Great GPU performance from my new XPS 13 with G210M!

Thought i'd post some info about my setup. I got my new XPS 13 a few days ago - P8800, 4GB, G210M, 500GB 7200rpm, Dell 1520 Wifi, LG LED display - and love the build quality and performance. I also removed the stock thermal paste and applied Arctic Cooling MX-3 using this guide.

Did a fresh install of Windows 7 with Flash 10.1 Beta2 and nVidia 195.81 (beta). Both of these allow for hardware accelaration in Flash.

CPU usage during playback of a Youtube 1080p video was amazingly low -
With the 9400M G active (Balanced Power Plan), playing this video took around 20% CPU


With the G210M active (High Performance Power Plan), CPU usage was 0-5%!!



Installed Media Player HPC 1.3.1249 and chose EVR Custom Pres for video rendering (View..Options...Playback.Output).

Here's how much load the GPU takes off the CPU during the playback of a 720p video
Video Rendering___________CPU Utilization
System Default__________________50%
EVR Custom Pres with 9400M_______28%
EVR Custom Pres with G210M______ 21%

I also installed Badaboom and tried encoding 1080i video from an HD camcorder into an iphone version and amazingly the CPU was hardly being taxed -


3DMark 2006 result was also very impressive -


Also ran DPC latency checker to find potential issues and everything looked good -

 

You have 6-cell or 9-cell battery??

How many hours can you use ur SXPS13 on power saver for surfing?

 

6 cell. I havent tried it all the way, but based on the drain i would guess around 3 hours if i was doing light surfing - reading news, email...

 

ouch the G210M doesnt support PhysX?? based on the GPU-Z reading u shown there?

 

No one uses PhysX on lower end GPU's, using PhysX is only really an option if you have either SLI or a high end card capable of doing both physics and graphical calculations at the same time without getting terrible frame rates

 

Nope, it doesn't because it has only 16 GPU cores (or shaders). Physx requires at least 32 GPU cores.

 

Very true, also the amount of games that actually make real use of physx is so small that its silly

by the way, VERY useful stuff andy, finally some benchmarks with the 210, seems it will beat the m1530 with the 8600gt... but how is the actual gaming experience on it ?

 

If the 3DMark06 score done at 1280 x 800, G210 is almost as powerful as 8600M GT GDDR3.
My 8600M GT is old

But I think during gaming, 8600M GT is bit faster at higher resolution due to 128-bit memory bus.

 

well this beats the crap out of my 9600m GT DDR2 LoL.. beats it by 200 points and it should be a great portable machine

 

I have the 230m and i don't have the computing function showing up in gpu-z , though all the others do, do i need to install software to enable it.

Thanks.

 

Maybe you're using an older driver. The newer ones should have OpenCL support built-in - http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_opencl.html

 

Yes, it is done at 1280 x 800.

 

How good is this SXPS13 in games like CODMW2? Left4Dead2? Crysis?

I saw in some threads stating using SLi is not any better than using 9400M?
Seems weird.. LoL..

While some like
http://www.notebookforums.com/thread230251.html
Shows crysis benchmark having performance booost using the G210M SLi.. hmmm