M17x and DPC Latency

Has anyone tried installing Linux and and then Windows through VMWare? Does the problem persists? If not , I'm gonna do it when my second HDD arrives.

Never mind. Got a confirmation, some distros do work out of the box with sound and video with no stuttering. Gotta check this myself.

 

I agree, running a 9 year old operating system is NOT a solution

That is like buying a blu ray player but settling with only using dvd's on it because blu ray is just too complicated for you

 

Yep, the XP era is over. vista 2. W7 yet to be optimized.
If half of my games will run through VMWare - Linux all the way. I personally use Ubuntu for work, but will try OpenSUSE with M17X.

 

I thought vmware does not use the video card drivers well?

 

It doesnt. Good luck with that plan

 

What's point in using 7 if you get stuttering, pops and a lower 3dmark score ?

when i bought you think i was expecting those problems ? wake up dude

 

Because XP doesn't support a lot of the newer tech existing in the hardware of the M17x and thus it's not a viable solution. Because Dell is coming out with a fix for this issue as they've stated. And as a reminder, not everyone has these kinds of issues in Windows 7, and most people can avoid them more or less in Vista.

Why not install windows 2000? That was the truly best OS out there. Dual boot Windows 2k and Windows 98 for ultra high scores.

 

Well, even if it's slightly better than WINE or Cedega, I'll still be happy. But you are right, and that's the only reason that keeps millions of people glued to Windows. For 3 years already, all our family been using linux for all our needs (including work) with very little tweaking. But we keep going back to windows just for games. sad. I really hope for some revolution in this field.

 

XP is not an option. I hate when people suggest that also.

I have had stutter a little on mine, but it is pretty few and far between.

 

I have absolutely ZERO stuttering problems on the M17x using DOS 3.0...

 

2k rocked. server-steady O.S.

 

It's not a solution, merely a temporary fix/workaround/bandaid until we get something sorted properly, however it does seem to help a lot.

In a nutshell, it freezes (or should do), your cards clock changing via the new power management profile (and ensures they are frozen at full speed by using GPU-Z to make sure they're clocked up when the disable is applied), disables the powermizer completely via registry (this hasn't worked in the past on SLI machines, but in combination with the first part, seems to work reasonably well), eliminates the nvidia display driver service from the equation which does very little major, always loads and is occasionally attributed to polling (it does a little more, but at the end of the day seems to do very little important from some research I did into it's purpose).

The GPU-Z stage at the end should ensure that your clock speeds are read correctly and there are no issues, as well as ensuring that your cards have been forced to full speed on boot (with no powermizer, and clock changes frozen they should remain this way indefinately until the system is rebooted/shutdown).
That stage of always using GPU-z may be placebo...BUT I've not had any issues since this guide, hence I've put it out for you.
About a month of stuttering, and since theorising and setting this up, testing it out, and running it to the letter (ensuring my drivers were frozen at max GPU) I've had none of the major stuttering I used to suffer, for almost a week, and I'm on Win7 which is the most severly affected OS so far.

The Nvidia GPU drivers are a LARGE part of our DPC woes, largely I believe due to powermizer, and driver polling.
My idle clocks on the two GPUs also literally only touch 50 so it's not going to cause long term heat issues.


This guide was designed for my M980NU which doesnt suffer any other major causes of DPC latency, which is why yours is still slightly higher than mine, but as can be seen from GIzmo's earlier post, this guide has helped him eliminate the massive 10's of thousands DPC spikes, which are the main troublecausers and I've had good feedback from another M980NU owner on this guide also.



Thanks to Kobalt, Nvidia/Clevo are trying to look for a cure to this for us M980NU owners; HOWEVER, until they come out with something, this is the best we've got, and you guys seem to be in a similar situation with Dell.

 

thanks for sharing Alexrose1uk. I still have some hope for dell, since they promised us a fix. IF that does not work, ill probably do what you suggested.

 

No Blu Ray, No HDMI, No HDMI audio, No Hybrid SLI ... I can think of lots of reasons not to go back.

I tried to use Win2k on my old Gateway FX and gave up quickly.

 

from John @ dell

Update, 12/15: Sorry there hasn't been anything concrete to report, but I finally have something. My friends in engineering informed me this morning that a fix has been written and is now in the final testing phase. I've been assured that the fix will be ready for consumption in the next couple of weeks, barring any unforeseen incidents!


