P7801 Poor Gaming Performance

Hey Crew,

New to the forum and relatively new laptop. I bought a 7801 about two months ago. I haven't modified the hardware and have updated to the latest .17 BIOS revision. I've been noticing the system just seems to underperform based on the hardware and from comparative benchmarks I've seen from similar systems online.

Here are a few things I've noticed.

1) The system seems to have an intermittent hang. I've noticed it in games where I have fluid framerate for about 5 seconds and then it stutters momentarily and then continues again. It's really noticeable on driving sims like NFS Shift where a steady framerate is really needed for providing a sense of motion. The stutter seems to occur at any resolution.

2) Anybody play Sins of a Solar Empire? It's one of my fav titles. One of the reasons I bought this laptop. Unfortunately, I get terrible framerates on this game. It is an RTS with relatively low system requirements. The game recommends a 256mb graphics card with 2.2ghz dual core processor. Minimum requirements is a 1.8 single core. The game starts off at 60fps but soon drops after an hour of game play to about 15 and stays there for the rest of the game. The game is not graphically intensive, and changing the resolution or texture settings does not change the framerate. I think this game having thousands of units move about as the game goes on is more CPU intensive and perhaps the 8400 in the system is just not cutting it at later stages of the game?

3) My system scores about 8750 to 8850 in 3DMark 06. On similar 78XX systems on the forum, I've seen scores from 9 to 10K.

Anyhow, I am not sure if all these things are related or not. I have tried to run all sorts of diagnostics. I keep my computers lean and mean. I have few programs run on start up, I have defragged, there is no malware, I have checked the heat sensors and nothing ever really goes over 60 degrees when I've been noticing these issues, I can confirm all the hardware timings and such on CPUID and I just finished running a round of Memtest86 and nothing came up unusual. Honestly might be just my imagination, but I seem to be noticing these issues more since I flashed my BIOS from .10 to .17. This, of course, may not have anything to do with it.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, crew

 

Are you doing everything in the 1920x1200 resolution?

What video driver are you using?

Have you tried other video drivers?

Did you disable Nvidia Powermizer?

 

more info on the system would help here ?

 

What power plan are you using?

 

@ AGlobal
No. As I mentioned, in the post, I changed resolutions in the games above to see if it would change the hiccups.

I am running the NVidia 186.81 Driver. It is the latest and its primarily been the only one I've used. The driver version before this one would cause the system to Blue Screen every time it tried to power off the display.

I'm sorry, I am not familiar with powermizer

@Stephen
The System is a Gateway P701u
2.26 Core 2 Duo 8400 processor
4 GB DDR3
Nvidia GeForce 9800m GTS

@ Bane
I'm always set to high performance

 

mmm thats wierd, you should be getting a better performance, maybe try some different drivers, the latest from dox is always good.

does it do this when on the power adapter ?

 

"My system scores about 8750 to 8850 in 3DMark 06"
that is just right... you can only compare yours to the 7811 or the 7801... unless they changed their screen the people with a 7805 have a 1440x900 screen.(a few got lucky and got the 19x12)
if you OC then youll get the 9k my personal score with my 7811 (back when stock) 9637 @ 715/950/1875
have you done a clean install?
i also recommend going through "manage 3d settings" on ntune and take your time to read through what each option does and if you want it, or you can just set it to performance.
Gl.

 

Sorry I missed the part about the resolutions. Changing to a lower resolution and lowering visual settings should definitely improve your FPS. Something is wrong if it is not affected.

I would definitely try different drivers. Make sure you follow the guide for proper removal and installation of newer drivers, making sure to use driversweeper to remove the AGEIA Physx and Nvidia Display driver AFTER using the Nvidia Driver Uninstaller. Try a few before ruling the drivers out for not being the culprit.

Some people have reported problems with powermizer automatically downclocking their GPU to save power. This option is not provided for most, so this will need to be changed through the registry IIRC. You can search for how to disable it.

If you feel the CPU is at fault, you can use RMClock (Not only to undervolt) to lock the P8400 to 2.26GHz. Then open Task Manager to the Performance tab, and then start a game that suffers from the problem you are experiencing. After the problem occurs, Alt+tab to Task Manager and look at the CPU usage graph to see if the CPU is indeed stressing, or see if it's hardly working while you are in-game.

 

Thanks, crew

Sentence brings up a good point. I never did a fresh install from factory. I think I am going to wipe the system and try from scratch to see if that works. Sentence, thanks for posting those scores. I don't feel so bad about this now. I am wondering if perhaps these glitches are specific to these programs and not system issues.

If not, I will try some other tweaks as AGlobal has suggested. Thanks for these tips. I will post back how things go after a fresh install.