Speed boosts? Radeon Xpress 200M Overclocking?

Hi. I've spent quite a bit of time trying to read up on this, and I'm not making much progress, so I was wondering if anybody out there knows my computer and if I can possibly crank any extra speed out of it. I have a:

Compaq Presario V5201US
Mobile AMD Sempron 3300+ (2.0 GHz, 128KB L2 cache, up to 1600 MHz system bus according to my cool sticker)
512 MB system memory, although 128 is shared with my GPU.
ATI Radeon Xpress 200M, 128 MB of onboard memory + 128 shared, as far as I can tell.

I want more speed. I've tried playing with the BIOS options to maybe tweak my on-board memory clock rate, but essentially my only options are to change the time/date, to share less memory with my video card, or to run a HD self-test. Yay. I've tried running ATI Tool, but it doesn't recognize my card. I downloaded the Omega Catalyst 6.3 drivers after reading in the 200M superthread on this site that 6.3 is the latest you should go if you want to overclock, but the built-in ATI Tray Tools have overclocking disabled for my card.

I'm not a greedy man. 3DMARK03 gives me 952 3DMarks, and all I want is another 100 maybe. It's an arbitrarily chosen number, but one which will make me feel better about myself just the same. I play WoW on this computer, and with all the settings brought to the minimum it plays well outside, but practically freezes anytime I enter a major city or there's a lot of action on screen. Obviously, when there's a lot of action on screen is exactly when I DON'T want to lose frames, so I'd like to try and help the situation in any way possible. So, my question is: Can I crank any extra speed out of this computer? Is there something I missed when installing ATI Tool, maybe? I've never overclocked a video card before, because I've never felt the need. I'm not going to do something crazy like try to hop the speed up to 533/533, but if it is in fact underclocked as many of these laptops seem to be, I'd like to see if reversing that changes my 3D performance at all.

Thanks, everybody. And sorry for the long post. I'm not very good at condensing!

EDIT> For a more detailed list of my specs, this post has it covered: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=71428&highlight=V5201US

Just gotta glance at the third post, and scroll down to the second system listed (which should have V5201US highlighted in red)

 

I don't mean to crush your dreams, but don't bother. You have an integrated card. It's better than the intel solution, but still not a "real" card. If you need better graphical performance--buy a laptop/desktop with a dedicated GPU.

One thing that might help with your performance is getting more memory. It would help both in games (the integrated gpu steals system memory, as you know) and also in office work/multi-tasking.

 

It's not about whether or not I should "bother" or if I can convert my econobox into a speedster. I want to know if it's possible to squeeze any extra performance out of this computer. Even a performance increase of 3% is still an increase, and I'm looking for anything of that nature.

I don't have the luxury of being able to pick up a gaming system. I'm on a free computer because I have no income. There's a slight possibility that I can pick up some free RAM through Jedec, but apart from that I basically have what I have unless I decide to eat only rice and dried noodles for the next three months. I guess that might be my best option... looking into RAM, that is, not the rice thing.

Thanks for your input. Anybody else have any ideas? A way I can crack into this bad boy and mess with clock speeds or somehow streamline Windows or something? Software-wise I've already stripped this thing down to bare bones. It's actually helped a lot, but my dream is to be able to enter cities in my game without experiencing freezes.

 

Best solution: use 1GB of DDR400 ram instead of the 512 you currently have. Since you have integrated graphics, using faster memory will increase video performance. Set powerplay to max perfomance when plugged in.

 

The best thing you can do is increase your RAM to 1 GB, or 2, if you can afford it.
I'm not too sure about overclocking, but I know I saw huge increases in performance when I did on my desktop, and it's coming soon for my lappy.

 

1) get a job. buying a gaming system will increase your performance 100x

2) to OC the 200m, try using powerstrip because omega 6.9 will ask if you have an IGP (which you do) and when you click yes it disables overclocking. powerstrip should give you the option to OC though.

3) i think a 3% boost in the synthetic benchmark 3dmark03 would be possible but that 3% will probably not translate into a 3% performance boost in real games or a 3% boost in fps rate in WoW.

also, i don't think they underclock the 200m cause it produces so little heat, so you might not be able to squeeze much juice out of it.

 

due to the heat issues, overclocking in a laptop is unwise, but you may have options for video if you use atitool...not having a laptop currently, I don't know if it would work at all.

as for overclocking your actual laptop, the program clockgen might help. a friend recently checked if it would work on his Dell, but no go...perhaps it supports other brands tho.

*disclaimer - this advice is meant as informational purposes only. damages caused by investigating the uses of the mentioned software is not the fault of this poster, they have no liability. the onus is on you!

 

Actually, overclocking seems pretty safe to me, knowing how many people do it (unfortunatly, most oc the gpu)

 

Sell the laptop and add some more $$, build a decent desktop. Just a thought.

 

Stuck with 200m, please remember that some people on this board can't see past the end of their core duo except to see their chequebook. Budget users are looked on as people to taunt with useless comments so please, try to ignore it and look to those who will give you a straight answer, which I will now attempt to do.

My x200m came with a clock speed of 378Mhz. I used powerstrip (easy to find, download and install) to push it up to 459Mhz and it was stable. With the new settings my 3dmark05 score went up from 515 to somewhere around 564. If I pushed it up to it's top of about 500MHz it might go even better say around 3dmark 600, however watch out for damage by heat, the gpu could heat up and cause heat damage to itself and the cpu, so try to monitor temperatures both by feel and with a 3rd party application like notebook hardware control which you can set to monitor cpu temps.

My x200m automatically takes ram from my main ram according to how much I have. At 512mb it took 64, at 1GB it took 128. I presume at maybe 1.5GB or 2GB it will take 256, but this is an exception as not many 200ms are designed to take that much.

Other ways to increase performance from your 200m are of course, reduce graphics settings and/or screen resolution. Also try installing more and faster ram which should help a bit. If you want to risk it, try getting ram upgrades off ebay. They might not be branded but they're half the price of most stores and I've done it 4 or 5 times without having any problems. I presume with a sempron you'll be looking at DDR-333 (PC2700 ram), but it's worth checking if your laptop can take DDR-400 or better.

Hope that helps, if you have any more questions please ask away or feel free to pm me.

 

Thanks alot for your input jess paws, Me myself is sitting with a Ati 200M, i knew it wouldnt be the fastest thing under the sun, but it runs all the games say before 2004 very well, exp. Need for speed underground 2 , Counter strike Source , GTA3 San andreas , Battlefield vietnam. Obviously not on high resolutions BUT it runs em' !!! xD