M17x performance dropped through the floor

I have a new M17x that I've been enjoying since just before the holidays. It's nicely specced with a Q9300 CPU and dual 280M GPUs. Plenty of memory and other nice-to-haves as well.

In the last week my performance has fallen through the floor and I don't know why. I checked all the usual suspects - integrated graphics enabled; virus; bad GPU; wrong clock settings (even though I've not touched them) - and all looked fine. As a last resort I ran Alienspawn and reset back to square one. I disabled the integrated graphics and yet my performance was still bad.

Can folk please point me in some directions to look? I'm pretty computer savvy but I'm drawing a blank. Even my Google-fu has failed me.

To give you an idea of how bad it is, here are a few benchmarks I ran today:

3DMark06 - Score = 5550; SM 2.0 = 2031; SM 3.0 = 2133; CPU = 3552

3DMark Vantage - Score = 794; GPU = 605; CPU = 12076

As you can see the CPU scores just fine, but the GPUs are horrible! I thought one of the cards was bad, so I disabled SLI but that only reduced the GPU scores by half. So both cards are working, just not hard enough.

Any help gratefully received!

 

you might have bumped the command to turn of the discrete video cards i dont know what the exact command is, do you have your manual next to you? i know its a fn+f7 or something like that.

 

How hot is it?

 

I don't think he didn't know about that:

 

I thought it might be worth a shot. might take 5 minutes of his time and it will eliminate that question.

 

Sorry I edited my post so you can see my point clearer.

 

Did you check the windows power settings?

 

turn off stealth mode if its on ( last button on the touch strip on the right.

Also make sure your plugged in

 

Shouldn't 3d06 tell you what card are you running before you ran the test!

 

I was pretty sure this wasn't the problem, but tried it any way. Sure enough, my Marks went down even further. 3DMark06 down to Score 1778; SM2.0 658; SM3.0 689; CPU 1043. Interestingly enough, not that dis-similar to the non-SLI scores, but I digress. I didn't run 3DMark Vantage because life's too short.

Very cool. It sits on a laptop cooler I bought for my XPS 1730 (which got stolen, but that's a different and far longer story). So cool, in fact, that the main fans barely run.

Yes. I'm running "plugged in".

However The_Moo and maybe Kevinmcg got to the heart of the problem. Trying the stealth mode button did the trick. I'm now getting the results I should be:

3DMark06 - Score = 13158; SM 2.0 = 5170; SM 3.0 = 6329; CPU = 3558

3DMark Vantage - Score = 12020; GPU = 10058; CPU = 28975

So thanks everyone for the help! Much relieved

It does beg these questions, however:

How can you detect whether stealth mode has been activated, other than bad performance?

How can you disable it all together?


Thanks again! I'm actually just about to embark on my first overclocking journey, thanks in part to The_Moo's great OC thread I found while trying to research this problem in the first place and hope to tweak these numbers up even higher.

 

click the stealth mode button to double check

or try GPU z and look and see if your clocks are right.

Good luck on overclocking, if you have not flashed to A03 BIOS try and do so to help with performance and overclocking

 

A03 helps with overclocking?

 

i have reports its helped some users get higher and it make sense since they played with thermal tables and im betting power tables

 

What kind of processor do you have? Three QX9300s Overclocked? lol just kidding, but I was going to say, your previous scores are pretty impressively low. Glad to hear that you got it all sorted out. Hope you have fun overclocking. When you get some results post them up in the *OFFICIAL* M17x Benchmarks RESULTS Also a great place to read and get some tips. Love to see your results.

 

So I read. I'm always a little wary of BIOS flashing as it's one of the few ways to brick, but I'll read all the success stories to give me courage.

No, that's about right. At least according to the review at http://www.notebookforums.com/thread230052.html

I'll definitely post up benchmarks as I progress through the process. Being the engineer, I'm being brutally rigorous and already have my spreadsheet going...

 

I realized something, I think your benching with physics turned on. In all the benching in the benchmark thread we are doing it with physics off.

 

I've been doing benchmarks with PhysX both on and off, as it's pretty quick to do. I'll only report the off results.

 

I believe so since I'm now able to get my Q9000 runs @ 2.53. Before A03 my CPU can reach that clock but always crashes in heavy load