M17x and DPC Latency

its such a difficult dession.

Its a Fab system I just want to know it will run with out dpc latency issues.

its a huge gamble holding out for the reffreshed system as they dont have to give me it as if like for like availablity is there i will get that.

i not only need the refreshed system to be live on uk website i need the old ones to disapear too!

 

My tech called back today yay! I am getting a new Laptop from Dell also, he is going to try to get the ATI's in the new one for me. We will see i will know in 7-10 days..

 

Do the systems with ATI over Nvidia have no problem with the red spikes? I noticed if i shut down boost performance to power save with nvidia the spikes completely stop so i figure it must be an nvidia issue.... if thats the case maybe ill see if i can get them to replace with a ATI

 

Here's my experience with this latency issue:

When I received my m17x I had huge problems with it, I used to get pattern of red, green, red, green, red, huge red, red, green, red, etc..

I found out that the huge red spikes are really to do with Nvidia drivers when they change the clock of the GPU's, so to fix it I edited the registry to make them stay at 100% all the time. I don't even have to open GPUZ on startup.

So then the pattern was the same but without the huge red spikes, and that way the stutter kinda goes, because spikes like 4000 dont affect too much.

After the BIOS update the change was immediate, I had DPC checker open when the update was running and I saw the red spikes disappearing, I tried to save a screenshot of the moment but the computer kinda stops responding during the procedure.


Anyway, just to say that I have Nvidia cards and that everything is working fine now, I wish I could have the dynamic clock change and it seems there is a way to do it using rivatuner but I dont want to risk messing up the system, its working very well now.

 

Where did you edit the registry to make them stay on full clock all the time?

 

Damn it was difficult to find the post =p

Here is the link: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5629140&postcount=624

Hope it works for you guys as well.

 

Here is the link to the original post that includes screenshots.

And yes, I haven't experienced stutter since A03 either using this workaround + setting the Nvidia Profile for explorer.exe to Prefer Maximum Performance. Of course, the video cards are always running at full speed.

 

Can you post a screenie of HWMonitor after a gaming session? Open up HWMonitor at system startup, use the system as normal, game for a bit and then do a screencap of your HWMonitor.

Thanks.

 

Yes, I will do that now.
With and without CPU overclock

Give me a couple of minutes.

 

take longer than a couple of minutes. Ideally with the system live and running for a couple hours.

Thanks for doing this.

 

Yeah, I'd like to see thermal readings as well after a good couple of hours of use.

 

Hm... still getting 66k spikes when watching videos, and thus stutters. Strange.

 

Unfortunately, I still have stutter - but it's not from the drivers or the GPU downclocking. DPC latency shows almost all greens after A03. The hard disk on the left (when using the laptop) keeps clicking every now and then. It seems to have reduced over time, after the A02 update and pretty much the same with A03. When it happens, mouse, keyboard, input gets a lag and I'll see several characters appearing at once.

Originally was 2x500 GB in raid 0, I switched off the raid and re-installed. I recall several ppl posting that those who took the 2x500 GB option got 'clicky' harddrives.

(My OSD pop-ups for screen brightness change have stopped but since I can control brightness now, I don't care. Changing the sound does show the pop-up.)

Worth mentioning that other Dell laptop owners (non-AW) also have equally crap latency but they don't seem to have a problem playing back audio or video. So maybe something else was also causing it.

 

you will let me insist that its the gpus and harware faut relating to discharging. i bought myself an hdd 500gb for my data but my os is installed on ocz vertex.

by the way koshinn is your ocz vetrex performance still good? i lost my performance (50 mb.sec!) but i had to reinstall latest fw 1.40 to tak it back to 200mb/sec.

 

something else i noticed
when i close my lid ,laptop goes to sleep
on my old xps m1710, all usb devices would be cut off.
with the M17x the usb devices stay on.

my laptop cooler fans spin, and my USB external stays lighted.
Is this normal?

 

Hey BatBoy. Ive done a couple of tests and here are the results.

The sequence was as follows:
- computer running windows for about an hour under normal use
- then played crysis (very high settings with natural mod) for 10 minutes (the spike was crysis closing)
- waited for about 20 minutes then ran furmark for 10 minutes
- last screenshot was taken 2 minutes after to show cooling speed

 

After I repeated the steps with CPU overclock of about 17.5% (2.35GHz)

 

Thanks for that. FWIW, this is what I had after having the system running for about 6 hours now which included close to 2 hours of game time.

 

Yeah, those are good temps.

I would certainly value powermizer functionality.

 

This is what I get on A03 with powermizer off w/ dox 195.62 drivers after about 4hrs of left4dead 2. But no spikes or stutter at least

 

erm, that looks actually really good to me...

 

Hey BatBoy - Been following this thread for ages now and I have a question for you: Are you still using the same drivers listed on your site with the A03 BIOS? Have you upgraded to the 15.50 drivers from clevo or do you use the DELL or 15.49 ones?

