How to maximize my 1645 for gaming / How does your 1645 perform for SC2

Here's my specs: Studio XPS 1645, i7 Q720 1.6GHz, ATI 5730, 6gb ram

My first question is how does your 1645 perform on video games such as Starcraft 2? I read somewhere people were running SC2 on Ultra settings at at a high resolution, with reflections off. I tried this and a little into the game it got very choppy where I really couldn't do anything, even opening the menu to close the game was hot. The computer also got pretty heated.

I run all my games on 1920 x 1080 resolution on my Dell ST2310 monitor. I am a little disappointed with the performance so far, maybe my expectations for too high.

How can I improve my performance? Currently all I really did was update my BIOS (not sure if it was outdated or not but it seems to have worked) since my computer kept shutting down. My guess was it shut down when it got too hot, it happened three times both times I was installing a bunch of programs while having sc2 open. Is there any other settings I should enable/disable? And yes I have my power settings at max performance .

My computer seems to run very hot as well, I keep a large external fan blowing on the back of it when I'm playing video games for a prolonged period and this seems to help keep it cool on the outside at least, not sure how much it helps for the inside. Anyone know if this is effective? Or should I remove the back cover and blow the fan on it?

 

See my signature for the specs of my laptop... it's reasonably similar to your's. SCII is interesting in terms of performance; it is very map dependent. Aside from that, I run most setting on medium. Physics, Models, and Movies are set to high (and textures can be high as well, I just don't really notice a huge difference in quality). Everything else is set to medium where possible (some settings are forced to low), reflections off. This keeps everything smooth, and quite playable even when in very very large battles. I think the biggest performance hit comes from setting the shaders to anything higher than medium. Oh, and I run at 1920*1080.

Perhaps your expectations were a little high, as the video card in this brand of laptop (4670 or 5730) isn't really a high-end graphics card. Don't get me wrong, it performs amazingly and I'm very happy with it, but it isn't something that can power through any game at high/ultra settings.

In terms of things you can do to improve performance. Make sure your power plan is set to "High Performance" in Windows. Terminate/stop any programs and processes that are unnecessary. There are also a number of settings that can be tweaked in the Catalyst Control Center.

Since you didn't specifically mention it, there are also drivers from AMD/ATi that you can install which are newer than the drivers from Dell, though I don't know if they will make any difference to performance. Graphics Drivers & Software

 

Simply put, the people who say "SC2 runs great on my XPS 1645 on Ultra and at high resolution" have low standards in terms of playability. Always use benchmarks with NUMBERS. By "great" they mean in the realm of 20fps, which is just trash.

1. They say "runs great on ultra." You think they mean 50fps average, above 30fps for 99% of the game. They actually mean 24fps average, below 16fps for 20% of the game.

2. They say "high resolution." You think 1920*1080. They mean 1600*900. In this case, unlike the first, neither of you are wrong, but the difference is like 30%+ in terms of likely performance difference due to the massive difference in number of pixels.

Changing drivers seems to do very little in terms of performance. If you need more performance, maybe try a GPU overclock. A 15% increase in core and memory speeds will give you 15% more fps.

 

Can anyone explain throttling to me? I was told to get a program to turn off throttling and also try using an older version of the BIOS to improve performance. Any comments on these?

 

I run starcraft 2 at 1600 x 900 Ultra settings, Shadows medium, Reflections off and i have it locked at 30 fps and it never drops.

 

What are your laptop specs?

 

I am mostly curious about 'tweaking' of settings in CCC; I have generally left this area under default settings aside from PowerPlay being set to performance...is there anything I should change to get the most benefits out of this particular GPU/laptop?

 

Under the 3D tab, you can adjust the slider to performance, but you sacrifice some quality. Personally, I leave it half between performance and balanced, it speeds it up slightly and I don't notice any drop in quality. Besides that, there really isn't that much to change in the laptop CCC, except for color/contrast stuff.

 

The same as yours

Dell Studio XPS 1645 | i7 720qm | 6GB 1333MHz DDR3 | ATi 5730 | 900p WLED | 500GB 7200RPM

 

Wow just installed the 1.1 patch for sc2 and my frame rate is all over the place. I have not changed any settings but frame rate is jumping up and down. For the first time i have seen <10 fps.

 

Probably not throttling then, but it's still possible. Also, with the 5730 the older BIOS might not help, that is mostly for those with the 4670/565v. To be sure it isn't throttling, download throttlestop and GPU-Z. GPU-Z can be found here Download TechPowerUp GPU-Z v0.4.6 | techPowerUp and throttlestop here http://go.notebookreview.com/?id=52...n.com/files/2008/3/3/1794507/ThrottleStop.zip.

Follow this thread for instructions to use throttlestop to determine if you have CPU throttling http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/446193-s-xps-1645-throttling-info-updates.html

Determining if you have GPU throttling is very similar, you just use the sensor tab of GPU-Z in addition to throttlestop.

 

FWIW I'm playing Metro 2033 on High settings (DX9) @ 1280x720. Everything is very smooth, at 30+fps. If I bump up to Very High settings, I can get 20-30 fps (though smoke tends to cap that FPS to the 20's).

I can also play on Very High settings with DX11, but the framerate drops to 20fps on average, and when there's lots of smoke, things crawl to well below 20fps (actual slideshow speeds). I've only played with DirectX11 just for the hell of it. Things are perfectly fine on DirectX 9.

 

Anyway this is too much trouble for my liking, I kinda regretted making the purchase before I even got the laptop but this is the nail in the coffin. I'm returning it tomorrow . My 5 year old Inspiron seems to be working very well a lot better than this 1645 ;S. Thanks for the help anyway guys.

 

were you expecting better performance out of the 5730? or is it the heat issue?

if your Inspiron is really performing better than your 1645, you may have a hardware issue that should be identified at least, even if you're going to return the unit. then you can use this hardware fault as ammo to see if you can get Dell to bump you up to an Alienware

 

Sounds like you had your mind made up already to return it, I seriously doubt your 5 year old computer is better than the XPS.

 

Yes, the XPS 16 will crush the old Inspiron with a 300 to 1000% increase in gaming performance, but I'm guessing he means there's no reason to have it since it's not as powerful as his desktop, or since neither meets his gaming standards.

 

has anyone noticed the CPU likes to run very hot even when its not that intensive? What is that? Like it would get all hot when I ran a PSX emulator but for Mass Effect 2 it was acceptable. SCII runs fine but its so hot! Even when everything is on as low as possible.

 

The CPU runs at the same speed regardless of what settings you use for SCII. This is why it can sometimes become a bottleneck: if you get a really fast GPU and a lot of frame rates, the CPU will still run at the same speed. It's also why people say lower settings are more CPU dependent than high settings-- it's not true, but it sums up the situation rather nicely; the GPU can push out more frames but the CPU can't keep up.

In the SXPS 16, both the CPU and the GPU share the same cooling system, so you're likely to see a correlation between GPU load and CPU temperature. In the PSX emulator, you're probably taxing both the GPU and the CPU. In Mass Effect 2, your load is mostly on the GPU. And in SCII, both the CPU and GPU are put through their paces.