Btw to those complaining when i bring up xp, theres no need to "bash" me, I see everyone with the stuttering issue complaining and I understand, all I'm trying to do is offer a temporary fix.

 

No worries, I like to be able to give back

And like many of you, quite frankly I dont want to go back to WinXP. Its really not as good as it's made out to be and I use it every damned day, quite frankly in software terms it's a dinosaur, much of the early code is from the 90s, and abilities to cope with new features, hardware etc can only go so far.

I think the vast majority of people refusing to leave it (bar those who have legitimate issues like software compatability) do so because A) They aren't old enough to remember new OS iterations every 3 years and dont realise why things sometimes need to change under the surface B) Are too lazy to relearn how to do some things, even if the end result is a better/easier experience.

 

consider this a sentimental reminiscence

No one is going back. However, for me it's time to try some alternatives. Luckily there are many distros available to keep me busy for a long while...
Anyway, will let you know if I manage to make everything work without stuttering. Since Dell just confirmed that the issue is taking couple more weeks,-I got plenty of time.

 

Could always try my guide and see if it helps you

A driver uninstall and reinstall is a fairly quick way to remove the work around if you feel it doesnt help

 

Where can i find this guide Alex?

 

Each time you refer to your guide, it would be helpful if you provided a link to it.

 

I didnt want to spam it all over this thread, as I already linked it on page 59 (?), I've added it to my signature though to help people find it

As I've said before, it may not be a fix, and it may not help everyone, but if it helps some people then that's better than an empty promise!

 

to be honest this is not very specific . couple of weeks may be one month or one year. temporary fix? and what written means? new bios?

 

the last sentence is actually me

 

Copied from the other post.

=================

You will need:
195.62 WHQL Nvidia Notebook drivers
GPU-Z
DPC Latency Checker

1. Clean install the 195.62 WHQL drivers
2. Enable SLI
2. Open the NV Control Panel (henceforth refered to as NVCP)
3. Go to Manage 3d Settings, and then the Global Settings Tab
4. Scroll down until you find Power Management Mode



5. Change the option to Prefer Maximum Performance, but DO NOT SAVE/APPLY yet.
6. Open GPU-Z and change to the sensors tab. Using the card select menu at the bottom toggle between the two cards rapidly. Both cards should switch to full clock speeds.



7. Click the save/apply button in NVCP quickly before either cards clock back down (if you're too slow it won't save/lock with both cards at full speed which is important)
8. Restart the machine.
9. Press the Windows Key and R to open the run menu. Type Regedit.
10. If it asks you to permit it to allow the programme to make changes, accept.
11. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet \Control\Video
12. In here there should be lots of entries, with system generated names.
13. Look through the entries, and sort out which ones have a 0000 and 0001 sub entry.
14. Once you've found all of these, open up the 0000 sub-entry and see what's inside them (we won't need to touch the 0001 entries). Most of them will look like/similar to this:



15. One of the entries should look different, and have a lot more entries:



16. Now we've found this entry, scroll to the bottom, and in the key window, right click, select new and make a new DWORD. (the 32bit one)
17. Name it PerfLevelSrc (note the capitals are important in all these new Dwords so make sure to include them!)
18. Double click the new entry and write 2222 as the value and click OK.



19. Now make an entry called PowerMizerEnable, open it and set the value to 0.
20. Make another entry called PowerMizerLevel, open it and set it to the value 1.
21. Make the final new entry called PowerMizerLevelAC, open it and also set it to 1.
22. Close regedit, and then reopen it. Your new entries should now look like the below (and should have been carbon copied into the 0001 entry):

`

23. Close regedit again if they're fine. Bring up the run menu again and type services.msc and open it.
24. Scroll down and find Nvidia Display Driver Service, and double click it. Change the Startup type to Disabled. Click the stop button. Once the service has stopped click OK.

25. Restart the machine.
26. Once Windows has started again, and open GPU-Z, change to the sensors tab as earlier and toggle between the cards a few times.
27. Open DPC Latency Checker. Load Windows Media Player and run a few songs. You should find you no longer get any stutters, and the bars in DPC latency checker wont go massively into the red anymore in normal usage (benchmarking/windows experience index testing etc may be different! I got a maximum of about 3000 microseconds, leaving it running in the background for two hours whilst I listened to some music and played about an hour of Borderlands, it used to regularly hit 57k)
28. Repeat the GPU-Z toggle (stage 26) each time you boot windows.
29. Enjoy a completely stutter free experience

There you go guys.

