Unofficial Gateway P series 6831/171S/171X/171XL Lounge

my roommate picked up something the other night.. It was an ad-worm of some type. If he opened google, it would keep popping up the spyware removal crap. And, if you did a google search then all of the results were spyware related. It wouldnt even search properly! Then, it disabled all of his administrative priveleges. So, he couldnt edit the reg, he couldnt access anti-virus, he couldnt restore system.. No admin priveleges at all. Heh. He had to do a full reinstall of XP. Anyhow, somehow that humored me..probably cause he always tells me I take too many risks and he's always calculated and careful. I see where that got him.

 

Tell him to quit cruising the Russian mail-order bride sites.

 

Two words: Backup Image

However I have always enjoyed a freshly installed OS.

 

I enjoy the fresh installs..just dont enjoy having to reload and customize everything from scratch

 

the lounge doesn't mention 6860, but i'll try

i just noticed that my hdd reaches around 56-58C at its peak. is that normal or not? i have the laptop lifted up a little, so the other temps are all fine.

 

what are you using to check the HD temps?

 

Those temps are a decent bit high even on the 6860's WD drives.

The biggest problem with the FX series is their poorly designed cooling (it could have been so much better) and the HD slots just exemplify this. There is NO active cooling and so you have to rely on what tiny bit of air can get in through the ducts on bottom (which are almost air tight against the hard drive caddys)

I solved the problem my creating a custom cooler to cool all of my hot zones (GPU CPU, Mother Board, Hard drives)

Lifting the back will help with the GPU/CPU but then just a fraction to far chokes the Hard drives and makes them start frying. (remember anything over 55 starts to get dangerous for HDD's)

I recommend trying to invest in a decent cooler to try and get more air flowing under and inside your laptop. It will help with temps a good deal and might put just enough air over the hard drive bay to lower those temps a good bit.

 

HWMonitor

Kamin, thanks for your reply, man. Which cooler would you recommend?

 

i am using the zalman nc1000 and while it doesnt do much for the gpu / cpu (compared with tilting back) it certainly help on the hdd. idle around 40 never goes above 48.
i think most coolers will do that on the hdd front. it just need little air moving about.

kamin cooler is a home made drilled desk there are pictures of it somewhere.

 

bernard is actually returning today

mother didnt like how long it was taking, lol, she did pay for it

anyways, they had it for 5 weeks, and its working, they said they couldnt fix it though cause its overheating, lmao, so there is no charge. I know how to fix the overheating, and they are probably running at stock voltage doing stress tests.

So free and its fixed, im very pleased

 

Its not a desk it was a serving table (cutting boards work just as well too)

Yay benard is coming back... we've all missed him, your posts i will say have been quite lack luster and dull with out his shine making them worthwhile

any cooler will do, i'll leave that to those that didnt make their own (as they could tell you better than i)

 

he knows how to fix the OH, didn't we hear that b4 ?
that was with a thermal pad on the cpu, wasn't it ?
lol. congrats, hope it works for you.

and why didn't you send it to gateway/best buy in the first place ?

 

oh and how's that w7 working 4 u kamin ?

 

Never got it to install. I'm going to have to rebuild my RAID array, because for some reason i'm only allowed to make 207mb partitions. So since i didnt have anything better to do besides play games my wife found me something to do instead of play with my computer (i got to start remodeling the kitchen... )

 

remodeling is good for you.
in the end of the day, there is a more satisfaction (if it doesn't fall apart) than running around shooting pixelized virtual terrorists.

well at least for me.

 

very true, and i suppose my 1970's era brown paneling kitchen was a bit dated... but until i got the wife i never even went into the room... thats what delievery was for.

But the greens and stainless steels do look alot better, plus i enjoy stuff like that too. I was just kinda hoping for a nice vacation of killing pixelized terrorists (well orcs, space marines, necrons, dark eldar, imperial guard, etc)

 

you like dawn of war, huh?

 

lol, brings memory of the flat i had with two high school room mates, the kitchen was off limit due to unrecognized organisms crawling inside the "fridge". ... lol. that was loooooong time ago.