Another question for anyone is what are safe temps? I mean leaving powermizer off fixes my dpc problems but does it really matter that its sitting 7-10 degrees higher (apart from noise)? I know this has been answered somewhere else but I just want to clarify.

 

I guess it could potentially shorten life of the cards..I don't think a few degrees is all that bad though. I don't really get much more noise than usual either.

 

I actually am curious to know if and how many people did call Dell for the latency and stuttering problem, because it seems that they won't really bother since the new line is out...

 

ok guys i tried for first time to disable powermizer. i installed the 195.62 drivers of DOX. it has an option to disable powermizer during installation. i was playing cod mw2 for 30 minutes. no trace of sound stuttering or video lag. dpc latency checker running on the background has shown some red spikes of maximum 4000μs (they dont cause sound stuttering) during gameplay but when not gameplay all way green without the huge spikes i see with powermizer enabled.

maximum temps reached 60 -62 degrees. normal temps 48-50 . The machine is an absolute perfect like that (even browsing or hearing online radio at the same time) but...

do you guys think it makes big difference or stressing gpus ? my normal temps with powermizer enabled are 38-40 degrees. so a 10 degrees difference makes any sense really?

 

It's a matter of choice, but think about this: Powermizer or not, your temps will be the same when you're playing a game, irrespective of hours. But don't you want to reduce the load on your GPUs and insure longevity by having the clocks and heat reduced when the computer is -not- doing intensive 3D tasks? I know I would.

 

of course i dont want to stress the system anyhow at least when i dont want to. i will leave it like that for two days to enjoy the stutter free and then back to crap.. maybe this will do something on a hardware level anyway and my dcp latency be better with normal driver. you never know.

anyway the rapid change of electricity demand causes dcp latency. when needs for power are stable then no problem.

 

I think the temperatures we're seeing are related to the A03 BIOS and not the 195.62 drivers...

I managed to mess up my system yesterday (uninstalled & re-installed gpu drivers) because I didn't realise stealth mode can be turned off only by pressing that media strip button again - even disabling integrated and restarting kept stealth mode going...and I was wondering why I got 20 FPS instead of 70.

Point is, even without the drivers installed, my GPUs were idling at 50-53 C.

PS: Batboy, your temps are very low! How heavily cooled is your environment? If your seagate harddisk assembly temps are any indication, you're in 10-15 C air con?

 

my temps with A03 BIOS and 195.xx driver are usually 38-40 (under normal conditions) for the gtx280s of course. passive cooling with cryo nzxt cooler.

 

This is how bad it got!

 

Finally....!!!! Did a fresh respawn, Used The DOX Drivers, Installed it using the HYBRID SLI Option, Disabled Powermiser during Install, and was able to watch a full movie, Browse the interweb, and have music playing as well, for over an hour and a half!!! Highest DPC I had was less than 1100!!!!! No stutter at all period! About Freaking time!!!!

 

After AO3 BIOS, I haven't seen any decrease in stutter. I still get huge spikes every 20 seconds or so.

However, when i disable both my wireless and ethernet adapters in device manager, i get no spikes at all. When I tried this in A02, it didn't change a thing but now disabling those seems to stop my stuttering....

WLAN driver issues maybe? John's post on the dell site says make sure you have latest drivers installed, and I can't find any newer than those on the Dell site....

 

I was on phone with them for 3 hours today, and will be expecting a return call tomorrow since the techs didn't know what to do after trying quite a lot of things (including a fresh install of W7 and following their specific order of installing the drivers. They did some registry tweaking, switching IEE to legacy, battery ACPI to disabled...all that we already tried)
I have to admit that all the yellow/green bars became greener, funny , but the huge spikes are still present in specific situations. Pressing eject key creates a 4-8k spike instead of 65k, but 65k spikes are easily reproduced when dragging windows fast with aero enabled, browsing some sites etc.
Anyway, I'm waiting for some sort of a solution tomorrow.

P.S> they know the issues very well

 

Good to know that at least people do bother them for these issues you know... As they told me on the phone the next step is to try another motherboard and then GPUs (imagine if they switch them with Nvidia again? ) still I have to wait for one or two weeks (that's what they said)

*EDIT*
whoever has news first just inform the rest of us thnx

 

Just to add my experience, I've never had the stuttering but I did have the high latency spikes - now with A03 they've more or less gone with the occasional one popping up randomly.

My system is pretty much standard, Hybrid-SLI, with the only tweak being using the MS drivers for SATA instead of the nVidia ones, as before they would cause lockups or BSODs. I may give them another go and see if it's fixed by the new BIOS.

 

Hey staman did you ask if you could try the ati cards. Cause I asked alienware to let me try the ati 4870's to see if it fixes the stuttering. I told them it was the nvidia 280's that were the problem.