The above has worked fine for me, the service disabling and GPU-Z toggling on each windows might only be placebo/psychological but the above has worked perfectly for me since Thursday and many hours of system use and restarts.

Oh if you load DPC latency checker whilst windows is still loading as soon as you hit the desktop, you might occasionally get a few spikes when windows is loading everything, but once the initial load has completed, everything should be A-OK, and you should experience no more audio issues during general use

 

For shizzle. Lets see what dell comes out with, if not a bios update i will drop my jaw :- (___)

 

I already tried most of the guides and am certain that the problem is not exactly driver related. For anyone claiming that they solved the issue entirely: run DPClat while playing music+video+change the screen brightness with function keys and see if you get those spikes. I still see a lot in 2-2.5k range+occasional 8k+. IMO if you can't lower them all to green , something wrong with the way the hadrware is optimized below the drivers level. I want to try linux because it uses hardware in a different way than windows. If I can get it work perfectly under linux, I'll just create a virtual instance of W7/Vista inside and should be able to both work&play with it (I do it for years with Ubuntu on my other laptops both home&work) The only tough point is gaming, but browsing through different linux forums I saw that people are actually able to run smoothly most current games with no issues through VMWare.
It doesn't take that long to try. Just have to buy another HDD.
Installing a distro is less than an hour (if everything works out of the box).
Anyway, will give you some feedback tomorrow.

 

it's not the drivers fault but the the way the hardware is configured, gpu bios and mainboard bios

the newest nvidia driver just offers a way to run at performance level thus reducing latency on that side.

still if the people who've disabled their graphics device through device manager and still get red latency then the m17x has way more issues wich probably only a bios would be able to fix

 

Well i can say very happily that your guide helped me ALOT! i was having stutter problems every 30sec or so now after doing what you said ive had 0 thats right 0 problems ( now i can finally listen to music..)

so thank you Alex

+ rep for you

 

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

Thank you very much for the laugh !!!

 

Thanks a lot, glad it helped

@ Akimox. This guide dropped the latency of my machine to average of approximately 150-700 on the desktop (low green), about 1.5k whilst gaming (system is busy) and maximum spike when system is doing stuff like waking up from screen shut off, about 3k. Remember I'm using an M980NU not a M17x, however we use the same underlying chipset and GPUs.

Before I was regularly getting 56K spikes. It may not have fixed the underlying issue which I admitted myself, BUT it has eliminated all of the issues with audio stuttering for me.

Its not perfect, but it works well enough to last me til I get a proper fix. The M17x seems to have further issues, but if it improves your experience in the meantime, then it's done it's job, that's all it's intended for

For *ME*, uninstalling GPU drivers completely resolves my issues (which isnt exactly a fix, but indicates its either the GPU drivers or something interacting with them), as acknowleged, yours seems to be deeper in the design.

Edit - Zath you lost the pictures, give me a second and I'll add the post here with the pictures. Please don't take this as an insult Zath, I just want to try and make it as easy to follow as possible

 

Right here we goes, with the pictures to try and help make this a little easier, that Lord_Zath's copy missed out
[Click the smaller pictures to zoom in!]

 

What if you've got 2 entries that have a lot more entries in them...

I just found 2 on mine while going through these steps. I don't know if I should just edit the top one or do both :/

 

Mind taking a quick screenshot of your regedit and sticking it on photobucket etc, so I can see exactly what you're looking at as I dont want to misguide you

PS. If you mean you've found a long gobbledygook entry, with a 0000/0001 sub-entry underneath and both the 00 and 01 entry have lots of entries, then that's normal, 0000 is carbon copied into 0001
If you make all the changes in the 0000 sub entry, if you try to enter them in the 0001 entry it'll tell you they're already present

 

It was two separate entries, one near the top and one near the end, definitely still within the Video folder.

Well I went ahead with just setting up the first one in the list. I double checked and they carbon copied fine into 0001.

However, after a restart, the node I commited the changes to seems to have lost its 0000 and 0001 values for some reason!

