Issues w/ m9750 and UT3 - I hate my video cards...

Let me start off by saying I did not buy my m9750 for gaming, it was purchased for work and that was my mindset when building it. When I purchased the computer, I hadn't done much research and went with the dual 8700M video cards because it was the most expensive option and highlighted as "up to 100% increase in performance" on Alienware's website. What a pile of ****. Obviously, after reading up online and here the dual 8700's was a poor, poor decision- not to mention a $300 or $400 so-called "upgrade."

A friend of mine gave me UT3 because his crappy computer wont even play it. I figured that a brand new, top of the line alienware $4483 computer should be able to handle such a game- guess not. I started off with the resolution at 1900 x 1220 during gameplay but my framerate must have been pretty ****ty because it was a little choppy. It runs pretty smooth until there is a lot of action going on then it gets really choppy. I went into the game settings, dropped the resolution down to 1600 x ? and the choppyness got a little better, but once every 8-10 minutes of gameplay the computer decides to freeze, the screen goes black, and the computer stalls for about 30 seconds before going back to gameplay. About once an hour it will do this then error out and I get a windows error message saying the program is not responding and I have to close it out. At 1900 x 1220 it was choppy but the computer never black-screened and froze.

At this point, I really dont know what to do. I called Alienware and since the computer is still within 30 days of purchase date I can return the 8700's and get 7950s, but the total cost to me would be about $380. Pretty ****ty considering that's how much LESS the computer would have been if I would have just ordered it with the 7950's to begin with. That is my fault and I don't blame alienware for it, but they should have noted that the 100% increase in performance was for DirectX 10 compatible games ONLY, and the rest of the games would suffer...

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can tweak either the UT3 video settings or the nVidia control panel so I can reduce the number of times the computer takes a **** on me during gameplay? It's been a few years since I've kept up to date with all the different video options and all these terms such as anti-aliasing, vertical sync, etc. might as well all be Hebrew to me. I don't know what the difference is and how I should setup my video settings.

I should also add I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate.

 

I think one of the first things to ask is, are you using the latest drivers?

 

The issue with the 8700 is the lack of driver support, Nvidia seem to have abandoned it. I keep reading, on the SLIFORUM, that Vista SP1 will fix alot of the crashes in the 8700.

Well anyway, I would attempt to install the drivers for the Dell 1730 which comes standard with the 8700. Plus Dell does a better job of providing up to date drivers. Here is a link to the newest Dell driver, try it out.

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16311

 

Really seems like a driver issue, i have to agree. Test out some other games and see if you can duplicate the error with those, if it doesn't repeat then it must be driver related. Of course if it does repeat on other games it could still be a driver issue but it could also be faulty hardware(which i doubt). Make sure the other games you test are just as recent as UT3 and graphically intense.
Hope this helps.

You can find some threads on this forum to help you pick suitable drivers for your setup.

*edit* make sure to check out this great guide too : http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=202449

 

Check out my SLi guide man. It may not be that much help, but it does have a few tweaking tips, and also has a few drivers that you can try out.

Also, try playing on 1440x900 or 1280x800 but try that guide.

 

There is also the hardware limitation of the 8700. The internal memory bus is half the width of a 7950gtx so you would expect slower performance-of course AW does not tell you that. The only advantage of the 8700 is that it has the hardware features for rendering DX10 games.

 

In lower resolutions like the ones stones suggested the 8700 should perform more then adequate, if the problem persists in these resolutions then you might have faulty hardware(i still think it's driver related though).