Observations on the X34 BIOS

I updated to the X34 BIOS today and as it says it did change the CPU profiles which meant that I had to re-undervolt my machine. So Naturally I just popped it back to the settings I had used with the X32 BIOS and fired up ORTHEOS just to make sure everything was stable. To my surprise I got BSOD very quickly which I had never gotten previously with those settings. I've also noticed that the CPU fan is not as aggressive as it used to be. With the X32 BIOS I never broke 30C while idle but with the X34 BIOS I went all the way up to 43C before the fan kicked in. Of course it might be interesting to keep in mind that this observation was done before the undervolting.

Furthermore I also updated to the nvidia 177.79 drivers with the modded inf from laptopvideo2go. So far it's working out great. My idle temps are now stable at 49C! Which is really awesome considering that it used to idle at 71C! Of course this is probably mostly thanks to powermizer which dynamically changes the clocks according to demand.

Which brings me to my final point. When I have RMClock with PowerOnDemand and the new nvidia drivers with working powermizer settings this leaves the stealth mode a little bit useless. The clocks now go up and down as they need to for both the CPU and GPU regardless of whether I am in stealth mode or not. This is good news for me because the stealth mode button never did work good on my system.

 

What's the room temperature like ?
There has been quite a bit of influence on idle temps by this as seen by the difference between dhoang417 & Svarto for example (dunno the exact numbers, sorry)

I'm happy you've sorta got your own version of Stealth mode working

 

Without having actually measured I am guessing that the room temps are about the same. They might even be slightly lower because today is a cloudy day and not especially warm outside. Also, even if the temps were slightly higher they should not account for that big of a idle temp difference.

Two more things I'm noticing is that RMClock no longer remembers that I want it to use the "Power on demand" profile and resets to nothing every time I reboot. Furthermore, CPU usage is at the moment unnaturally high while in idle. I need to do some more testing to find out if everything is working as it should.

 

that's a huge idle temp, 71??? can't be right.

i just updated my bios too. touch controls now rock. no downclocking, and that's it. so it did what it was supposed to. yay?

 

that was before the new bios.
thus he is saying it worked as planned and has reduced the idle temp.

 

i think that would be more due to the new dynamically downclocking drivers.

 

Fr33man, where did you get the 177.79 drivers? They're not in My Hive (on UK site). Were they released by ALienware and if not , do they work ok without downclocking? I assume yes.

Thanks

 

you get them from laptopvideo2go. they will downclock the performance level to the card to level 1 and when you run games the clocks will go back to their normal levels. helps with temps and battery life.

 

Thanks exiled. I'm confused - the drivers will downclock the card? But when playing games return it to normal clocks? How does that work??

 

basically when you are just idling and not doing anything that requires the gpu like browsing the internet or watching a movie the gpu will downclock itself. once you open up a game the gpu's clocks gpes back up and becomes normal again. its kind of hard to explain. if you have rivatuner you will see what im talking about with the downclocking when idle and running full speed when playing games.

 

That sounds great. How does the software know when you're gaming though? Also, I went to laptopvideo2go but couldn't find 177.79 drivers

 

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19830

thats where you will find it.

i dont really know how the drivers work but maybe in a few years i can tell you after i graduate college. all you need to know is that it works

 

What the f**k is going on here? I unistalled the 167 drivers - then tried to install the Vista32 177.79 drivers by clicking the Setup.exe icon - everything seems to go fine then the installer tells me that it 'can't find any drivers compatible with my hardware'

 

OK, so I need to download the modified INF and copy it to the driver folder before install. The problem is I've unistalled the old drivers and now my computer isn't registering my 8800m GTX - it just says 'Standard VGA' driver so when I try to install the old drivers it says 'you already have the latest drivers installed'. WTF is going on here? I can't install any new drivers and I can't runany 3D applications. Anyone got any ideas?

 

Can some please help? My computer is registering my graphics card as 'Standard VGA adapter' I can't rollback drivers or update.

 

sorry its so late ryujin but i got that, i just remarked at the oddity of the situation.

 

did you use driver sweeper to remove anything that was left from the uninstall of the 160 something drivers.

 

fine...upstage me...see if i care...

 

Yeah I had that problem too and found that I was unable to use the "Have Disk" method. So what I did to fix it is that I uncompressed the drivers to a folder using WinRAR. I then browsed through the driver folder and manually replaced the inf with the modded one. Then I started setup from the *.exe located in the extracted driver folder. When Vista asked if I wanted to install unsigned drivers I said yes. A reboot later and everything was running smooth.

On a side note I've found that a checkbox had been unticked in RMClock and after fixing that I am able to keep the undervolted profiles even after reboot. But as I've previously mentioned the tolerance of undervolting for the CPU is not as great as it used to be and idle temps are still way up even for undervolted profile. No, they are not alarmingly high but it is kinda annoying when they used to be so pleasantly cool.

I'm also experementing with reducing the timings on my memory but I'm not quite sure if things are stable. I've tested with the Right Mark mem test utility and even though it is reporting everything OK I'm not quite sure if I trust it because everest is giving me crazy fast benches which I don't trust and the Vista index went up from 5.0 to 5.9 which is a lot for the small tweek I performed.

 

well how else would you do it? i'm doing that every time...

 

I somehow dug up a guide on the laptopvideo2go site that mentioned what they called a "Have Disk" method, which involved manually going in and letting vista find you modded inf and bypassing the nvidia installer. Needless to say this method left me frustrated and confused so I resorted to mucking about myself and trying things at which point I instantly solved it.