all powerfull m15x problems with 9800m

I've upgraded to windows 7 2 months ago. As MWLL was released recently I once again did gaming on my m15x. With windows vista I did not have this problem running fallout 3 for hours.

When I now play mwll which is a mod for crysis I get huge performance drops every 5-10 minutes. So I did a run furmark and somehow I think the graphics driver is slowing down the whole system as soon as the temperature of the gpu is rising to fast. Also the 9800m is getting quite hot. It was at 97 degrees after about 2 minutes of furmark. I attached a screenshot, look at the temperature at the bottom. Everytime it was dropping there was a huge performance impact.

To prevent such a high temperature I wanted to clock down the gpu. First I tried to use rivatuner but changing the clockspeeds didn't have any efect. Then I tried to use nTune. But when I try to use it, it crashes with a blue screen. The I tried to update my graphics driver, currently I'm using the forceware 186. When I update to forceware 195 it crashes up on restart with a bluescreen.

Another strange thing is, that while watching a movie I experience similar problems. Every 15 minutes the picture freezes but the sound is still playing. After about 20 seconds everything is back to normal. I don't think that a movie can heat the gpu to critical temperatures.

So my questions are:
1) Did someone experience similar problems?
2) Is my graphics card damaged (I don't notice any artifacts while running furmark)
3) Did you manage to overclock (underclock) the 9800m GT under windows 7?
4) If yes then what did you use?
5) Could it be something else that is slowing down my laptop?

 

While I can't say I share ALL your problems, I have had a couple similar ones:

First of all, the drivers... for some reason the 9800m GT in this bad boy is very picky about what drivers it uses. I also have win 7, and i'm not really sure if it's due to 7 or not.... but a lot of drivers just will not work. It is frustrating the hell out of me. I always uninstall the previous drivers and I always use driver sweeper in safe mode to clean out any left over files. I have tried the latest certified mobile drivers (195) from nvidia and the latest drivers from laptopvideo2go.com with the same result.... BSOD. The only ones that seem to work for me are 185 certified drivers from nvidia.com or Dox's 182 drivers from laptopvideo2go.com.

As for the temperature thing, I experienced this a year ago with my m15x. It ended up being an issue with the BIOS version... for some reason the video card would be downclocked when it reached a certain temperature. Unfortunately the max temperature was set too low, so it would downclock too early. This kind of sounds like what you are experiencing? If you search these forums for "m15x bios update" it will pop up.

I've never managed to overclock/underclock this card.... but i haven't really messed with rivatuner in a long time. I think this is also dependant on the driver version you have as well.

I can't think of anything else that would slow it down like that.... unless there's a lot of dust blocking the vents. Try using compressed air to blast that out just in case...