*HP dv6z AMD Llano (6XXX series) Owners Lounge*

Thanks guys, ya'll been very helpful. I'll probably be quite happy with my stock glossy then. I don't intend to go outside too often with this lappy.
I would probably qualify as a casual user except for the fact that I enjoy some gaming from time to time. It seems from what everyone says here that Llanos are pretty good at overclocking, so I think I can bump it up to 2.0ghz safely. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure i'm not going to run anything as demanding as BF3 (even though i'm itching to try it soon...) so the cpu in any case should be perfectly acceptable for most 1-2 year old games n MMO's. So how's the battery life? The slightly higher TDP of the MX worries me slightly, but I guess i can undervolt for running on battery...

 

TDP makes fairly little practical difference...if not for the voltages themselves. 35/45 watts is a fine line. Certainly the newest MX chips push close to 45W properly.

Bumped all voltages up one tick, BF3 is actually super smooth with all defaults and no deferred path trick. In large-map MP. Weird.....it was very jerky at stock 1.5GHz and with Crossfire on, now with 2.2 and CF off multiplayer is as smooth as singleplayer.

 

Yeah Crossfire is horrible with BF3.

 

I just find it striking, because the game was already so smooth in singleplayer.

Currently still getting screwed over because I need to unlock a PROPER scoped weapon, too many idiots who don't know how to use theirs keep getting teams killed.

 

I think the new switchable graphics are super unstable. At least they are for me.
My entire laptop kept freezing up while playing BF3, so I raised all the voltages ( a lot) to make sure it was not the cpu. Kept crashing.

Thought perhaps my GPU overclock was the culprit, so went to a milder musho bios. Kept crashing.

Finally I switched back to stock graphical selection method. I have not crashed since.

 

new as in fixed on dGPU?

 

what about fixed mode with stock clocks on both cpu and gpu ?

 

Can someone provide me with stock CPU values? I do not have them anymore. Then ill post back results.

@baii yes fixed dGPU

 

Um. Stock CPU....open K10stat, pick a profile, click the little "default" button. Or did you mean something else?

 

So after bumping voltage one tick above the settings I posted earlier, it all seems to be running well. Going to keep an eye on it though. I definitely prefer to set the profile and exit K10Stat so far....seems like if it keeps running there is a conflict elsewhere eventually, but if I quit out the settings remain and I can run all day.

 

I used fusiontweaker to permanently set overclock. My default is no longer default. If someone could please take a pic of "default" and post it I would be grateful.

 

FT can actually mess with defaults? Did not know that, mostly only messed with K10Stat. I unfortunately do not have the 3530MX, but later I'll check my screenshot folder...

EDIT: Incidentally my temps are great. They peak around 82-83, fan kicks in and temp on exit is more like 73-74. From System Monitor logs I see distinct throttle jumping at first, but once it warms up and the fan spins a little higher, both temps and clock speed settle down. Funny that overclock speed becomes easier to maintain as it continues to be used, must be a function of that "rate of increase in heat" mentioned before. Would have been nice if fan was tied to rate of increase as well as absolute temps, my netbook did that pretty smoothly.

It does not seem to affect game play, but amyone concerned could 'prime' the cooling with a couple minutes of Prime95 before launching their game.

 

Lenovo Z575 with A6-3420M APU and 6650m gpu for $500. Good deal imo. Almost at the same ballpark as the Asus k53ta last year. For anyone who wants to game on a budget.

Newegg.com - lenovo IdeaPad Z575 (12992PU) Notebook AMD A-Series A6-3420M(1.5GHz) 15.6" 6GB Memory DDR3 1333 500GB HDD 5400rpm DVD±R/RW AMD Radeon HD 6650M

 

Close enough to my system. (A8-3500M, HD 6750M, $550) At least in theory. Good spotting!

 

HTWingNut,
If you don't mind could you post exactly what settings you use for 1920x1080 and 1280x720 for Battlefield 3? I'm looking for the perfect balance between visual quality and performance on this laptop. Thanks.

 

Check HT's 6750M test thread, thought he had a screenshot there.

In my case I have CPU as screenshot I recently posted (increased all voltages one tick though), 800-2200 MHz controlled by Windows. GPU stock (600/800) and no Crossfire, 1366x768. Settings "Auto" gave me Textures Ultra, everything else Medium, Post AA (MLAA jag reduction), 4x anisotropic and SSAO. Seems fine in multiplayer.

A couple settings don't really seem to take effect in MP, but fiddle around as much as you like. There should be a console option to display FPS but I can't for the life of me remember what it was...

As I recall certain effects will have a dramatic performance hit at 1080p+ whereas 720p class can handle them easily. Higher rez would be nice if I sniped more, but better FX seem to improve visibility through brush and smoke. To a degree this game can actually reward quality prefs over pure rez/framerate.

 

Console command to show fps is

render.drawfps 1

I ended up dropping everything to low because I really couldn't tell much difference and it bumps up the fps by a few.

 

Okay, I'll do some checking later. Thanks for the command.

