m7700 (D900T) short freezes

Aight so a couple days ago I picked up a D900T (2GB ram, 3GHz, 6800 ultra, V6.2). I reinstalled got everything set up and opened warcraft III to play dota. Every few minutes the game would freeze, but only briefly (not even a second) and then continue as normal. I thought maybe it would be a driver issue so I went to laptopvideo2go and downloaded the latest driver and whatnot. Went to warcraft III and it was freezing every 30 seconds or so for 5-8 seconds (much worse...). I thought maybe the driver wasn't set up correctly so I went to alienware and got the newest driver they had listed (still old, but newer than the one on the respawn disk). Still freezing, but not as bad or as often, so I rolled back to the original drivers.

It seems that the newer the driver is, the more problems it has. I haven't fully cleaned out the vents yet or anything (later today after some sleep), but as I was getting this freezing issue with the fans running full blast I'm not sure it will help. Do you guys have any ideas on what the problem could be? Sorry for the wall of text, I'm very tired and want to get this monster up and running properly.

 

Does this happen to any other program or game? Also when you updated the drivers you did do a clean install correct, meaning deleting the old ones first?

 

welcome to nbr,
I had very similar problems to you but I have the Quadro FX2500M in my D900K
I had to force antialiasing off for the games to run properly.
Quadro's force antialiasing on all of the time, so I had to force it off with rivatuner.

You should download RIVATUNER,
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=163

You can force the antialiasing off, which should help speed up gameplay.
Otherwise the bottleneck is going to be your processor. The intel single core is not the fastest thing.
Next time you go to game, turn on task manager first and leave it running in the background.
If the cpu is at 100% load,
the problem is either the game needs more cpu power,
or there are too many processes running in the background, causing the cpu to be stressed before you actually go about gaming.

The 6800 ultra is still a powerful card by all means, it shouldnt be stuttering while gaming
You should try laptopvideo2go's website for drivers.
I think the latest driver for your gpu is around 175.xx

K-TRON

 

If you have a 530 CPU (3.0) you can upgrade to a 6xx series, and up to 3.8ghz.
That'd help if it's a cpu issue, as the 6xx series beats the 5xx series for both processing power and heat production (more power, less heat) and the 3.8 is obviously a good bit faster then a 3.0.

Deffinitely clean it out, you'll have to remove the CPU heatsink to clean it properly, or at least i haven't figured out how to do it without removing it, the dust here likes to form a thick pad on the inlet end of the heatsink where i can't get to it. The GPU heatsink you can just take the sheet metal cover off to clean, it's much easier.

Clean it as soon as possible, i lost a motherboard to overheating, that cost me $475 and 13 months of no laptop.

 

@Alienized - I installed DoD:S and same problem, will be running ~40FPS and a quick freeze then continues on. Yeah I uninstalled the old driver, rebooted, and installed the new one each time.

@K-TRON - I tried rivatuner (got it from Gophn's guide) but for some reason I couldn't see the GPU temp (nTune was the same). Does my card not have a temp sensor? I will download riva and the newer driver again and try turning that off after I clean this thing out.

@bobnova - Yeah I was looking at possible upgrades for this, CPU and GPU wise. I was disappointed to learn that I couldn't put a core2duo in, but I'll check newegg later for those CPUs.

Thanks for the help guys, shutting down and cleaning =]

 

one of the first Nvidia 6800 Go modules did not have a temp sensor for software to pick up.

you can also try:
- HWmonitor

the best thing to do (after the cleaning of the vents and fans) is to use the Fan Toggle (Fn+F2) when you are gaming to switch all fans to max speed... to help prevent overheats.

... Note: you might need a EC/KBC firmware update to enable this feature.

 

Ok I cleaned out the vents (GPU heatsink was 75% clogged 0_o), installed the latest drivers, turned off antialiasing via rivatuner, opened up warcraft III and still get the freezes. I am starting to think it is the CPU because at one point a whole ton of happened (lots of spells, heroes died, someone left) and it just straight up froze for ~10 seconds, then did that CD skipping sound deal and slowly sped back up to normal speed. Is there a way I can use riva to see CPU usage while in a game?

@Gophn - Downloading HWmonitor and yeah, I learned about Fn+F2 from one of your guides.

 

open task manager before you start gaming
just after the freezing happens, press the windows key, and you can see task manager.
If the cpu is at full load than that is why you are experiencing these short lockups.

K-TRON

 

Ok I did that and from the looks of it I was never using more than 60% CPU while playing the game, and minimizing only spiked to ~68%. Any other ideas?

 

Best program i'm aware of for d900t's is Getthermal, i haven't found anything else that will read all the relevant temps. It also allows you to set the fan speeds, which i rather like.
The default alienware turns them on at 60*c, which is very close to the max thermal spec(68*c?). I have mine set to turn on at 45, which makes for full load temps at 60-61.

 

I'll take a look at that. I figured out how to have rivatuner show CPU usage in games, and in warcraft III CPU0 1%-20% CPU1 24%-40%. When it froze the CPU would go up, but only by ~4%. WORK RIGHT FFS

Edit: Ah this is nice, set it to start at 45 and cool till 40. Did you change any of the others?

 

I haven't managed to prove that any of the other settings actually do anything As such, i haven't really messed with them much.
As far as i can tell it's entirely extrapolated from the fan-on point.

I have mine set to turn on at 45*c and off at 1*c, because the sensor occasionally drops to 10 for no good reason and turns the fans off otherwise, which in turn lets the cpu temp go up to 60+.

 

I used nLite to put the HDD controller driver in my copy of XP Pro, installed, got all the latest drivers for everything, problem solved.