All M1530's perform better than mine?

OK, so how come i keep hearing about the M1530 being such a great gaming machine, but so far for me its been hard to achieve the same results as everyone else who has one of these laptops.

Apparently one person happily got crysis at 14-27fps on 1200X800 on medium settings with 2XAA with a WINDOWS driver update, no O/C and no tweaking.

I am using a driver that gets 4730 on 3Dmark06 basic and have reformatted and tweaked vista yet on the crysis demo i get 10-11 FPS while standing still!

I also hear 60+ FPS happily on Half Life 2: Episode 2 on all Max settings. yet MY game gets frame drops frequently.

See my sig for any problematic specs that might be causing lower gameplay standards. These are but of few comparisons i have drawn to come to this conclusion, i would love my laptop to game as well as everyone elses. (PS i use fraps to count FPS)

To help me judge this even better, is anyone able to get Oblivion (its the only other game i have) playable on Max settings on 1440X900 in the grass?

 

That is exactly how I feel with my Vostro.

 

Sounds like drivers issues to me.

3Dmark is a synthetic benchmark. The more points doesnt directly mean more FPS in games.

 

I play Counter Strike Source at 1920x1200 on mine all maxed out with 2x AA and 16x AF and get 50 fps to 70 fps. It uses the same engine as Half Life 2 so it should be similar in performance.

Did you clean up your system? Disabling unneeded startup items, etc.

 

as i said, i have done the tweaks

 

It's likely the Crysis demo is a lot less optimised than the full game with patches. I can't confirm this, but I expect that's the cause of the difference

 

You probably have some processor issues...

This processor might be it: Intel Core 2 Duo t7800 2.6 GHz

I'm able to play Oblivion at totally maxed settings at 1440 resolution easily. I have the T9300 2.5ghz processor.

 

How can you tell if your CPU is the problem? is there a program to diagnose this?

 

Well, the newer generations of M1530's doesn't sport the T7800 as well as Penryn. It could very well be that your processor is not running efficiently. If you think about it back then people weren't raving about gaming results with the T7800 series processor. Its just a possibility considering all your other specs are up to par. If you get the opportunity, try borrowing a processor from a friend just to test his performance, as T8300 2.4GHZ are able to perform very well also.

Another thing you might want to make sure, is that your 8600GT is in fact DDR3, if it is DDR2... well, that might explain it. It could be that Dell started with DDR2 and later switched over to DDR3. Check to make sure in your Device Manager.

 

I would take pretty much what you read about frame rates with a pinch of salt, some people like to overstate their figures for one reason or another.

The T7800 is a decent processor, I cant remember if it was an option before Penryns were out, but it would have been a pretty expensive upgrade. I doubt it has anything to do with your processor, I d imagine its far more GPU based. A Celeron with a decent GPU will run crysis.

Maybe if you have the time, do a clean install and begin with the stock drivers and then try laptopvideo2go ones after.

 

Chocolam, your laptop certainly isn't under spec'd. I think it has to be video drivers. I gained 10fps in COD 4 just by playing with drivers. You just have to find the one that likes your video card.

 

mmm well my t7800 is 2.6 GHz core 2 duo, so its not bad! and my GPU is definately DDR3, DDR2 ones couldn't get above 4000 in 3dmark. How do you check anyway?