M17x Concerns

I just have some questions about my M17x, and I was wondering if you guys would be able to help me answer them.

I recently received my new M17x with ATI Mobility Radeon 4870 cards in it, due to the fact that the my old nVidia 260M cards where causing much DPC Lat, and I'm concerned that my ATI cards at not working 100% properly. I've also noticed since I got my new laptop with the ATI cards that some games take longer to load (for example: Battlefield Bad Company 2 Beta, the game I would say took about 15 seconds tops to load with the 260Ms and now with the ATI cards the game takes at least a good 30-40 seconds to load the maps. Also if I accidentally load up the game with the nVidia 9400m on, the game loads up like it did with the 260Ms in). Maybe its just me being paranoid about my laptop, but I feel like the my laptop hasn't been performing as well as it did with the 260M's. Shouldn't my laptop (in terms of gaming) be performing better because the ATI cards are have a better GPU. In Battlefield Bad Company 2 I feel like I gained 4 extra frames when I play on medium(game runs in mid 30s). In COD MW2 I've noticed that some areas cause significant frame rate drops as well. Also the laptop's gpu fans hardly kick in. I hear them spin up on boot, but I never hear them when I'm playing a game. I just want to make sure my laptops video cards are fine, because my DVD-Rom drive is being swapped out because they believe it is defective so I want to take care of everything just in case.

My System Specs are:
Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 @ 2.8GHZ
4GB RAM
ATI Radeon Mobilty 4870 x 2
250GB Hard Drive (From Alienware)
320GB Hard Drive (Added myself aftermarket)
Windows 7

Thanks in advance!
Chris R.

 

I miss the relationship between graphic cards and game loading time....it should be more a HDD performance issue.

 

Are you sure crossfire is enabled? Are you on the 10.3 beta drivers?

 

I know their is no correlation between video cards and loading times, but the fact that my system is exactly the same other than the video cards, one could safely assume that the video cards are causing something to slow down the loading process.


Lord_Zath in the Catalyst Control Center I double checked that and it says it is enabled. Also in GPU-Z it looks like both cards are getting work, but the load on them is about 50% (I've only checked for Battlefield Bad Company 2 which isn't the greatest optimized game). Also, the beta drivers aren't from Dell correct? I would have to get them through the ATI site. This won't cause problems with the LCD Display? On the ATI site it says to download the test Alienware Drivers.

 

I was regularly in the 60+ fps range at 1200p + 2xAA + 8xAF with BFBC2 so if you are getting low framerates, it's probably a driver issue. You should uninstall and then run driver sweeper to clean out any residual nVidia drivers. Though I'm not sure how that works since yours has a 9400m in it as well.

 

They sent me a brand new one, but I'll try reinstalling the drivers anyway. It's worth a shot. Could my dual core processor be killing my frame rate though in BC2?

Do all the laptops have the nVidia 9400m? I just find it strange that I have the ATI cards with the nVidia low end one.

 

Only the older M17x's (R1) have the integrated nVidia chipset. The newer ones are all Intel based with i7 cpu's.

 

Okay, so just uninstall the ATI drivers, use driver cleaner to make sure nothing is left over than, reinstall the ATI drivers. Should I get the 10.3 drivers or use the Dell drivers?

Thanks so much

 

So I got the 10.3 drivers and performance still seems to be the same. Do you think it's my processor being a bottleneck?