I noticed that voltage stops delivering benefits at some point. [email protected] seems to draw the same wattage, or slightly more wattage than stock 0.9375, but there's no disputing the drops of several degrees C when lowering voltage on higher clocks. I will probably compare 0.7500 and 0.8000 just for laughs (and that plot to get below 8W w/o E-RAM or SSD). If differences are negligible I intend to run at higher voltage for the sake of overall amps.

 

What system builders need to know about solid state drives ? Channel Register

This bears out what I was crabbing about the other day, but puts a little more context to the notion. True pre-erasure of empty blocks has a big positive impact on write performance over time, and large disparity between read and write speeds may spell more trouble in the future.

 

catalyst 12.3 is out.

you guys install this ?

 

12.2 was disaster so I don't have much confidence

Edit: looking for brave soul to jump !

 

I'm sticking with 12.1a until I hear of any valid improvements and/or no crashes/hangs.

 

Wait 12.1a is good? Thought I heard swearing about that one too.

 

12.1 pre-release or 12.1a pre-release. I personally haven't had any issues with 12.1a, but others find 12.1 pre-release better. In either case stick with one of those IMHO.

 

I have a update image of my drive OS every week, let me make a image and jump tonight. Dun have much game to test though, only have my crappy coded Asian game(dynasty warrior) and madvr.they should at least say if it is stable or not.

Big word on the release note

edit hmm something weired, the installer say my display driver up to date
12.4 beta than zzzz

 

Probably falls under switchable graphics enabled?

 

12.4 install fine, game seem to be fine but ccc game profile is broke for me.

software oc seem to be working

fix mode seem fine.

CCC profile making is definitely dead for me.

edit : google about the profile thingy, seem not driver related

 

Well I wonder if it is related under the switchable graphics issues. Such a maze of drivers and cards.

HTWingnut: I've been playing BF3 with max CPU 2.2GHz/2.2GHz scaling down slowly to 800MHz, GPU stock, graphics 1366x768 fullscreen, quality left at Auto defaults. Under those conditions FRAPS claims I never drop below 29fps even in severe 64-way multiplayer. Most of the time I can even record short full-rez video clips and stay above 30fps, but video is not very smooth on some clips afterward. I should test further to see if this is due to CPU, RAM or just HDD....(20MB/s sustained writes may conflict with texture streaming which apparently is higher priority)

 

Yeah, I've found that I can run at lower CPU speeds too. Running on battery with 1.8GHz and GPU at stock, using dxtory to limit framerates to 30, it runs very smooth,and only drains about 35W.

 

Excellent! Minimum CPU speed seems to be the big barrier for smoothness in large matches, something definitely to keep in mind. I wonder if Trinity chips with that ludricrously increased clock speed will be fine without any adjustment?

A couple games actually do suffer with lack of Crossfire. I haven't had much enough time to properly play Shogun 2, but Assassin's Creed feels pretty badly laggy now...I may have to lower a setting somewhere.

 

How do you guys use DXTpry to limit FPS? When I play on battery, all settings on low, 720p, CPU @ 2.4 ghz, I am almost never above 25 fps, most times around 16-20, very unplayable. Perhaps my 800/1000 clocks are 1) unstable or 2) drawing too much power and getting throttled.

 

You should be running 30-50 fps with those speeds at 720p no problem. Try to clock your CPU and GPU down a bit and see what happens.

 

WOW, that made such a huge difference. Lowered my CPU to 2.0ghz at 1.05 volts and saw a big fps jump

 

Throttling! Yep, happened to me when I pushed too hard.

 

damn, that must be a bummer lowering from 2.8ghz.


now people see why these things will never match core i5's...

 

If you do pure CPU task, it doesnt throttle that bad(or at all hence you can prime 95 all the way).
dGpu+ CPU = some throttle. my profile with 2.5ghz will usually have 2 core floating from 800mhz - 2.1ghz with heavy GPU use.
dGPU+iGPU+CPU = THROTTLE core cant even with 2.1ghz some times ~~

Or disable CoolNQuiet helps as well, not sure if it will kill the motherboard with amount of powerdraw though.

 

It is only an issue when on battery or on a <120 watt PSU. Plugged in at home I run OC cpu, gpu, no issues. I am using a 90 watt psu right now, which means I need to allocate my watt resources intelligently.

 

It's running choppy while hardly using system resources. What gives?

I've been using the AMD system monitor since I change drivers to try to make some performance judgements. Logically, in areas where it suddenly drops to 10-15 FPS and chugs I've hit some sort of unoptimized effect the processor or video can't handle right?

Nope. It's showing around 40% usage per core relatively evenly spread across all four cores and only ~45% on the dedicated video (no integrated video usage, even though I have crossfire enabled and application profile set to high performance). It's hardly breaking a sweat, yet outputs 10-15 FPS in some areas of games.

I'm not sure if the monitoring utility is wrong, or Markarth in Skyrim (what I'm testing with right now) is just really poorly coded. Does this in other games, Metro, Stalker, TF2, etc. 720p on "high" settings, runs smooth as butter most places. Just "upgraded" to 12.1a from 11.11.