 

oh yes. that is my favorite game on the PC. It probably stems from the fact i was a rogue trader for Games Workshop until they shut the program down and then i opend a game shop to feed my (and everyone elses) addiction... i mean hobby

But yeah i'm working on destroying soul storm with all the armies now... still havent mastered Sisters of battle yet

And i CANT FREAKING WAIT for Dawn of War 2

Yeah the single life was great. The only thing my kitchen held was the garbage can and a microwave. The fridge contained beer and soda.

Now i have cabinets with food that can be cooked and things like vegetables and fresh meats in my fridge. I'm still getting used to it... but i've put on 20lbs since i started being cooked for... gods that woman can cook good

 

Anybody running external Esata drive?

My old Seagate FreeAgent Pro gives me an awful saw tooth graph in HD Tune with average 34.5 MB/sec. A second custom Esata drive gets a straight line average 36MB/sec using a black WD 1Tet drive; should be no bottle neck there

My FireWire whoops up on both these at 38MB/sec average. Before I start reinventing the wheel, I want to compare benchmarks. I'm using Sil 3533 controller. I saw a post where a laptop with the Sil 3132 was getting 50+ thur an express card!

TIA

 

Well, I use ESATA through my Antec MX-1. The hard drive is a Seagate 7200.10... I think, pretty sure. 500gb.

I just copied 2 700mb files, Speed was between 38 and 42 mb/s. Maybe not the greatest, but I think it's still faster than USB.

 

hey folks, new here as well. i have a 6831 that i have some planned upgrades. cpu, memory, maybe a screen.

the memory stock is 667mhz, if by changing the cpu to a t9300 or x7900 allow me to use 800mhz memory?

am I correct in thinking if I use the x7900 it unlocks the bios to allow OCing?

thanks to all for their amazing input. this place has been a godsend!

 

Memory upgrades are useless. You can go to 4gigs if you install a 64bit OS but after that anything you do is a waste of money.

You chipset is limited to 667 so all 800 mHz does is down clock to 667 and give you a lower latency (which in itself does nothing noticable) If your wanting 4 gigs of ram thats cool, but dont try for anything more than that... its just a waste of your money.

I spent 109 dollars on 800mHz ram on my 6860 and i have the nice 4-4-4-12 clocks to show for it... and you know what it does for me? Transfers 1bite of data a clock faster than everyone with 5-5-5-15 clocks. So unless i transfer millions of 1 bite files i'm never going to get any benefit form it. But i get to be cool so i guess thats something

The acceptable upgrades to the 68XX series CPU are
t8300, t9300, X7800, X9000. I offically band the t9500 and the x7900 due to horrible costs and really low benifits

Seriously if you want a CPU upgrade stick to the big 4. They are the best price spots for the power and its pretty much the only CPU besides stock any of us use.

And yes the x7800 and the x9000 will unlock your BIOS overclocking. You can go up to 3.0gHz. You just need to be sure to undervolt any CPU you get to get better temps out of it. A cool CPU is a happy CPU

 

kamin you get the 800mhz memory answer award. (again)

 

lol. Much better than what I would say. "Yes... for more info, use search"

 

yay, i rock so hard!

 

Thx for the info Kamin. I wasnt really sure if the chipset was the actual cpu or the MB.

Iwas interested in the T9300 earlier, then have moved over to the x7900. lol, now Im looking at the x7800. I can take 3.0ghz!! It sure beats the stock 1.6 in it now

 

No worries, thats why we're here.

The t9300 is most everyones sweet spot. It gives you a huge boost in preformance and once undervolted runs ice cold (a little over half the idle temps of my x9000)

The x7800 will easily OC to 2.8gHz, and some have been able to keep the temps low enough and still get 3.0gHz. Its a bit different with ever chip, but even running @2.8 your looking at 1.2gHz faster than your stock CPU so all in all a GREAT improvement over stock.

 

i don't know, Kamin. "Huge" is a very subjective word. What numbers are we talking on avg?

