**OFFICIAL** Dell XPS M1730 Owner's Lounge, *Part 4*

HWMonitor is the perfect program to measure temps for CPU/HDD(when not in RAID)/GPUs.

Rule of thumb: HDDs never above 55C.
CPU never above 75C.
GPU never above 80C.

Currently, there is no program that shows the fan speed correctly. Or not that I know of.

 

Thanks for the feedback. Now I'm just going to stop worrying about it then. Thanks again.

Are you running any fan control software? As far as I know none of them work well with this laptop. Most can only control 2 out of 3 fans (3rd fan is turned off in the process). Updating your BIOS to A11 would improve temperatures, however, you may experience higher noise from the fans/annoying speed variations. Also, cleaning fans vents can reduce temps by quite a bit.

 

alright thank for the help whatever it is but it never reaches 70C while in load and never reaches 80C while not in load so its not bad for a gpu by the way i am playing nfs hot pursuit with 8700m gt sli t8300 and 2gb ram the game is playable but i am not sure about sli so can u tell me if sli works for you? Game gives same or i think better fps with fps with sli but max load on 2nd gpu is 67% and sli balance graph is hardly half so can u give me sli profile of this game for nhancer with nvidia cp sli not works well but with nhance it is working in cod4 assassin creed and farcry2 but there is no profile for hot pursuit

 

I remember that when NFS:HP came out, there was no SLI support. There definitely is now. It should be supported by new drivers. I believe game patches also improved SLI performance.

 

Well, i got the latest 290.53 beta drivers and they are O.K. I only need the game patch because i have v1.0 so i check the latest patch now.

but i got some questions about sli
do i need a profile for each game to make sli work proper?
If yes than how i can make it? I can not find any profiles
nvidia drivers made cod4 profile itself only and the nhancer software made assassin creed cod4 and farcry2 profiles itself.

 

Well I still use for Win XP the older 197.15 drivers and Nhancer for making my own SLI profiles.

Else you have the nvidia inspector for newer drivers.

 

Your GPUs are overvolted, right? I mean, at 600/900/1500, every once in a while, I get a bluescreen... (although for some reason, MSI Afterburner reports erroneus values, like 940/1620)

Also, checked some of your videos. I just can't believe how nice games run on your system compared to mine.

I'm this close to doing a full system reinstall, since it's too weird to have such a huge difference in games on very similar setups.

I'd like to do a test by test with you , if you have the following games:

Bioshock2
COD Modern Warfare 3
Heroes VI
Serious Sam 3
and Crysis 2.

Same setups, to see just how many fps you have over me, and I'll go up to 3.8 Ghz, and OC the GPUs also.

Let me know if you can do this and we'll settle on the tests/setups/configs etc. Might help me figure out why I'm lagging behind.

 

NFS HP is pretty CPU dependant. I know that when I had the T8300, I had poor performance compared to the X9000 (pretty much doubled my fps).

No SLI for it though.

Nvidia Inspector should be the program you're after, for profiles.

 

As eleron said, you can use Nvidia Inspector to create your own profiles or load profiles that you may find on the web.

As eleron pointed out the CPU may be a limitation, although I don't think it can be a bottleneck paired with your GPUs. With my setup playing on high I still get drops in fps to high 10s - low 20s. Lowering the settings doesn't improve things that much neither.

I'm pretty sure it does support SLI though. Because I remember when it just came out it would barely run on medium settings, but after a few patches and driver updates I can run it on max settings.

 

No overvolted actually. Well I have Modern Warfar 3, Serious Sam 3 and Crysis 2. Yes we can compare I just have to install Modern Warfare 3 and Serious Sam 3 on my XPS first.

 

DDT5 now i ask to u a feedback , you have an SSD like me. Did you change settings on bios to make it work fine?

My XPS sometimes freeze and i need to force reboot. Sometimes happen when it finish to load 7.

I had this issues with the t8300 and the x9000, i've checked the temperature and everithing is fine.

I don't know if is related to the SSD or the C states of the CPU. If someone have any tips.