So I still have the second entry near the bottom with the more entries than others and 0000 and 0001 values but now just have a Video sub folder where I made my changes, unless the whole thing is meant to disappear:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v20/blue_wolf/regedit.jpg


In any case, it seems to have improved my latency

Before I was getting latency values very similar to the OP. It was hitting 16000 every 20-30 seconds or so. Wish I'd taken a screenshot now but I found it a little painful to keep watching lol...

Now, when playing a track with WMP I'm getting these values:



Getting a few idle spikes on 8000 but no audio quality issues as of yet.

I think I should just leave the registry as it is for now. I can go back to the restore point I made before starting point 1 if anything goes wrong.

Thanks very much for sharing this, I'll keep checking Latency Checker and report back with how it's going.

 

Well if you uninstall the Nvidia drivers,and then run driver sweeper it should clear out those entries nicely if they're leftovers or unecessary (pure display driver clean though, make sure not to select anything else haha)

If Im understanding you correctly though (I might not be), the entry where you made those new dwords, the 0000 and 0001 should not have dissapeared, they should remain after bootup, I'd recommend ensure they're not in the other one and if they aren't recreate them, although obviously they'll have moved to thier alphabetical position in the lists.

One possibility is that the second set of entries is for the integrated GPU if you use that and haven't disabled it (in which case it might be worthwhile to make the recommended entries in both those sets of entries, to ensure you have added them to the right entry, either way something there doesnt sound 100% right but then I could be misunderstanding you.

Your latency still isn't great at all, but glad your audio issues seem gone at least

 

Whats odd is I have not disabled PowerMizer nor would I as this can produce other problems. My results (DPC Latency Checker Tool) are the same as most others... No audio playback issues here and PowerMizer is doing what its supposed to do - lower clocks and reduce thermals in the process.

 

For whatever reason you're only getting spikes up to 5k, that'll be why, as others have mentioned thier's has been much higher with 100k region spikes.

To be fair the cooling is decent on these machines, and disabling powermizer shouldnt cause any unecessary issues unless you were overheating the cards.
It's a power saver after all, little else.

 

Alex, not trying to knock your process in any form and I thank you for posting/contributing your solution. My intention was merely to point out disabling powermizer is not working for most. This has been tried before.

Also, in regards to PowerMizer and its benefits, its more than just a 'power saver' feature. I say this knowing/experiencing first hand what a non-functioning powermizer can do to GPUs over the course of time - even with added cooling measures.

In any case, as I have mentioned many times in many of my posts, if it works for the user, then kudos. In the end, its the user's machine and the user has to decide what they are happy with.

 

My graphics drivers weren't updated properly from doing a clean install, but installing over the top of the current ones has worked fine.

So I rolled back to my previous restore point and have started this again.

This has at least given me the chance to show my odd two entries in the registry with 0000 and 0001 folders and more options than the rest.


Here's the first folder:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v20/blue_wolf/vidreg1.jpg

And the second:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v20/blue_wolf/vidreg2.jpg


Seemed to work last time just changing the first one so I'll try that again.

 

Hey, yeah I see what you mean, given that I have to presume the second set of entries are for your 9400 integrated chip, as the entries created are reasonably generic.
In this case I'd put the entry into both sets. It may even help reduce your stuttering further (its POSSIBLE that even when your integrated GPU isn't in use, that the system still polls it).

@ Batboy, I know what you mean, what I was saying was an oversimplification, and yes I understand powermizer disabling doesn't work for everyone, and has already been tried, HOWEVER this guide does a little more than that because I built it for my M980NU which ALSO was NOT cured by simply disabling powermizer (I tried that weeks ago), whereas this guide HAS cured it, which obviously suggests more to the issue than powermizer solely.

In my case, the idle temperatures for my cards are currently around 50, which is lower than many desktop cards I ran for years, not to mention Kobalt themselves are aware of this workaround and are reasonably happy with it and resultant temperatures 'til we can get an official fix.

 

Ah, that would make a tonne of sense. Alright, I'll change it for that one too.


Finished the steps again and I experienced the same thing that happened last time that caused me to retry this-

After finishing the steps I loaded a game of MW2 and experienced low FPS. So I went to device manager and found the dreaded warning icons over my 280m Display Adapter values...