EDIT: GAH it's crossfire. Disabled crossfire, now 60-70% dedicated video card usage (~20% higher) and 20-30 FPS in the same areas. And yet it showed no dedicated video usage when crossfire was enabled, so I'm not sure why it was limiting itself to only ~45% on the dedicated video with crossfire. Didn't have this problem with 11.11 with crossfire in the same games.

 

What do you mean? at 2.2-2.4GHz these can compete with an i5 just fine. And as rmacgowa stated, his was just an issue of using a PSU that was rated too low for the power he was using.

 

Well, I'm at 2.9 and I sure eat i5s for breakfast.

 

That simple and rapid flexibility cannot be touched. The whole platform is all about "rightsizing" but it should be much more automatic. i5 laptops feel like i3 laptops, which is to say GREAT...until you have a lot going on at the same time. i7 is amazing but they're only finally getting on top of that heat problem.

My A8 feels good at stock clocks but a few games are smoother at 2.2GHz, regardless of actual CPU load. Probably similar to when DOS games began failing because the processor clock was too fast? (but in reverse) Trinity at least will not have the issue of ticking too slowly. But can games actually request thread affinity when you launch them? Because ideal unganged operation would keep the high load on the fast chip(s) and the idlers only on the slow chip(s). Ganged operation makes some sense if you bounce among cores, but there should be a switching penalty we'll want to avoid....unganged plus affinity should just be BETTER.

rmacgowa: Is your cooling somehow impaired, or do you have a different Coolsense policy? I kinda doubt that would be a contributor but it's worth checking all possible leads. Oh, Catalyst power policies also I guess.

 

Just got my k53ta for my bro, my first impression compare to dv6 is what the.....
a picture is better than a million word, uploading it now.





So with almost identical hardware

HP manage to make a power brick double the size?

I must say I like the ASUS design more, @least it is not a fingerprint magnet. no stupid hp logo light, keyboard doesnt flex.

No Total care BS

It come with a non geniue windows though ? O , I snap a Intel 6200 in there probably thats why?

More to bash HP. ASUS have hdd/battery/wireless/cap/num light under track pad, which may not be the best design, but still beat HP HDD light on the side( which I can never see when i want to, but flash the hell out when I sleep. Dv6 wireless/cap light is better placed on buttons though) The more I think about it , the more I want to bash HP. Who in the world make electronic with white signal light, damn serious........?

 

Look at the rated capacities. I bet the Asus has a 65W adapter? Can't quite make out from the picture...if it is a 90W it will probably be adequate in all cases but 120W is a reliable monster for peaking loads. The 120W also speaks to thickness of the traces on the motherboard. Those high overclocks draw a severe amount of energy, plus excess capacity provides for fast recharge in almost any circumstance. I mean really, charging at 40 watts input? That leaves 80 for everything else yet so there's rarely a competition.

If the ASUS has an 80-90W adapter that should be fine, otherwise be careful when tweaking.

PS: Shogun 2 just got another large patch. Highlights are double army size (twice as many units) in multiplayer, more than twenty new battle maps, ~30% (!!) reduced load times and startup times, lower memory use and deeper AI. If they remake Medieval, Rome or Napoleon/Empire with this engine I expect the game to occupy 50GB of disk and burn your Crossfire/SLI rigs in the heart of the Sun.

 

Let me know how it goes your bios testing!

 

gonna try tonight if I stable at that clock

just dealing with my stupid intel 6200 hang the k53ta when restart

Btw, ASUS powerbrick say nothing about how many W ~~

 

meh 4am. Don't know why I stress so much when he dun even care until D3 is out. (Fine, I just want to toy with it ~~)

 

I believe that is a 65W power supply, DV6z is 120W. HP supports 1080p panel, blu-ray, but affecting power most is A8/MX CPU (45W) vs A6 (35W), 6750m with GDDR5 vs DDR3, DDR3 1600 vs 1333. It pulls about 90W without overclock when fully taxed, I'm sure it was too borderline to offer a 90W PSU, and you may have power issues if overclocked significantly on the Asus with the 65W brick, it may limit your performance.

 

I have coolsense set to coolest and cores locked to 2.0-2.2 Ghz with fusion tweaker. My 9 cell battery also gives the bottom of the laptop some extra space to move air around.

I am pretty positive it was just a power throttling issue because I play on my 120watt psu at home no problem, with 2.8ghz cpu @ 80 degrees and 800/1000 gpu @ 75. I like to carry around a 90 watt psu because it is much smaller and lighter.

I think I am going to convert back to KSTAT 10. The ability to make different profiles is going to pay off more than fusion tweakers permanent overclock

 

Yeah, I use K10stat because of its flexibility. I just have it run as a service at startup and it works fine for me, runs in task tray, and no issue.

 

fusiontweaker load clock at start up just like k10. But the service is embbed so you don't have to hassle with it.
If you change window power plan, fusiontweaker "Seem" to switch at same time. But the bug that it cant go below p4 or p5 just kill it for me.