 

Do you already have the latest firmware?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...762-crucial-m4-5200hrs-bug-fix-available.html

 

NFS HP
well i get around 20-40fps with sli and max load on both gpus is 37%.i installed the patch#1 and no difference yet well there 4 more patches left i will check them as well but i didn't find a option to low/high the game detail? Only option is high resolution textures.

 

after some tweaks with nvidia inspector i manged to improve the performance
Now
Max load 80%-98%
than 35-45fps
sometimes Max load 60%-75%
than 17-33fps
however game is well playable and graphics are better now.
Thanks

 

I made a few tweaks to improve performance:
Made sure that HDD is configured in AHCI mode (not IDE). This change can be made in BIOS, but it may mess with your current windows installation.
Made sure I have the latest firmware, as already has been mentioned.
Made sure I have the latest Rapid Storage software from Intel. This has drastically improved the performance.

I had issues when my laptop would crash unexpectedly, sometimes during loading Windows. Sometimes it wouldn't detect SSD at all (even in BIOS). Turned out to be a faulty SSD. They are not as reliable as many people think. Had it replaced under warranty, new one works like a champ. Crucial were great at replacing it.
Sounds to me like you may have similar issue. The worst thing is that when I run all sorts of diagnostics on the SSD (SMART checks, some other SSD checks), none of them reported any problems with SSD. Check their forums to see if there are others with similar issues.

 

Ok, let me know when you have them, then we'll see which maps/places to compare and under what settings. I'm guessing all round high, 1920x1200(1080) res.

Or if you have direct configs for them, even better, so the only difference would be hardware wise. I'm willing to test both your driver (197.x) to use nhancer and the latest 275.x, which I already have.

I also have Win7, and have installed Battlefield 3 some time ago, but haven't played much, so that could be another test element.

Anybody who has

1. Serious Sam 3
2. Modern Warfare 3
3. Crysis 2
4. Battlefield 3

is invited to test performance

 

In SLI Mode games use the memory of 2nd gpu also? But i could not find a software every softw tell me the 1st gpup's memory usage so is there any software which can tell u the 2nd gpu memory usage?

 

They mirror each other's memory. That's why 2 GPUs with 512Mb of memory is SLI does not equal to having 1GB of memory in total.

 

No in SLI the memory is still 512mb and not 1GB for the 8800m GTX/9800m GT SLI. Though SLI uses both GPU´s shader processors so you can count in for 96x2 for the 8800m GTX/9800m GT SLI abd 112x2 for 9800m GTX SLI.

 

SLI doesn´t seem to work for me in Modern Warfare 3 yet. However fully maxed out with 2x AA I get this average fps in a heavy firefight.

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
2211, 60000, 33, 42, 36.850

Helicopter Scene with the minigun:

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
2227, 60000, 27, 44, 37.117

 

Ok, I'll test it like that. I'm guessing you used the FRAPS benchmark.

AFAIK MW3 supports SLI, or maybe it's your driver?

Anyway, I'll give it a go, but which mission is that? ACT I, ACT II? that's as far as I got

 

I think it´s ACT 1, yeah I will try the game in Win 7 instead with a newer driver and see what FPS I get. It´s smooth though with one GPU and 2xAA

 

Yes I use FRAPS.

Here is Crysis 2 DX9 Extreme Settings and in the burning tower with lots of Cephs in it.

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
1770, 60000, 22, 43, 29.500


Also while we are at it, I tested Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim:

City of Whiterun during daytime, all settings High 1920x1200 16xAF no AA and all sliders maxed:

Driver version 197.15 Win XP:

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
2353, 60000, 24, 55, 39.217


Bad Company 2, DX9 all settings set to High 1920x1200 Win XP Driver 197.15:

Level Cold War the assault on the small town:

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
2229, 60000, 28, 51, 37.150

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit all settings maxed:

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
2992, 60000, 33, 57, 49.867

 

Ok, so here they are: SLI enabled
driver v. 285.38
windows XP
Stock GPU clocks
CPU at 3.6


Modern Warfare 3
MAP Act 1, second mission(first one after prologue)
Settings: Maximum, with 2xAA

Min---------- Max---------- Avg
29----------- 42---------- 36.328


Crysis 2
VSync YES
Map - first map, when the marines are in the sub, when they start talking, benchmark 1 min
Settings: HARDCORE
Min---------- Max---------- Avg
24---------- 42---------- 28.4

same map
Setting: ADVANCED:
Min---------- Max---------- Avg
34---------- 61---------- 42.8

same map
Settings: GAMER
Min---------- Max---------- Avg
39---------- 61---------- 45.4----------

 

Eleron I will run that first map in Crysis 2. Seems like the framerate is around the same as me.

