New HP amd elite a10 5750 laptop just started to run like crap. Any Ideas?

Hey guys I just bought this computer

HP Silver 17.3" Pavilion 17-e049wm Laptop PC with AMD Elite Quad-Core A10-5750M Accelerated Processor and Windows 8 Operating System: Computers : Walmart.com

And it just started running like crap today. I was playing Lost Planet: Extreme Condition last night on med/high settings at an average of 28-29 fps outdoors and 57 indoors. Today it's running like crap for some reason though. It's down to around 10 today. I tried turning the settings way down and it didn't help.

Anybody know what might be causing it? I'm not too familiar with Windows 8 or how an APU performs. This computer is a replacement for the HP in my sig.

 

Well it's a 600$ laptop with integrated HD 8650G (around GT630, HD 7670m) performance. What did you expect?

Don't even mention the higher resolution then 1366x768.

 

Are you plugged in and in high performance mode? Is your laptop overheating?

 

I will be the one to post the 'update your mobile gpu drivers' comment.

 

Ok, so my brother cranked the resolution up to 1600x900 and turning it back down (1280 something) brought the framerate back up to around 30. Sorry for bugging you guys with that.

 

aaaaaand updating the graphics drivers gave me a nice meaty bump in performance. Now I can pull around 30fps with most settings turned up all the way.

 

I expected it to be able to handle a 7 year-old game at around 30fps on mostly high settings, which it can now that I've updated the drivers. Some of you guys seem waaaay to harsh on the APUs. Just because it isn't the most powerful and expensive machine money can buy, you act like it can't do anything. It may cheap, but until the next home-console cycle is in full swing, maybe another two or three years, and focus shifts away from designing games to be able to run on the dated Xbox360/PS3 hardware (which this machine should be significantly more powerful than) this should be adequate for gaming. Seriously, that 750 dollar HP in my sig that I bought 4 years ago would handle just about anything I could throw at it. Usually on medium-low settings with a decent framerate. How is that? Because just about everything there is to throw at it is designed to work on the consoles aging hardware. Games that that machine couldn't handle are only just starting to be released.

 

APU lack a lot of CPU power and they are extremly memory speed dependent in terms of GPU power, add to that the poor quality of AMD drivers and you will see why everyone here is avoiding them

 

There are still people on these forums who seem to enjoy their APUs. They also say that driver support isn't bad at all. It seems like most of the people bashing them are Intel fanboys (no offense).

 

AnandTech | AMD's A10-5750M Review, Part 2: The MSI GX60 Gaming Notebook
that cpu limited machine :/ because of the APU..50% of loss in perf because of the cpu.

 

"The most brutal thing about the GX60 may be the existence of MSI's own GE60, which trades the APU for an Intel i7-4700MQ and the Radeon HD 7970M for an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M. "

Yes. I know. The Intel chips are much much faster. But does that make the A10 a useless piece of crap that can't do anything? Does that make it a rip-off? The APU bashing always takes the "it's not as good as intel" angle. Does that performance difference mean anything outside of benchmarks?

From what I understand, the GPU handles the bulk of the performance load in games and the CPU is really not nearly as important as many make it out to be.

 

False. Many, many games nowadays are quite CPU-bound. Battlefield, GTA, AC, Crysis, Total War, CoH2, pretty much any MMO, etc. The CPU is responsible for a lot of things, sometimes even rendering things such as shadows. It needs to prep frames well in advance of the GPU rendering them, otherwise it lags behind and the GPU is waiting too long on the CPU, causing a bottleneck. Significant CPU time is also taken up by things like sound processing, AI, physics, in-game calculations and stats updates (tons of these in RTSes), and much more. Too much CPU time taken up by these things can also cause it to fall behind the GPU in terms of queuing frames, again a CPU bottleneck situation. Basically think of it this way: The GPU is primarily responsible for rendering the graphical image on-screen but the CPU is responsible for all the other calculations and feeding the GPU. That's why the issue of balance between CPU and GPU is so critically important in a gaming system.

AnandTech's comparison of the Razer Blade 14 and MSI GX60 really underscores the importance of the CPU in modern games. Even though the 7970M is twice as fast the as the GTX 765M, the Blade 14 wins half of the gaming benchmarks, sometimes by a mile, just by virtue of having a much faster i7 CPU. Getting half the performance with twice the GPU power just because of the A10 CPU? Now that is sad.

 

APUs are fine for light gaming. Dunno why you guys ar emaking such a big deal out of this. And if the OP's notebook was performing fine before it started to get low FPS, obviously the problem is something other than the APU being intrinsically slow. How is saying "APUs are slow" relevant to the OP at all?

 

Because OP was the one who steered the discussion toward the relative merits of APU systems. If you read a few posts back, his original problem was already solved.

 

Londez, you owe me a +1 rep

 

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My apologies. I should know better than to feed trolls.

I was just a little erked at that first reply. A condescending "what did you expect" immediately attributing the problem to the APU. And he was completely and utterly false. With the updated drivers, it's performing even better than I'd expected. I come here asking for help with a problem and the first response I get is somebody incorrectly telling me it's because my computer sucks.