Advice Wanted: Nvidia Go 7600 & Very Poor 3DMark Scores

I just recently purchased the notebook listed below in my signature, mainly to do some couch-surfing and some light to medium gaming on the road. I was fairly sure the Nvidia Go 7600 256MB would be up to the task.

I've done a bit of gaming on the laptop and it *seems* to perform about as expected, which is ok/good but certainly not great compared to the modest 7800 GT in my desktop.

But the thing that's giving me concern is that fact that if I run 3DMark06 on the laptop it gets a dismal score of 569! From what I've seen on the forums this card in the laptop should be more in the 1500-2000 point range I think.

Is this some how due to Vista and 3DMark not getting along well? My desktop scores reasonably with Vista installed so I wouldn't assume a problem there. Perhaps the version of drivers (97.54) I have installed on the laptop? These are the ones that my laptop came factory installed with. 3DMark06 shows the core clock at 100 MHz and the memory clock at 135MHz. I hope that this is just what 3DMark is reading while the laptop is in either 2D mode or power saving 3D mode and that the laptop would kick the graphics card up to full speed while the benchmark is running.

Here is a link to my laptop's project details:
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=1702955

Any assistance or recommendations will be greatly appreciated.

 

Try another driver, check the nvidia control panel and power settings in vista.

It appears your system is not going into 3D mode when required. Try some games, if they appear slow and sluggish (even in the menus) then the power settings or 2D mode speeds are being used.

 

When on battery power graphics cards clock down to save battery power. Yours may have done that.

Check your Nvidia PowerMizer settings.

 

As for your scores, do not just look at the total 3DMarks, look at the CPU scores as well [make sure it looks good]. The main thing about benchmarking, is to get the best score, you must turn off as many resource hogs as possible, such as:
- System Restore (wastes about 5-15% resources wasted)
- Anti-Virus (5-20% resources wasted)
- Spyware Detector (5-10% wasted)
- other un-needed background programs (Adobe, Quicktime, etc....)

So you should not just worry about your scores... compared to another, its better to look towards your improvements [before & after doing the tweaks for CPU and resource optimizing]

 

I have a Toshiba A100 with Go7600 and it shows the same symptoms... how can you check for sure whether the graphic card is going into 3d mode or not?

 

Dunno, but the 7600Go should be clocked at 350-400MHz, not 100MHz. Under XP, a 7600Go @ 350MHz will generally net you in the range of 1800 3DMarks in '06, more than 3X your 570. You need to check your drivers for sure, perhaps use a clocking utility of some sort. I don't use Vista and refuse to do so, so that part is up to you

 

Yea you definitely just have the battery settings on. Maybe a driver update or 3d settings change or plugging your battery in while running 3dmark might help (who knows?)

 

*Sheepish grin*

My laptop was stuck in power saver mode, just like a few of you said. Once I changed this to either "balanced" or "high performance" the 3DMark06 score shot up to 2188!

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=1718324

Much, much better. Thanks everyone.

On another note, where do you guys locate your new Nvidia Vista drivers for notebooks? Nvidia's site doesn't appear to have Go drivers for Vista.

 

I upgraded my Vista drivers to 158.18 and my score bumped up to 2223. Every little bit helps I guess

 

Do you have the modded .inf file for 158.18 driver? I have a GO 7600 as well and planning to try 158.18...

 

Yeah I have them and usually you can get them from www.laptopvideo2go.com but it looks like they haven't fully recovered from their site crash. Send me a PM with your email address and I'll send you the .inf.

 

One question. Can I just download 158.18 drivers from Nvidia's website and use the .inf you sent with that driver?

 

Yup, but you'll need to extract the drivers to a folder, replace the inf and then run setup.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_158.18.html

 

Hi. Im having problems with my go 7600 too. I get a very low score in 3dmark06 (see my earlier post 'problem with Nvidia go 7600'). Wave suggested that my computer was stuck in power save mode, but I checked my power save settings with vista and theyre all on max performance. I get similar bad frame-rates in Oblivion with the power save settings turned on max power saving with ac lead unplugged and with the settings turned on max performance and ac lead plugged in! Any ideas...?
I would like to try that new driver too, if someone would be kind enough to email me the .inf file.
Any more suggestions much apreciated....