HP nx9420 - Blast from the past... and a GPU question

Just found a near-mint (seriously, there's not a scratch or mark on it) HP nx9420 in a pawn shop including the 120 watt power adapter (also in practically mint condition) and amazingly it's got the Nvidia Quadro NVS 510M in it. I know the whole machine is pretty much 6 years old now but for the price - and with me being a fan of older solid hardware that's still very functional - I put it on layaway and will take possession of it sometime next month.

Until then, however, I've been doing a ton of research and reading a few thousand posts about the nx9420 and the GPU this one in particular has (the NVS 510M). I've noted that there were two other options for the GPU: the ATI X1600 and the Nvidia Quadro FX 1500M, and obviously the ATI one was considered to be pretty weak compared to the Quadro options.

My main question is this: between the FX 1500M and the NVS 510M, which one is considered to be or actually is the better GPU? I've done the research into both but I can't find a solid answer or benchmarks of any appreciable quality to show a difference. I did note some info on a wiki page with Nvidia "specs" for both cards but they're somewhat dubious - the NVS 510M is listed as having 48 CUDA cores (I WISH) but they didn't start the whole CUDA cores thing till the 8xxx generation of Nvidia GPUs.

So, if anyone has any solid info, or can point me to some decent benchmarks - as I'll be doing some 3D work I would love to see something like SPECviewperf results - comparing the two, or if anyone can just flat out say which one is definitely the better GPU in terms of overall graphics power (I'm not a gamer so this is strictly about 3D performance with respect to apps like Maya and Blender), I would greatly appreciate anything you can provide.

I've read pretty much everything here at NBR about the nx9420 and the nw9440 (both effectively the same machine given some minor differences), and done reading till my eyes hurt at the Nvidia forums and some 3D related ones as well, just hoping to get something that might still prove useful for info. Wish it was possible to drop a new MXM GPU in the nx9420 but with HP and their lockdowns I'm fairly confident that'll never happen.

Thanks...

 

How much? It would have to be less than $200 to be worth buying. I had one. Great laptop. It had the X1600 and I ran an older version of AutoCAD on it. Sold it for $200

 

It was about $200, yep, that seems to be the ceiling for older hardware at pawn shops nowadays. Funny thing was, aside from the MacBook Pros (there were 2), nothing else that pawn shop had was worth the money to me even though they did have several i3/i5 machines from Gateway and even HP. They had another nx9xxxx series machine, can't recall the exact model right now, but it was in horrible condition with missing keys, a Core Duo processor (not Core 2 Duo), less RAM, smaller hard drive, scratched screen, missing optical drive bay door, 3 of the 4 USB ports were broken, etc. Really bad shape and they were asking $225 for that one...

Amazing how that stuff seems to never make sense, but sometimes I'm in the right place at the right time and get a decent deal.

I'll take rock solid jet black boring hardware over "pretty shiny crap" any day.

Did some more research and it seems like the NVS 510M should be more powerful overall; the FX 1500M has memory bandwidth listed as 32GB/s and the NVS 510M says 38.4GB/s so I'm going to guess it's a bit better, but not by a whole helluvalot. Should still prove better than what I've got right now which is a fairly well work ThinkPad T60 with Intel GMA950 graphics Jerry-rigged to a 1280x800 LCD panel.

 

Whatever you do, DO NOT PUT THE FX1500 in your nx9420.

I used to have a nw9440 (same as yours but it comes stock with the FX1500) and it has a serious design issue. Search for "nw9440 colour of death".

There is a certain range of colours that when displayed on an external monitor over DVI causes the GPU to instantly overheat and hard cut the power to the laptop.

I persisted with HP support over this issue on my nw9440, and their only option was to replace it with a brand new 8710w since they couldn't fix it. The issue only showed up after 2 years, because I used to use it un-docked. Then I started using it docked and it was unfit for purpose.

Since the NVS 510M is from the same generation of GPUs it might have the colour of death issue too.

 

In under the wire... (30 days and all)

Got the nx9420 last night, it works great. Got Windows 7 Enterprise x64 up and running, but I'm kinda frustrated about the Quadro drivers - the HP "stock" ones are way way old (v98.06 from Feb 2007). Windows Update installed the v179.67 set from Mar 2009) and they work fine but some aspects aren't workable - I use Firefox and I'm trying to get the hardware acceleration working (which of course this 256-bit Quadro can most certainly do) but Mozilla in their infinite whatever decided to blacklist any Geforce-class drivers pre-257.21 for some reason. I think sometimes they don't know what the hell they're doing since IE9, Chrome 18/19/20, Chromium (latest), Maxthon (latest), and even Opera (latest) on this same machine using the same v179.67 drivers all have native hardware acceleration and it works great.

I ran some of those IE9 "speed demos" and they all are noticeably faster in those browsers, but Firefox just lags behind.

So I spent hours digging around and located some 510M compatible drivers from Windows Update, as odd as that sounds, and they even install properly because the inf file supports the HP/Compaq version I happen to have. The drivers load, they're signed (no alert popup that the drivers can't be ID'ed), and they do seem to work just fine. Firefox does recognize them and does enable hardware acceleration too which is what I wanted, but when you get what you want, you often pay some price down the line.

My price is a very nasty 2-3 second total system "hang" when loading videos now, of any kind, in any player: MPC-HC is my primary media player and it works fine but when I load a video, there's a point where it'll begin to load and the app appears, but the system will freeze for 2-3 seconds solid, and I mean absolutely everything stops - even Task Manager hangs (was trying to find what's causing that nasty hang). I suppose I can live with it since I don't watch videos 24/7 on this thing, and the hardware acceleration in Firefox is definitely an improvement (although the Direct2D and DirectWrite stuff is so broken I don't know what the hell Mozilla is doing wrong - it works in every competing browser without issues).

I found an even newer driver from HP itself - 259.85 - dated Nov 2010 but they won't install even though the hardware requirements say it supports the Quadro NVS 510M; might have to do some inf hacking and see what I can manage but I don't think it'll "fix" the 2-3 hang issue. Went to LaptopVideo2Go and their automatic driver finder says (according to my PCI Vendor and Device ID) that the last driver set that'll work for me is the 259.47 - seems like it should be something newer that'll function but I suppose Nvidia just strapped down the newer drivers in ways that can't be worked around.

If I could just figure out what's causing that nasty hang and resolve it, this thing would be pretty much flawless.

Oh well, I swapped my 250GB drive into the nx9420, moved my 4GB of RAM over, cleaned up the LCD panel (glossy, unfortunately, and I think it's the BrightView but, it sure isn't bright to me - color reproduction is outstanding, however).

It's running great now, no reason to muck around with the video card but I have noticed it's running quite a bit warmer than I expected (idles at 54C and hit a max of 83C during some testing - that's still well below the 100C Tjunction of 100C but it does get pretty damned warm indeed).

It's a solid machine and I'm happy to have it, so... guess that's that.