Dell Studio XPS 1645: Post A07 Discussion

Count me in the minority, but I've actually been pleased with the A07 BIOS revision. I'm curious about other opinions since I'd like to have a better understanding of the latest round of complaints.

As I understand the current situation:

• The CPU no longer throttles when stressed by itself. With A03, running Prime95 on my 820QM at max brightness resulted in throttling. With A07, that's no longer the case. I get a consistent 13x multiplier. As a software engineer interested primarily in CPU horsepower for compiling and virtualization, this pleases me.
  
  
• Gaming seems to work fine for a limited amount of time, but at some point stuttering occurs with some frequency. Which games exhibit this? Does this only occur at max settings in 1080p? At least one person was testing for throttling by running Prime95 in tandem with the game. Is that a reasonable real world test?
  
  
• Prime95 and Furmark still results in throttling. Again, is this a reasonable real world test? Moving forward as more applications become multi-core aware and work is off-loaded to the GPU, I imagine system load will approach this simulated load... but is it realistic? My thought on the matter is that at some point heat becomes a factor, even with the excellent drop in temperatures that I've seen with GC-Extreme. A single fan and shared heat pipes aren't exactly an ideal design for that type of stress. The question is whether the heat dissipation is good enough.
  
  
• In the event of GPU throttling, I've seen RivaTuner as a suggested workaround. Is it possible to lock the GPU clock to the maximum possible using RivaTuner without the CPU being throttled as a result?
  
  
• Is the GPU really only throttling at a certain temperature threshold? I saw someone mention 84C as the magic number. Does that mean that you can run, say Prime95 and Furmark without throttling until the GPU hits 84C? Or in a more real world scenario, does that mean it's possible to game without apparent throttling until the GPU hits 84C? Wouldn't that mean you could further reduce (or eliminate) GPU throttling with better thermal paste? (For reference I've never seen my GPU load past 70C). Obviously, if that's a workaround, it would have been ideal for Dell to do this at the factory, but let's put that aside for now in the name of discussion.

If anyone responds to this, please do so with care not to be inflammatory. I'm not looking for conspiracy theories or hand-wringing about the evils of Dell. I'm looking for feedback on what people have experienced.

 

For me it's MW2 that starts to lag big time after a little while. I want to know how others are able to play this and what steps they took to be able to. How it compares to other laptops as well.

 

It would be worthwhile comparing various loads (games, simulated stress tests, etc) on different models/makes with similar setups. Specifically, I'm interested in people running games on the ATI 4670 at 1080p. It's not a very useful complaint about the Dell 1645 getting 5 FPS in a game running at 1080p, if a system from another vendor with the ATI 4670 isn't doing any better.

Numbers would be an ideal measure.

 

do we really need so many threads on this. The bios seems to be limiting 110w at the wall, seen peaks as high as 115w using throttlestop and A03 before i returned the laptop. It would make sense some users still stutter because of that, jackert's experience seems to back that up. especially those systems that draw more power.

Only thing id like to mention is that no other laptops seem to throttle with prime95 + furmark. Seems they were designed right from the get go in this respect. I worry about future apps using more cores and taking advantage of the gpu etc. I can understand why some users are returning their laptop after this, for them its a bit of a low blow.

 

I've been getting random freezes after I installed A07. This never happened before. Freezes happen while browsing the internet, nothing intensive. On the other hand, I've been playing MW2 and it runs very smoothly at max settings.

 

Still can't run Crysis Warhead worth a Da*n, compared to A05 / Battery or A03/ThrottleStop. So, i'm happier just not happiest yet. But you can count me in the difficult to please category.

 

Why do you consider yourself difficult to please expecting the performance you paid for?

I would be furious having to deal with the throttling you guys are experiencing. I have a Studio 1749 on order and if it throttles in any way its going straight back.

 

Sometimes I fell as though I pick on problems normal people would not even notice.

This seems to be the case with my dislike of the RGBLED.

 

When I had A01, A03 BIOSes and 90 W adapter CoD MW2 played fine on 1080p max settings. Certain levels, such as the 1 where u run around in a town and save a dead guy did lag at times, but it was the level and not the heat.

 

game of Wings of Prey.

A03-A06: used to throttle down to 9.5 multi and 87.5 modulation.

A07 + 130W: 14.5 multi and no modulation (same as battery or TS while using BIOS A03-A06).

Game + Prime with 6 or 8 threads: 12 multi and no modulation (with 8 threads it's not playable but there's no modulation or downclock).

A07 + 130W:
Furmark (v.1.8.0) + Prime (64bit v.2.5.9) with 8 threads: multi dips as low as 8.5 and reaches up to 10.08 at best (it cycles between those numbers). No modulation. GPU of course downclocks at the threshold (load drops to 0% and clocks to 300.0 / 499.5).

A07 + Battery (battery and adapter settings are same - max performance):
Furmark (v.1.8.0) + Prime (64bit v.2.5.9) with 8 threads: multi goes to 7 with no modulation. Stays there - stopped the test. Adapter provides better results.

A07 + TS + 130W:
Furmark (v.1.8.0) + Prime (64bit v.2.5.9) with 8 threads: multi stays at 12. Clock modulation occuring: every few seconds it drops clocks down to 12.5 and then climbs back to 100 very fast. When this happens, the multi climbs up slightly to 12.36 until modulation is removed and it's back at 12. It cycles through that.

CPU temps only peak at 73 degrees. Feel free to duplicate the tests and confirm/reject those findings on your systems but in my opinion it's clear under certain circumstances, we have both multiplier and modulation happening not related to temps.

Is it much better than A06, yes. Has it removed all throttling, no. Not really a huge problem for me personally as I don't reach that load 99% of time today, though I do wonder why I have modulation with TS enabled.

 

So far I've tried about 4 different games and haven't had any CPU throttling, Crysis, Hawx, Anno 1404 and Dawn of War II. I run Crysis and Anno 1404 in windowed mode at 1280x800, the other two full screen at 1280x800. I have graphic quality at max except for Crysis which I have at high. I've had gpu throttling when the temp was between 82-84 for awhile (20-30 minutes).

I applied AS5 to cpu and gpu Monday and now my temps hit upper 70's. Haven't had a gpu slow down since.

So the question is, is the throttling people experience from temperature or is the bios really limiting power draw again. Or are people trying to play games at max resolution and quality and the gpu is the bottleneck. If trying to play at max resolution and quality, I'd say get a new laptop with a more powerful gpu. If the bios is limiting power, then I guess I'm just lucky, since it isn't doing it to me.

I decide to run Prime95 and Furmark just to see what happens and yes I get throttling. CPU is at 87.5% and multiplier floats between 7 and 8. My cpu temp is 69 and gpu temp is 78. So definately not temp since I hit those temps when gaming. Guess Dell needs to tweak a little bit more. I'll probably have a new laptop by the time games come out to push this system to max.

 

I'm getting the impression that one of the issues is just that... Some folks are trying to play various games at max resolution and all other settings maxed as well. Now whether that is reasonable remains to be seen; I really would love to see how well other systems with the 4670 fare with matching game settings.

Edit: It's interesting that apparently ThrottleStop isn't aggressive enough to keep up with throttling caused by running Prime95 and FurMark.

Admittedly, I suspect Dell already considers this resolved; I doubt that they will address this any further, but I have been surprised before.