Would be interesting to see what I would get with a 9800m GTX GPU. I am thinking of buying one for my XPS since that 1GB of VRAM really does help or should help in games like Skyrim and Battlefield 3.

 

This is with no tweaks, no profiles, just crysis 2 vanilla.

I'm guessing with some visual enhancements, it would run and look better. But I barely have time to game nowadays, so I will look into this another time.

I've seen your youtube videos and I always have the feeling that your system runs much better. I would have to do a filming just like you and see if feels the same.

Serious Sam 3 is what I'm most interested. I can't run it at WUXGA and full settings, cause it lags badly.

As far as the 9800M GTX goes, you'd be better by killing your laptop and getting an M18x

 

Well, M1730 is a old laptop but we can still run the latest games on it.But i got less specs well one thing about sli that i can't see much imrovement in any game with sli expect Wanted Weapons of Fate i get around 5-10fps with single 8700m GT but with sli i get around 50-80fps that's cool and i want such sli performance in every game.

 

Yeah I have to test Serious Sam 3 too.

 

Depending on what the 9800m GTX goes for, I'd also advise consideration for a used M17X-R1 with at least the 260m GTX SLi setup. You'd be able to do just as much with that, and some more, if the price is worthy.

And by price, I mean serious consideration. For example, I'd rather pay £600 for the M17X-R1 with an SLi setup [1] than pay £400 for the 9800m GTX. You can just experiment more, and expand your range. Plus. . . two machines. For an additional £200, that's much more effective and worth your while, in my opinion. It'd be great to see what you could do with that machine since people are accomplishing quite a bit, including Crossfire 5870m.

[1] I recently saw an M17X-R1 go for £600 on ebay. It was loaded with all the goods, including 260m GTX SLi. CPU was a bit weak - Q9000. However, you could always upgrade that to a Q9200 or an X9100 for another £110. Or if you're absolutely stretched, then you can dump your T9300 or the X9000 into that computer since it technically supports both; I've used the X9000 on mine.

 

Yeah that´s true Kade, 9800m GTX GPU almost costs as much as that notebook. I think I will let my M1730 rest and not upgrade it anymore, it´s not worth it with the only Dual Core CPU it supports and no Quad core which is needed nowadays.

Nice to hear that X9000 works in that notebook too. Yeah I have to think about it for sure.

 

Yeah, I mean, with the 9800m GTX you will benefit from the additional VRAM. I've already posted results of this in our other lounge, which you've seen. However, if for around the same price -- maybe a bit more -- you could get a whole laptop such as the more advanced M17X R1, then you can pull off a lot of stuff and will have greater head room for customisation and upgrades.

Just yesterday, when that R1 I mentioned got sold, I saw an ATi 5870m on offer for around £180 with the seller agreeing to take offers on the listing. Now imagine getting two of those for around £300, and fitting the R1 with the QX9300. The parts are cheaper because they're not as proprietary as the M1730's. Put it all together and you've got a killer system. Although in my opinion, you'll still leave many of us in your trail with just the SLi 260m since you're good at optimising games. You focus less on actual FPS and more on making the games look smooth, which is categorically more important when it comes to playing actual games. This is one the reasons why your videos look phenomenal in my opinion -- smoothness.

As for the X9000. Yeah, it works. Obviously, with the higher power draw on the M17X, you might not be able to get the highest X9000 overclock as you would with the M1730, but much of that is offset by the RAM and the overall performance. Although I should add that with some good FSB clocking, coupled with some multipliers and added nudge from throttle stop, you could reach those 3.5+ GHz marks with ease. I know my X9000 experiment was stable to about 3.6 GHz. Unfortunately, unlocking all multipliers actually created too much RAM latency, so I relied mainly on FSB overclocking, which can be done through BIOS on the M17X, while pushing it further through Throttlestop. Good stuff.

