Studio 17 falls just short of expectations. Any ideas?

Hi all,

I have been searching the forum for the past couple of hours but I have a few questions regarding getting a little bit better performance out of my studio 17. I have a 2 ghz processor, 4gb of ddr2 800 ram, the 4500mhd intel gpu, and a 5400 rpm hard drive.

My main use for this laptop is for watching HD videos but the specs fall a little short of smooth playback. 1080P works for the most part but there is stuttering in some areas. I was hoping that there is some way I can squeeze a little more performance out of my current specs to get 1080P playback to play smoothly.

The dell BIOS is pretty locked down so I'm not sure about overclocking the CPU to, say, 2.2 ghz. Everest says that my mobo supports up to DDR3-1066 ram but I am doubting that going from 200 pin to 204 pin would be possible. I have also read that the 4500mhd utilizes system ram but I don't know how to allocate more memory to the gpu. Any other ideas?

 

You probably need to update your GPU drivers, and maybe even reinstall the OS to get rid of any included bloatware.

You are right that you cannot use DDR3 RAM, DDR2 only for this system. The drivers for the 4500MHD automatically handle how much RAM to allocate to the GPU, and the amount of RAM allocated is not a direct indication of how powerful the GPU will be anyway.

Completely uninstall the graphics drivers and download the latest ones from Intel. Don't use Dell's old drivers.

 

Thanks for the reply. I already updated the drivers with the latest from Intel's website. 1080P playback is still choppy in some areas. Would a 7200 rpm hard drive make a difference since the videos are played from my hard drive rather than a disc?

 

Greg is correct, your chipset supports DDR3 memory, but your particular motherboard only has DDR2-compatible slots.

The 4500MHD is pretty damn good as far as integrated graphics go. What are you playing these videos with? Windows Media Player, or some third party HD video player? What codec are you using?

Hard drive speed probably won't help with HD video playback, but it will slightly increase overall system speed. If you can afford it, it's certainly not a bad upgrade anyway.

 

try using coreavc as a codec, see if that helps.