K53TA OC w/ K10STAT (Clarification Needed)

Hey all, new owner of a refurb K53TA-BBR6 - and I'm absolutely tickled with it. Popped in some extra RAM, swapped out the HD for an older SSD I had sitting around (not the fastest, but still significantly zippier than the 5400 rpm HD that it had in it!), and did a fresh install of Win7. Impressive little laptop. Screen is fairly meh, but I'm holding onto the hope that we're able to remedy that eventually. Now I'm just trying to get a handle on how to eek out a bit more performance out of this lil' beauty, and had some questions.

Here's a screenshot of my initial OC, thought I'd start conservatively and go with a modest 2.0 Ghz. Basically used THIS as a reference.



My temps and such seem to be acceptable, we'll see once I figure out how to get K10STAT to run automatically at boot and such. My questions are as follows:

1.) Am I supposed to have "Enable Clock Control" active? In the above linked thread, all of the screenshot have it disabled.

2.) I'd like to ensure that the voltage of each P-State is sufficiently stable, but the "Lock P-State" option doesn't seem to work; as soon as I activate IntelBurnTest, it ramps up to 2.0 Ghz (the P0 setting) regardless of what P-State I lock it at.

3.) If I close K10STAT, the OC seems to remain active (cores still peak out at 2.0 instead of the stock 1.4) but I've got no icon down in the taskbar indicating its running - is this as intended? Seems to default to stock on reboot.

4.) I'm a little confused about the whole Enabling/Disabling of Crossfire. Are there still performance issues if enabled? Almost everything I've found about this model is in reference to Catalyst 11.8, have things improved now that we're up to 11.12? If I disable Crossfire, does it only use the APU (6520)? What good is having the 6650 if we can't use it? Oh, and why is AMD System Monitor reporting it as 6520G + 7670M Dual Graphics? *scratches head*

5.) If I decide to take the OC any higher, do I scale the Boost accordingly? Say I wanted to try for a P0 of 2.4 - would I change the boost to 2.7? Or leave at 2.3? Not entirely clear on what the "boost" does.

Once I've got a better handle on the above, I'll tackle trying to get everything applied at boot and such (read something to the effect of using Task Scheduler or something? I should really bookmark this stuff...)

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance!

 

first question is where did you buy this K53TA? My wife bought one last year (around november) and we were so pleased with it for casual gaming i was going to pick one up for myself and my brother also wants one. The newer version has the 7670 that your reporting as a product refresh but this seems strange to me in a refurb? if you can give me your hardware id # for the dedicated card from device manager that would be helpfull

 

System I referenced in this thread was a refurb unit I bought from Newegg on 1/8 - I ended up RMAing it because I wasn't especially fond of the screen quality.

I've since gone through two custom HP pavilions, an Acer, and a Lenovo - and have been disappointed with each and every one one of them compared to my original K53TA. Been kicking myself about returning it for awhile now.

Funny thing is that I just got my auto-notify email today from Newegg telling me they've got new refurb units back in stock...so I've got a replacement K53TA on the way!

I'll report back with what the newest system shows up with, and keep crossing my fingers on an option to upgrade the screen to 1080p.

@link626 -- thanks for the response, looking forward to getting the new system and tweaking it to my heart's desire!