Note: I am still not sure about the price of the M1730's 9800m GTX SLi. The last time I checked, they were still in the 400 range, and heck, you can get a whole M1730 with the same cards for around £600-800.

 

So you can´t overclock the X9000 as high in the M17x as in the M1730? Well no problem though I would aim for a Quad Core instead actually.

You are quite right about the smoothness in the games I have posted. That is what I actually aim for more than high framerate.

Stuttering I don´t tolerate but some games are impossible to make stutter free. However there is just 1% of my games that stutters occasionally but I try with nhancer and when I have found the right SLI bits I easily transfer these to my Win 7 partition and Nvidia Inspector.

 

Well I just tested Serious Sam 3 and guess what at these settings

CPU: Medium
GPU: Ultra though I disabled antialiasing rest of the Ultra options enabled. My own SLI profile though
Ram: Ultra (I think the option was called ram)

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
2294, 60000, 21, 59, 38.233

Not too shabby and this is at the scene where the spaceship blows that building to pieces and some killing with the purple enemies

I will post a youtube vid of how it runs

 

Mind posting the SLI profile?

I've tweaked the game (custom) and still, later on in the game, the resolution is a killer, especially with rain or hordes of enemies. First map is actually decent in terms of demands, but the game gets far more annoying afterwards.

I'll do the same test and see. 1 min test is it?

 

Yeah 1 min test, I fought hordes of enemies in the first level but the framerate never dropped below 30 fps.

Will do more tests later on in the game and see how it runs.

 

Magnus, do keep in mind that this is MY ES X9000, which I never got to test with throttle stop on the M1730, so I never really knew its peak performance -- all I knew was that it was from our good ol' NickBarbs and it was rockstable at the BIOS 3.4Ghz overclock. Now we know that all CPUs aren't created equally in the overclocking department, and perhaps mine just can't tolerate 3.8GHz. I don't think I should blame M17X for that since even my QX9300 had made it that far, and that's a QUAD CPU. So yeah, I wouldn't worry about it -- your X9000 will fly in that machine. You simply need to make sure the FSB is clocked correctly since that motherboard's default base clocks are around 1066, and the X9000 should be around 800, you move up from there to get plenty of extra MHz. Don't used the unlocked multipliers at the 14x and above levels in the bios, but instead, save that for throttlestop to accomplish.

Personally, I'd recommend getting the Q9200 or QX9300 and clocking it around 2.9-3.1 GHz, as that's plenty grunt and your CPU intensive games will FLY at a whole new level.

I so appreciate your work in that arena, dude. I recently saw an M18x video running vanilla Crysis on very high, in DX10. Obviously, it was running really fast, but even in there, I saw stutters and brief lock-ups, where as your gameplay in comparison was more consistent and smoother, giving the illusion of 60FPS without having to be 60FPS. Obviously, machine spec versus machine spec, the M18x is a winner, but presentation versus presentation and practically, I think you put on a better show.

 

Yep, that's why I always vote Magnus for tweak god

 

Well, i got a low end 8700m gt sli gpu but it can run all the games i tried very well only problem i got is with crysis this game not running well in sli but working better with single card and game lags a bit sometime while some settings are medium and some are high@1024x768 the game is quite playable with one card but i want improvement because game is running in dx10 so anyway to get it running in dx9 so that i may get better performance?

 

Wait. . . Wha? Vote for the obvious? I thought Magnus' status as Tweak God was a universal consensus.

Teak God. . . heh. That sounds so wrong, but Magnus knows that it comes from a good place.

That's odd. . . it should do better with SLi. What you need to do is up the resolution to around the 1280x800 mark, to get the most out of the SLi scale. Definitely run it in the DX9 mode since you don't have the vram or the larger grunt to support some of those DX10 intensive features. It won't look that different. Of course, you should dig up one of Magnus' custom tweaks to see how well it performs.

I used to own a Toshiba X205-SLi, which has the 8600m GT SLi. I used a dumbed-down version of Magnus' original tweak to achieve better performance.

