ThrottleStop could do more to help you but the bios takes priority over what ThrottleStop wants. You need a more powerful adapter and a bios that lets you fully utilize that extra power. TS can only do so much when a bios and power adapter are released that are totally inadequate for the job.

The M17x-R2 would be the best home for your 940XM. The team working on the M15x has been twiddling their thumbs for months without coming up with a solution. Try contacting Dell and ask them for an upgrade.

 

thanks for the advice unclewebb, this is a fresh replacement. geez this is not what i want to hear, i'l wait to see what A08 is gonna do, hopefully it will solve something. man this suck my old 920 is doing much better than my 940 atm.

 

yeah, I still wonder if there are any power assumption on the mobo itself. It might just be that if dell gives you a new PSU + removes throttling, you might get failures on the mobo, which is not that cool, since some people will only have bought a 1 year warranty

 

Dell did eventually appease Dell 1645 and 1747 owners and released BIOS updates that let the systems run almost as intended. Users then had the stock 90w PSUs tripping and shutting down and sent out 130w PSUs to those who requested them.

With the BIOS update and a 150W psu, my 1747+920xm ran fine. Wish I had it still to run it through the Throttlestop mill and really see where it stood.

 

When the throttling XPS 1645 with its inadequate 90 watt adapter was released, a Dell rep on NBR stated that it would be dangerous to use a 130 watt adapter because the motherboard couldn't handle it. That was obviously a complete and utter lie because after enough users complained, Dell finally approved a 130 watt adapter for the XPS 1645. It's still inadequate and being deliberately throttled to far less than its 130 watt DC rating on the label but it's not nearly as bad as the over heating 90 watt adapter was so most users stopped complaining.

Dell is playing the same game with the M15x. For months they debate about giving users another watt or two when they could really use 30 or 50 more watts so the M15x can play a game and maybe charge the battery a little at the same time. Every decision made is done after a thorough cost benefit analysis. Part of that analysis includes an estimate of the percent of users that are going to find out that they are getting less than full performance and will bother to complain about it. Dell has the technology to make high performance gaming laptops that are second to none at a reasonable price point but only the M17x-R2 comes close to that goal without all this clock modulation throttling crap killing real world performance.

 

I was one of those people that had to go through months of you know what in order to eventually end up with my beautiful M15x.

 

Ok so I ran my first benchmarks today using Unigine Heaven.

stock drivers

With directx10 and resolution (1680x1050) stock clocks: 760
With directx11, resolution (1680x1050) and 700/1000/1 overclock for 5850m : 672

These about right?

I had a bit of a scare during the day when for some random reason, I could not get above 660 with directx10 (and no stealthmode was disabled), I tried many things to fix it, was even going to update the drivers but I just did the power drain trick and it all was ok. Any idea what could have caused that drop in performance? The only thing I did between getting normal scores and getting the 100 point drop was install itunes... I'm at a loss as to why this would make any difference. Anyhow if these scores are in the ballpark with the stock drivers then all good!

 

check out this thread.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ne-heaven-v2-1-m15x-scores-260-vs-5850-a.html

 

Apple did it!...

Sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm in a funny mood (night shifts) and I'm a PC kinda guy.

 

ah cheers!

LOL!

I think I will wait till a08 before updating my drivers.

 

Hey all

First time poster/user.

I found this thread (and site) while trying to figure out why my m15x alienware laptop (new) with a ATI mobility graphic card HD 5850 doesn't let me run then Final Fantasy 14 Benchmark or Beta Installer/Downloader.

I found alot of real pertinent information back on pages 70-72 of this thread, but unfortunately, I cannot download the ATI Catalyst Command Center version 10.6 anymore (I can't find it) -- this seemed to fix Coreman's problem, which sounds very much like my problem.

ANy help?

 

The FFXIV Benchmark runs fine on the 5850 using the ATI 10.8 driver set (which includes CCC v10.8), available for download here: ATI Catalyst? Mobility Display Driver

 

Any interest in the below GPU for the M15x? Will the new bios or future one support it?....


GeForce GTX 470M

 

not sure of the bios support yet, but i'm willing to test it for ya, hehehehe

 

kinda glad i haven't yet sprung for the 5850 or 5870 to see if this is has good performance comparatively

 

ok here is my first A08 bench with vantage.

 

nice what was the increase over A07 with same clocks etc.