My laptop vs desktop machine

Hi everyone!

I have a homebuilt desktop computer which is my gaming system at home, and it runs all the games I play fairly good. I don't play the high-graphic game titles much, so that's not a main focus of my PCs, I do play them sometimes though. About 6 months ago I chose to pay a considerable amount of money for a laptop computer, so I could have some gaming power around with me to LANs and such. I really want to see it perform the best it can, but I'm seeing a few problems with the laptop. There are two main problems.

First is that I find many modern FPS games like Planetside 2 and Far Cry 3 to be almost unplayable on anything higher than the bare minimum of detail settings (though on 1920x1080 resolution) due to mouse lag and other nastyness.

Second is a kind of stuttering happening in Diablo 3, and a few other games (League of Legends among others) Mostly it has a good and stable FPS, but has these split second stutters or freezes. They last maybe like a fifth or a tenth of a second, but so frequently (every few seconds) that it's really annoying for anything action filled or competitive. In D3 it happens mostly when I run around, and not really when standing still.

I'll post some specs the way 3DMark11 listed them, so you know what hardware we're talking about

Desktop:
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
Processor: Intel Core i7-930 Processor
Motherboard: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P6X58D-E
Memory: 6,144 MB
3x 2,048 MB Corsair DDR3 @ 667 MHz
3DMark Score: P4894
Graphics Score: 4751
Physics Score: 6046
Combined Score:4619

Laptop:
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7970M
Processor Intel Core i7-3610QM Processor
Motherboard CLEVO P170EM
Memory 8,192 MB
2x 4,096 MB Kingston DDR3 @ 800 MHz
3DMark Score P6681
Graphics Score 6482
Physics Score 7925
Combined Score 6651

As you can see, the laptop is scoring much higher than my desktop, and this puzzles me because the laptop doesn't perform that well in comparison, in the 3D heavy games like FarCry3 and Planetside 2 just to mention the two again

Both are running Windows 7 64 bit, and laptop has the 13.1 CCC drivers installed. Please note the reason I compare my PCs is because the second problem is nonexistant on my desktop. My desktop also plays the games mentioned in point one equally as good or better.

Any wise words about my laptop? I really imagined it would perform better in games - else I wouldn't have paid that much for it in the first place. Sigh

Thanks in advance !

 

Welcome to the forum, what hard drive (Make, model, RPM) is in the Clevo? and is the firmware up to date for the hard drive?

 

How are your laptop temps? Could be throttling.

 

Thanks for the welcome and for the replies guys

The harddrive is: 500 GB Seagate ST95005620AS . It's a SSD hybrid type of drive.

Actually I never thought of the firmware at all, it has to be the stock version. 5 seconds of googling this very model, it quickly becomes apparent that this type of drive has issues with stuttering and bad performance. Nice catch!

About the temps; I need to do some testing to determine this. I'll see to it soonish

Edit:
A link about Diablo 3 and this storage device:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...blo-3-performance-problems-due-hard-disk.html

 

temperature monitoring tools in my signature below and welcome to the forum.

 

Enduro mate enduro... AMD and moreso Clevo/Sager stuffed up. Wait for the newer series and upgrade or upgrade to 680m.
Good luck.

 

Try comparing 7970 and 560 Ti with Extreme preset in 3DMark instead. That will show a better picture.

That said, 7970M should be a lot better than 560 Ti anyways.

 

I'm keeping an eye on my temps and GPU usage now.

CPU is idling at 48-55C

Updating Planetside 2 to the latest patch made my CPU temps range from 60C to around 72C under this very light load. In general I see even the slightest of tasks make the temps of the CPU rise to, and sometimes above, 60C. I find this strange, but not troubling as the CPU power under load is never exceeding 75C during the games I play.

Playing Diablo 3, CPU is around 55-65C, and the GPU is 55-60C. 50% GPU usage and 60 FPS (Vsync capped), dropping only when moving around (maybe related to the game loading stuff when running around).

Playing Planetside 2 on medium settings, the CPU is around 65-70C and GPU is around 75-85C (this game actually runs smooth now on medium - not as bad as I remember. Definitely playable!!) Maybe that is due to the newest CCC drivers. These readings were without Vsync.
Without Vsync: 70-85 FPS, peaking at over 100 FPS, up to 95% GPU load.
With Vsync: 60 FPS stable, but only 65% load.