Oh, and below is a link to another custom tweak by Ural, who did -- what I consider to be -- a great job of Crysis on 8700m GT SLi. It should run well at 1280x720.

Link: http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...-8700-sli-should-work-other-configs-well.html

 

Thanks guys, ah well tweak god I´m not sure about that. But I do like to tweak. Eleron I will post those SLI bits I fixed for you for Serious Sam 3.

Yeah an M18x with 580m GTX SLI would be something However if the computer has latency problems there´s not much to do with stuttering and such that´s why the SLI in the XPS M1730 is basically stutter free due to little to none latency.

Oh just off topic but do you know guys I imported the PS Vita from Japan, quite awesome handheld though not too many good games around yet.

 

Saw some videos of yours playing games on the phone.

Man, I just can't figure out why would you agonize yourself into playing like that after gaming hardcore on the laptop

 

Ha ha well I am pretty good at playing games on the phone, also it´s pretty impressive performance on smartphones today.

Though I bought an Iphone 4s recently which has top notch 3D performance. Best smartphone GPU out there and only GPU that uses unified shaders, well it´s essentially two PowerVR SGX543 GPU´s.

Yeah the phone actually beats Galaxy S2 quite bad in raw 3D gaming performance

Well I like to tweak with phones too and that LG Optimus 2x I gave to my wife is tweaked

 

You are Tweak God!

And don't worry about the latency factor. It is easily resolved. By default, when you use multipliers, you will be increasing the latency on your RAM. With the newer laptops, you get the benefit of also overclocking through the FSB, which is always that much sharper.

I am going to get it when it's released here in about a month's time. Better than paying premium for Japan since it's region free. The new games will rock, and I am totally looking forward to it since I enjoy hand-held gaming and this thing does match home console standards.

You were praising the Iphone 4S. Now this thing has quad power going for it, which is just epic. Not to mention, with the kind of money Sony pours into its first party developers, we'll see devs doing things with the Vita that far superior mobile and android hardware just won't be able to do because of the lacking dev-support element. Sad, but kinda' true.

 

Yeh its true GPU of iphone 4s is better than galaxy s2 but ipad2 is still better than 4s

well, i got a question
What you will do if your XPS M1730 is hanged and not responding ? How you will turn it off?

 

Keep the power on button pressed for 3-4 seconds.

 

Yeah the games on PS Vita definitely holds it own against the Android and IOS games and definitely graphics wise.

It´s CPU is a Quad core though one core is for the OS only so 3 cores for gaming but the GPU is also a Quad Core GPU the PowerVR SGX 543 MP4+

 

Hello guys. Forum newbie here

I wanted to ask something. I own a 2 year old m1730. Last year the GPU died and, after 3 engineer visits over the course of one month, they ended up replacing everything including the 8800GTX sli with the 9800GTX sli.

Last month I called dell because the GPU was overheating (100c+ temps) and the tech guy just told me to update the BIOS and had the heatsink and fans replaced. Last week the system did the same stuff as last year - crashes, system failing to start etc.
Yesterday dell agreed to replace the mobo and gfx card but the technician comes in today without the card. After explaining everything again to another CS guy I was informed they will send another tech but I will get a 8800GTX as replacement not the 9800GTX.

I want to ask, at what point can I ask them to replace the whole system? The Problems with the laptop are getting really frustrating. Any advice will be appreciated.

 

Generally, after 3 similar failures, the laptop can be considered bad news.

I've had 2 GPU failures, 1 mainboard, 1 power brick and 1 battery.

Whatever fails next, they'd better offer a replacement.

 

I'm running gta4 on my t8300 2gb and 8700m gt sli and the game is running fine with low quailty graphics but i want to improve graphic quailty but i can't change graphics setting because of only 256mb memory the option is locked by game so any way there? I just don't like the graphics and SLI is not working.

 

In addition to what Eleron's already said. If you do get a GPU replacement, you can insist for a 9800m GTX SLi since there's a general practice of no 'going back' on upgrades. Your system should be listed and supported as a 9800m GTX SLi spec machine.