Geforce 6800 go

I just got my Dell 9300 in the mail. I didnt have the money to buy an XPS so i had them put a geforce 6800 go in the 9300... only problem is that i'm getting frame rates that are way lower than what i would have expected. Even when i turn down the video options as far as they can go. Why am i only getting 17-20 fps? Do i just need more ram or are the mobile centrino processors not really capable of handling half life 2 or anything else fancy for that matter.

 

whats your specs, what video card drivers are you using, do you still have all that dell preinstalled junk?

 

Yes, check for that junk Dell preinstalled. Personally, I'd just format the drive and install everything myself, so everything is the way I want it.

If it's there, format or get rid of it!

Make sure you have that 6800 card too, not the X300 Radeon!

 

The same thing happened to me when I got my Inspiron XPS Gen. 2. I played Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 and could only get them to run at the 1028X768 resolutions with the details set to medium/high. I then realised that I left all the junk that Dell had pre-installed on my notebook. If you have all the CD's (such as the OS CD, drivers CD, and applications CD) then reformat your computer but don't install all the Dell applications. I wouldn't install any of the Dell applications as they like to run in the background and take up memory. Also is you have 512MB of RAM then games will really suffer even though you have the Nvidia gpu. Currently my XPS has 512MB of RAM and it can run Half-Life 2 at the 14xx (whatever it is) resolution. The Pentium M processor will handle games much better with 1GB of RAM or larger. Battlefield 2 is one of those games that runs best with 2GB of RAM.

 

What game or benchmark only gave you 17-20 fps? With Geforce Go 6800 and Pentium M 1.60GHz CPU, you should get about 40 fps with Doom 3 timedemo demo1 at 1600x1200 high quality noAA 8xAF and latest video driver from Dell. You should get 50 fps with the same test at 1280x1024.

 

They're not called Centrino processors by the way. Centrino is an Intel branding that combines the Pentium-M processor and Intel's wireless technology.

Anyways, there's nothing wrong with your laptop's hardware. It's probably because of all the bloatware that's installed and a bunch of other factors. Even the X300 is capable of better than 20 FPS at low settings.

 

reformat and defrag