Far Cry 3 is around 70C for CPU and 75C for GPU on medium setting. It's peaking at 50-55% GPU usage and 30-50 fps.

On another note, I tried updating the firmware for my hard drive and update my chipset drivers, nothing helped the stutters in D3

I forgot to see how hard the CPU is working, but I have to go for now. I hope this testing could help out a little

 

Your temps and performance seem about right I'd guess @ 1080 but odd it's not utilizing the gpu more.. I bet you can crank settings in far cry 3 up to high and you won't even see a drop in performance assuming it utilizes the gpu more. My slower gpu stays pegged at 98-99% while playing both Planetside 2 and FC3. I've got a similar cpu and temps there seem fine. Your gpu is quite a bit faster than mine but temps still look fine. Could be as others have said an enduro problem.

Are you using the high performance power setting and plugged in?

 

With Diablo 3, try disabling the FPS limit. (in both background and overall)

For whatever reason this made my desktop play MUCH smoother when overclocked.
(oddly enough, it ran better while stock.... OC meant it skipped until I turned off the limits)

One warning, watch your temps while doing this.

 

I looked into installing the AMD CAP drivers (again), and I think they made quite the difference. The problem is now that Far Cry 3 is acting up, so it's hard to test reliably.. sigh But my initial impression was that it got much higher FPS; I think I was 60% (or even more) GPU usage, with FPS between 60 and 80. Still, I need to test more!

Now with the lag/stutter/skipping issue, I think I get this in almost every game after paying attention, which leads me to believe that this problem is due to my Seagate drive. It's pretty much anytime it's required to load stuff. I tried, although not recommended by Seagate, to run a few benchmarks of the drive. To anyone that didn't search the drive model number, it is a Seagate Momentus XT, which has it's share of problems. Anyways, the graphs say (to me at least) something funky is going on. I'll upload them when I figure out how

Yep, triple checked that the games are running high performance, and I'm almost always plugged. Always when testing and gaming, anyways.

Tried removing the FPS caps but help at all. I don't think I want to try overclocking, I'm not very experienced with that and I think I could easily ruin everything

Here are some jpgs of the benchmarks. My thoughts, and links:

I find these sudden drops in Read rate a little strange.
ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting

The real strangeness is the following pictures:
ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting
ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting

Note two things:
Long periods of very low Read rates, along with being very spiky when it does som actual reading.


Edit; on the topic of Diablo 3's laggy issues, I just downloaded a program called quietHDD, and set the APM to max (to prevent the drive from constantly spinning up and down), and that took like 90% of it, Still a bit laggy in situations with loads of monsters and spell effects, but playable now! Yay

 

Hi again everyone. After deciding that while it is playable, it's not acceptable to the specs of the PC. I've have been digging around in the Event Viewer and I see this message quite often:

The speed of processor 0 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for <X> seconds since the last report.

It always hits all 8 threads of the CPU, so I really wonder what this is. I also see a bunch of other strange issues related to different Windows Services and system drivers not starting correctly, and this started to affect functionality of my wireless connection, the fingerprint sensor, and the backlit keyboard (related driver is sometimes not loading). No blue screens though, which actually puzzles me considering the messy start of the services/drivers.

 

Hmm, that's odd. The CPU speed being reduced would seem to indicate throttling due to temperatures (which could result in frame rate stutters), but the temperatures you listed aren't high enough they should be triggering that. Those other issues you mention in the last post are also odd. That so many things would be acting up at once is unusual. I'd almost susp2ect it would be something motherboard related, but that's just a hunch. I'd make sure you have a recent backup regardless.

The HDTune (at least the benchmark, the one I'm familiar with) don't look too alarming to me. My 7K160 was steadier than that, and my 7K320 is probably a little steadier, but also goes up and down, and my desktop drive is similarly spiky to your drive. The 4200 RPM hard drive in an old ThinkPad I had was way spikier than that, however, and I never had any issues with it (though it was sorta slow).

 

Make sure you download and install throttle stop. I had to use that program in order for the Sager laptop to disable the turbo on your processor when you run the GPU. Thats the reason i returned my Sager. That should help you. Somewhere on the Sager forums, I posted what options I enabled to have throttlestop work without issues.