 

Trust me it was the first thing that I suggested to them and I insisted from the very beginning with both agents. They said, first we will exclude the drivers -we excluded the drivers, formated twice in a day- then they told me to wait for a week or two because the development department would contact me for feedback (I don't know what else I have to provide them that I already didn't, I was displaying them while connected to my laptop, the GPU frequencies, temperatures, DPC latency, drivers installed...) after that and if there is no fix, then they gonna replace the motherboard and then the GPU cards -hope with the ATI ones- otherwise I see my laptop going back and forth about 3 times till we find a solution.

 

Perhaps I'm just simplifying the matter so correct me if I'm just totally wrong, but has it occoured to anyone else that the "fix" in A03 (I use that term loosely) might have been as basic as adjusting the thermal table to let the cards get hotter before kicking in the fans and/or downclocking them?

If that it true then it might explain why the problem is not fixed, but less prominant for some people. Personally I'm seeing exactly the same stutter and DPC as with A02...

 

For sure they let the main GPU run at higher frequencies thus at higher temperatures. Since they didn't publish any log file with the changes or the causes of the problem we can only speculate. I have to totally agree with you that the stuttering is the same but not as frequent when using Dell's display drivers -at least in my configuration-, with the rest of the drivers the stuttering occurs as frequently as before.

 

i dont think so. The low spikes that we were getting are gone with the new bios. They definitely fixed something. The high spikes (60k+) are coming from the video cards clock change. Only way to fix that is to disable powermizer......
i did that and now i have all green bars, i play youtube + open up itunes + play 1080P video with WMP and no reb bars at all. when i enable powermizer, all hell break lose. red spikes every few seconds and stuttering all over the place.

 

The fix was for the DPC Latency/stutter issues caused by the ACPI configuration. There are more DPC Latency/Stutter issues stemming from Nvidia cards/drivers/powermizer (the big ~65k spikes). I'm not having them anymore at all, nor do I have audio and video stutter during audio, movies, streaming media or games anymore (I did have them massively before A03, now they are gone...although I do use a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Notebook Express card for sound, so there might very well still be an issue with onboard sound). To fix them I've disabled powermizer and forced performance mode with Alexrose1UK's workaround as well as forced Prefer Maximum Performance for explorer.exe and sidebar.exe, which means my cards don't down- or upclock anymore at all (which might be bad, but hey, I'm on a 4 year warranty anyway).

 

That we don't see red spikes doesn't necessarily mean that the fixed something, they could have suppressed the symptoms -ie I disable the battery ACPI and the every 5 sec spikes are gone- I haven't fixed the problem, just disabled a feature.
Yes by disabling the powermizer I have no stutter at all except a few lower spikes and the 5K spike when I press the eject button. The problem is that both GPUs run at 51 degrees, not very wealthy in the long run...

 

Of course it doesn't. But with or without ACPI processes disabled on A02 I was experiencing audio stutter as well as video, HDD access and network stutter. They are all gone with A03, even with ACPI processes enabled. So it did actually fix it for me.

Yeah, it will certainly wear down the video cards. But that's why I have a 4 year warranty anyway. I haven't had a DELL laptop (Note that I only owned Dell laptops with Nvidia GPUs) in which I didn't have an Nvidia GPU die at least twice during the 4 year warranty period (by the way, my M17x' onboard 9400M has died once already - roughly a month after I got it so my mainboard had to be replaced), so I figure it doesn't matter all that much to me. Besides, if the cards die later in the Laptops life cycle when only newer cards are available, it may cause a free upgrade of the cards or a whole new laptop as a replacement. Not too shabby either. The excellent warranty is the true reason I get Dell systems anyway.

 

That's scary

 

my motherboard died once too. i dont know if it was the onboard gpu or something else. it just didnt even start. no lights at all or fans. at least they sent me a new motherboard in less than 24 hours and a technician to get it replaced.

 

Glzmo,

what video drivers are you using?
if you dont mind to list whatever configurations you have? did you do anything special? i did a fresh windows 7 installation after applying the A03 bios, installed all latest dell drivers and im using 195.62 video drivers. Still get 60k+ spikes every few seconds..

 

I'm using the official WHQL 195.62 Notebook video card drivers from nvidia.com, but I installed them according to Alexrose1uk's guide and also set the explorer.exe and sidebar.exe profiles to Prefer Maximum Performance.
Also, I don't have the OSD installed (hate the Stealth mode touch key, so I don't use the OSD to prevent me accidently triggering it) and I've removed Command center from starting up automatically, which may or may not make a difference.

You can see my system configuration by clicking on the thumbnail in my signature.

 

http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/4899/beforea03.jpg

Before A03 and WLAN Update



http://img697.imageshack.us/img697/9584/aftera03.jpg

After A03 update and WLAN update. Not impressed. Running 186 drivers.

 

oh ok so you basicly disabled powermizer, by having GPUs running at max speed. This is what i did you as well to fix the big spikes. But thats not really a solution, its a workaround.

 

My motherboard has died once and been replaced and has died again and are having system changed!

mind there were other faults too.

here something more scary every nvidia mobile gpu i have ever had has failed, and my girlfriends.

we are talking more than 13 gpus and 8 systems

maybe i will be better off with ATI