 

well t9300's run at 2.5gHz and the 6831 stock runs at 1.6gHz so that an 900mHz improvement right off the bat. Add to that the tripling of cache and the cooler temps and i would say with confidence that its a "huge" preformance boost. just the speed increas is a 64% imporvement, adding the cache to it i would say you're going to be pushing a 68-70 precent increase in preformance.

Even when i down clock my x9000 to around that level, i can tell there is a difference in preformance from the stock 6860 CPU (1.83gHz) and its only a 700mHz difference at that point.

Just out of curiosity what in the world do you consider a "huge" increase if not around the 70% range???



edit... i just noticed that i almost have 1K posts....weird
Edit Edit: thanks for the catch Citizen86

 

Actually it's triple the cache, 2mb vs. 6mb. woohoo

It's an increase, no doubt, the computer is snappier. But unless you are constantly converting video or number-crunching, I don't think you're going to see an AMAZING night-and-day difference.

And I'm speaking from experience, going from the T5450 to T9300.

 

i was talking more in-game performance "huge", since i assumed the guy was looking to gain more in that area, not encoding videos and working with archives
congrats on your 1k

 

not sure, but it should gain you a good bit in most games. The GPU is generally the bottleneck in most games, but i play RTS games mostly so my CPU is the biggest limiter to me with 1000's of bodies on screen and trying to calculate the AI for that many little soliders can be a hassle

I think diablo85 posted a review of his rig with a t9300 in it with a couple of more popular games in it. He was posting 5-20FPS better according to the games running

 

And of course narsnail did two separate reviews with the stock CPU and the X7900. Good for comparison

 

fixed... remember i banned the x7900

 

hey, fellow cult members! When i received my laptop, I was almost sure that vista 64 came with it. What i did: formatted the disk that had all gateway's bs on it and merged it with a different partition. When i checked this forum out, I realized that I've made a terrible mistake. The cd had only 32-bit ver. on it and that now-formatted disk had the 64 one on it. Would I be able to get a copy of vista from gateway? Or, if there are some nice guys/gals here that could make me a copy and mail it to me? (i'll pay for shipping, blank dvd). Appreciate it, peeps.

 

Actually that partition had all of your drivers and system recovery on it.
Though iaTa's driver thread has all the ones you need to replace them with.

The windows disc should come with a copy of 32/64 on it and you choose which you want to use when you install it.

I'm not sure why your's wouldnt come with both. If you can wait a few days until i get home i'll make you a copy of my OS disc and mail it to you, though someone will probably be able to get it to you sooner (i dont get back until friday late saturday early)

Actually, i think i have a spare one from my first 6860... i might be able to get you an all offical one

 

My P-171x FX came with a Vista 32bit only DVD, maybe they where getting rid of the old stock,on the P-6860 lol

 

Vista Home Premium only comes with 32-bit disks, you actually have to pay for shipping from Microsoft to get the 64-bit version (like I did). I'm not sure about Vista Business, but as far as I know only Vista Ultimate comes packaged with both 32 and 64-bit installations.

 

yeah, this is mostly for playing games. them ranging from WoW, to battlefield 2 to star wars empire at war and mods.

again, i was liking the t9300, but kinda want to OC some, very little lol.

is the only reason you dont like the x7900 is the price kamin?

 

a t9300 would be more then enough for those games.

For Overclocking remember our BIOS only allow us to clock to 3.0 (unfortunatly... i want 3.4+ )

The reason i dont like the x7900 is the price usually, plus it was a joke a couple of months back when we laughed at the t9500 and x7900 for being oddball cpu's and not really offering anything over the CPU right below it but basically small speed increases. The x7900 gives you 200 mHz over a x7800 but nothing else... and you can over clock both CPU's so the same speeds are easily reachable, and it did it for WAY more money. I bought my x9000 for less than the x7900 cost and its a superior CPU.

Saying that i havent paid attention to CPU prices so the x7900 might be 5 dollars now, but back when we started the "ban joke" they were going for more than the x9000 and that was insane.