I turned the Nvidia Display Driver Service back on, ran MW2 back up and tried another game- this time it was fine, no lag and better still, no audio issues. However, I didn't restart my system since starting the service again and completing all the steps, so I may find my audio issues are back once I restart with the service on.


And that brings me to a question I have concerning points 23 and 24:

What are the reasons for these steps exactly? All they seem to do to my system is cause the warning sign to come up on device manager as I explained. Did I do something wrong?


One thing I did do before I started that second MW2 game is run the Powermizer switch application and pressed the option to turn it off. Before I updated to the 195 Nvidia drivers, this errored.

---

In any case, my latency is back at 4000-4500 with the odd spike at 8000 but this is way better than what I was getting before:




Off to restart my system, hopefully I can report that the exact changes I've just made have improved my gaming and audio quality to an acceptable level before this Bios release.

 

Generally the Nvidia Display Driver Service does very little, and very few people find they require it, I recommended disabling as several of the sites documenting it mention it may be involved in polling. As it also generally does very little, this is why I have recommended disabling it. Why it causes issues for you may again pertain to the hybrid SLI setup you're using, which my machine does not.

A large number of M17x owners have this disabled, which may be why you have noticed different behaviour to several of the others.

As an example of why I have recommended disabling it, here's it's relevant entry on tweakguides.com about the Forceware drivers:

As it causes you issues however, re-enable it (I also have not encountered any issues with AF/AA for disabling it, the only issue I encountered is you can't toggle the SLI indicators with it disabled).

Also, in regards the powermizer switch, I wouldn't bother using it, the registry entries we made earlier are very similar to those used by it (and may indeed be identical in your case). Due to this, it is not necessary in line with this guide, and you might want to check your registry entries to ensure those settings are intact. It may have changed PerfSrcLevel to 3322 for example.

The fact we have also created these registry entries is likely the reason the switch didnt error, as the entries it wants to edit are already present (as we added them)!

Hope that all makes sense to you.

 

So I've been following the Dell Community boards and Dell has apparently declared that they cannot fix the Studio 1737 line due to "hardware limitations" - this after they recently released a BIOS that was designed to fix the issue but only made the spikes fewer in occurrence but more severe. One person has figured out how to suspend acpi.sys for XP. He may yet figure out how to do it in Vista and maybe Windows 7. Here's what he suggests:

Re: Studio 1737 DPC Latency
By Trent Curtis in Audio

Well I have been sucessful in writing scripts to suspend ACPI! Thanks to the undocumented hidden command line of Process Hacker! This will suspend any process that has a thread id(not process id, its alittle confusing...) containing 100.
1. Install Process Hacker.
2. Just make 2 batch files and put them on your desktop.

Suspend-ACPI.bat contains:
"c:\Program Files\Process Hacker\processhacker.exe" -e -type thread -action suspend -obj 100

Resume-ACPI.bat contains:
"c:\Program Files\Process Hacker\processhacker.exe" -e -type thread -action resume -obj 100

Cheers! May your dell studio laptop be DPC free on XP. I will have to try this on Vista but I don't think it will work. I will post back on Vista.
Good Luck!

 

i dont want to be pessimist but this studio 1737 story seems to be like M17X one. what tells me that this wont finally happen with it as well?

what do those bat files do exactly?

 

acpi.sys has been generally agreed as the root issue for latency - it does plenty of things such as power management. It's also a lot of advanced features. The .bat files will disable acpi.sys and enable acpi.sys. I have yet to test it (next week probably) but I wanted it here in case 1) anyone else wants to try it, and 2) Dell deletes the post.

 

i tried on win7 x64 now. dcp latency is the same but it may be only my impression but sound stuttering seems to be better..

 

I think if Dell can't fix it, we all organise a sea container of M17x's to arrive at their door...

 

I'm not looking to be a or anything but isn't there some legalities if they aren't able to fix this issue, considering it impacts both audio and performance?

I am by no means wanting to, but if I get jipped out of a machine that runs properly and they refuse a refund... What else is there to do? I don't really want to live with a "Stuttering machine".

 

I'm also very concerned about that too; I don't want to be stuck with a machine that doesn't work like it is supposed to, or like they actually advertised.

 

I've said this 1000 times but I still can't belive they continue to sell this VERY expensive laptop day after day knowing there are issues with it right out of the box.