m9750 issues

Hi, had recently recieved my laptop from alienware and have had issues from the start. Most of them have been the normal driver issues with things with vista sp1 and not having 64bit vista for the total 4GB of ram but I have solved that buy aquiring a copy of 64bit vista and it installed flawlessly with my oem key.

My main concern and problem that I have been having is video. I had recently decided to install 3dmark06 and see what kind of marks I would get with my system. I had been looking around forums and websites to find out what an average is for a system like mine but was not able to find out what configuration people were using in 3dmark. I went ahead and ran as the default settings inside of 3dmark06 and had recieved around 4k on the first run in vista 64bit. I made sure that sli was enabled in control panel with afr2 being used. I decided to give all 4 os's a shot and below are the results:


Windows XP 32bit: 2980 points
Windows XP 64bit: 3112 points
Vista 32bit: 3650 points
Vista 64bit: 3948 points

I had done a clean format of each system and ran the same tests on each. I made sure they all had the newest drivers from laptopvideo2go. I was surprised to see that vista had higher scores as I expected xp to run much better. Each system was fully updated from windows update of all the current updates. No other software had been installed besides what was mentioned above. I had noticed that most people on forums that I had read had said that a system around mind should be getting 7k+ and the only thing I could think of would be that maybe SLi wasnt really enabled even though the menu had said it was. Is there anything that I am missing that needs to be done? What OS would u all suggest? Are there some kind of specific fixes that I am missing to make SLi work better?

I'm not really hardcore into gaming but had recently started playing AoC and figured with this system I should easily be able to run this game. I average about 15 fps on medium settings. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

so.........what card do you have?

 

ah sorry forgot the signature....should be on now

 

have you followed through this guide? http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=202449
and those are the scores you have since day 1?

 

have not followed that specific guide but others like it. Will try this tonight when I get home from work. At first I wasnt playing much except team fortress 2 which wasnt really noticable with 60+ fps constant. It was just a week ago when I bought aoc and decided to start using the 3dmark

 

alright this might sounds stupid, did you test it under 1280x1024?

 

i ran tests under both 1280 and 1900 res's which was why i was wondering what people's 3dmark scores were normally based off of

 

so what are these for? 1920 or 1280?

 

those were the default install and ran tests at 1280 i believe

 

If you ran 3dMArk at the default 1280 res these scores are way too low. Even with the 8700 which is somewhat slower than the 7950gtx you should be getting scores significanlty higher than the ones you posted. I get around 7300 3dMarks with SLI enabled and 5600 with a single 7950 gtx. I suggest that you set your SLI mode to Split-Frame Renderiing-that setting usually gives the best results.

 

Mmhmm and give my guide a try and see if that helps at all. You should get ~7000 3dmarks.

 

What he said. I get around 7300 with Vista Ultimate SP1, SLi 8700s, 4GB RAM, 2.0 Ghz C2D with RAID 1 which negatively effects the score since the data is written twice.

 

Loggie, are we related:tongue:

 

Ok, so I ended up formatting and going with my copy of 64bit vista since i have 4GB of ram. I installed the xtremeg 175.63 drivers and now on default settings i am getting upper 7800+ scores. I then was going through installing the rest of everything and started to tweak vista a little bit to try and get it to run faster. I went into the bios and noticed that it said it detected the 4GB of ram I had, but I also noticed that it also said available was around 2.6.

I started reading and found out that the m9750 board/chipset wont support the full 4 gigs of ram?!?!?! I am still kind of in disbelief. Does anyone know why or how(legally) alienware could sell a system with the option of 4GB even though the actual hardware doesnt support it? I know about the 32bit/64bit ram limitations but I didnt know about the actual motherboard not able to support this. I have read in random threads here and there and it seems that alienware keeps blaming it on the windows 32 bit issue. I had also read that there was no plan on releasing a bios update to fix this issue. My question is.....whats the point in having 4GB if i can only use 2.6 of it? and how is alienware allowed to sell systems and mention nothing of this limitation while ordering? If they would of sold an option of 3GB then I wouldnt be as upset as I would only be losing ~512mb but this seems kind of rediculous that I have ~1.5GB that cant/wont be able to be used.

 

Does anyone know of, or heard anything about a bios update for this issue?

 

Haha I actually have no idea how they do that legally. Go ahead and run a lawsuit, maybe you can get us all some money back as I can't install 4GB for photoshop

 

It is a hardware limitation so no amount of bios tweaking will fix it. They get away with it because they don't specify what type of ram or what part the ram is used for. Take out one of your video cards and you will see 512 meg more ram. In your case you have 1024 megs of video ram so it will only see up to a max of 3072 megs of system ram.

 

Heh, not planning on doing any kind of lawsuit or anything I was just wondering why a company would do something like that. I did notice some bios updates on their websites and was wondering if they had anything to do with it. They dont give any details on the updates.

@Frag I know of the hardware limitation but according to intel the chipset is able to support the 4GB so its the motherboard manufacturers that need to get with the program.