 

ok, thanks, looks like I will stick with a x7800 then,, looks like i can get that one for quite a bit less than the 7900. I did not know the 3.0 was the highest we can go. so thats helps a bit.

Have you upgraded screens or are interested in doing so. I got to play with the newest offering at the bestbuy i work at so I got to see the higher resolution, its pretty nice.Have thought about doing that for mine but the 1400x900 is ok with me.

 

I'm saving my screen upgrade for when i get another "upgrade bug" hit me, I refuse to buy a new system until Nehelam is released for notebooks so i force off getting new computers by upgrading this one. I figure i'll break down and get a 1920x1200 screen in a month or two, hopefully longer though as its the only thing i havent upgraded in this rig.

But until then i'll stick with the 1440x900 its better for games in my opinion.

 

Agreed. Basically just for FPS though. You can bet your butt that if your game runs maxed at 1920x1200 it's going to look a lot better than 1440x900

It's the one upgrade I really want to do... I haven't touched the ram because I don't see much point going from 3 to 4 gb, but if 8gb ever drops I think I'll do that. 1920x1200 screens are so great though.

 

am I to understand that you have the 15" 6860 that they came out with or do you have the 6831 like me? what all upgrades have you done to it? if you don't mind me asking.

 

The 6862(or something like that) was the 15in model i have the 6860 which is 17in and the sucessor of the 6831.

as to upgrades
Upgraded CPU from 1.83 t5550 to x9000 @3.0gHz
Upgraded RAM from 667mHz 5-5-5-15 timings to 800mHz (running 667mHz) with 4-4-4-12 timings*
Upgraded the Stock 320gb 5400rpm HDD to 2ea 320gb 7200RPM hard drives in a RAID 0 array
Added a 64GB SSD to the extra Mini PCI-e slot (i use it for critical data that i dont want to lose... its slow as Xmas but doesnt risk data loss)
and Upgraded Drivers on the 8800gts to DOX 180.70 (not really an upgrade but it really felt like one)

About the only thing i have left is swapping out the panel for a 1920x1200 one, but i've never figured out which one i want and as i said i'm waiting for the upgrade bug to hit.

*Do not do this upgrade... its basically crap you waste money for NO benefit

 

dangit, see what you've got me doing now, that x9000 looks delicious now

seriously, thats the main reason i liked the t9300 so much was on account of that 6mb cache. do you think i would notice much of a difference going with the x7800 than the x9000? how much were you able to get yours for? and why in the world is this one more than the rest, top of the line?

 

Yeah the x9000 is nice, but unless you are into really heavy duty CPU activities its a bit of an over kill... but still very nice.

The t9300 is a great CPU and gives a good upgrade, most people wont need anything more than it will give you. Its got the speed and cache to do what it needs to and as i've said before runs ice cold once undervolted.

The x9000 is the "top of the line" because its got the smallest die for the generation of CPUs, the most cache and it is overclockable. All in all its superior to all of the other CPU's for this line of FX. The only down side of it is the fact that it has a 44w TDP, so its power hungry and produces a good amount of heat. I idle just under twice as hot as a t9300 (20-25deg vs 38-42deg) and i'm only getting 500mHz of extra speed for it. Which is a good speed boost, but nothing that i see very often unless i'm doing very CPU heavy applications (like rendering my planet) If you were just using it for gaming its a bit of an over kill for anything but the highest end of games (or the ones with poorly written and bloated code...crysis/GTS4 etc)

I picked my x9000 up for 380 shipped so i got a good deal in my opinion, but you can find the t9300 and the x7800 for just over half that usually.

 

Thanks

I tried a $19 replacement, 640G FreeAgent XTreme for my RMA 500G FreeAgent Pro Gotta love the Seagate 5 year exchange!

Anyway.. same performance, on three different drives, firewire beats eSata with both faster than USB, on external drives using HD Tune to bench. Oh well, guess we have early generation chip sets but odd that internal drive speeds are so much higher.

cheers

 

Hey new to the Forum Just picked up a P6831fx.

Was wondering if any one got multitouch (gestures) synaptic drivers to work under Vista 64bit?