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

Not totally sure that this is right thread but i'm giving it a shot.
I'm very much considering to buy me this dv7 ( HP - 17.3" Refurbished Pavilion Laptop - 6GB Memory - 640GB Hard Drive - Steel Gray - dv7-6165us ) over the Asus K53TA because of the better specs but still i have a few questions that maybe someone here could answer me.
-I want to know for sure that it is possible to disable the igpu and just use the 6750M all the time? And are there any issues with OpenGL Games?
On the Asus i've got the confirmation so i want to be sure about the HP as well.
-Has someone experience with this exact dv7 model? And in general (dv6,dv7 with AMD) are there any big problemes? Most importantly for me would be if there are any temp or throttle problems. I mean without heavy overclocking if it's gonna have temp or throttle problems if i play a few hours on my desk without a cooler.

Sorry if this was asked before or posted somewhere in this mega thread, i just want to know what to expect.
Thanks!

 

So i got my dv6z recently (a8 with 6620g and 7690m) and i left it on overnight for torrenting. When i woke up in the morning, the bottom left (near the touchpad) was so damn hot, although there was no programs on besides utorrent. Is this natural? Dual graphics was turned off, catalyst shows the apu graphics card on only.

Also it's worth noting that 7690m does not show up in amd overdrive or amd catalyst or anywhere really (ux?). Anyway to make that my default over the 6620g?

 

The CPU is in the lower left corner. But I can't imagine it would get real hot because of torrenting, that doesn't take much CPU power at all. Run something like HWMonitor and see what temps your CPU is running at.

Also, right click desktop and choose switchable graphics you will choose which GPU to use for which application. It defaults to 6620G. When you start a program it will show up in the list temporarily. Close the program and then choose the GPU you want to use with that application/game. Conversely, you can just browse for the app executable and select it.

 

Do you have A8-3550MX or 3520M? In a good laptop 3520M without load do not make any heat, I'm surprised your laptop so damn hot after little torrent. I would recommend you to use K10Stat or Fusiontweaker to control your voltages.

 

Been monitoring it all day with speedfan and all temps have been around 40c, although now they are siting at around 45-47c. Bottom left has only been mildly warm all day. Perhaps it was due to it being on for such a long time or something? Also is it weird i see no fan RPM in hwmonitor or speedfan?

I assume choosing the GPU means "High Performance" = 7690 "Power Saving" = 6620G? Because i only see those two options, not actually picking the gpu.

Thanks for your help.

 

just below of the lower left palm rest part are 4 gddr5 modules of the 6750m (or 7690) these things heat a lot if they are overclocked, if yours is in stock setting perhaps is already too hot on the environment... yes, power saving means the integrated card, and the high performance means the dedicated one.

 

Point taken

P.D: Wipeout Pulse works wonders too

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...z-cooling-mod-thread-warning-lots-photos.html

dGPU is lower left, with GDDR5 next to it. APU sits under middle of the keyboard. Just once, I had a case where the dGPU locked up in a high utilization loop and put off lots of heat. This persisted even through sleeping and waking (laptop, not me). I rebooted and it's never happened again.


Splinter22: There are some issues with fixed mode apparently. You'd probably need someone to mod a dv7 BIOS for you, and deal with any consequences. Bricking can be undone easily enough. Fixed mode certainly does have full dGPU performance in OpenGL titles, though honestly I cannot think of many cases where high OpenGL/OpenCL throughput is necessary. We all wish for it of course, especially in Trinity it would be great to fully exploit both sets of video codec modules and shader cores....the dv7 should run at least as cool as our dv6's. Site is down overnight but I would guess the 6165 has a 9-cell battery? That would lift the back a little and improve cooling further. I have ZERO heat issues with a plain folding stand which achieves similar effect to a large battery. Unless MAX OpenGL is critical you should just get it.

 

Test Comparison: Which Browser Will Make Your Laptop?s Battery Last Longer? | 7 Tutorials

I intend to follow up on this a bit.

 

@calc_yolatuh:
The site works again and yes it comes with a 9-cell battery. Didn't know that the 9-cell battery would lift the back.
Is this fixed mode BIOS hard to mod?Are there any available yet?

 

Yes the 9-cell sticks downward, better than backward. Screen folds back nearly flat thanks to this. Also the dv7's apparently have a 5th speaker ("subwoofer" they claim) and may-or-may-not have an empty 2nd HDD bay...can't remember. It should be good for roughly 8-10+ hours of office-type work, probably 6-8 hours with many older games on iGPU and generally close to three hours plus gaming on dGPU? (scaling from experience with my stock battery)

I have NO idea about state of the BIOS, Musho knows this type fairly well so I would think there may already be one out there.

 

They have a subwoofer and a second HDD bay, yes.

 

I didn't expect such a good battery life. That's really good news. Thanks!

 

I would say 8-10 hrs is a bit overzealous, but with general use, wi-fi on, screen 50% bright, balanced mode, I can get about 7 solid hours or more.

 

Still surprisingly good for me.

 

My current understanding is that the 17 watt parts will be locked down, but thru machine bios. The 35 watt laptop parts will have some unlocked processors as will the big desktop units.

seer

 

I just hope you can at least adjust the voltage DOWN for best battery life on the 17W parts. It would be a shame if you lose that flexibility.

 

I completely agree. I don't really worry about overclocking my mobile cpus, but I do care about undervolting them. I think AMD could really improve their position in the market, if they allowed such customizations in Catalyst, like undervolting and controlling other aspects of the hardware (Intel locks down all that stuff except on the most expensive products).

 

just purchased metro 2033, anyone got any performance suggestions?

runs fine dx9 on high on 720 res, would love to run it higher though. still on 12.1a drivers.

I mmight give 12.4 drivers a try.

 

Those with a clean install/minimal recovery, could you tell me how many processes and what percentage of memory usage you have on task manager? I have 70 processes listed atm, 82 after opening Chrome, with 32% ram of 4gb used. Processes look a bit way too many.

 

if trinity is locked down, that would suck.

that's the only unpublished benefit amd has going for them.

amd can advertise lower power consumption, and at the same time, users can overclock and ignore power consumption if they choose to.

without this kind of flexibility, sandy and ivy will just keep kicking their nuts.

 

I have been reading this thread for some time and i finally pulled the trigger on a DV6Z quad edition with the A8-3510mx and HD6750M dGPU. also has the 1080p screen (which is very nice)

so far i am loving this thing. after trying a ton of different versions of amd drivers i finally settled on 12.1a and still was getting BSODs like crazy (the atikmpag one) and now after disabling ULPS i seem to be BSOD free. one thing that im not a huge fan of is the system RAM (its two different brands, the 2gb stick is a samsung and the 4gb stick is hyundai electronics)

i used K10stat to give it a mild 2.2Ghz overclock with a turbo of 2.5Ghz (didnt feel comfortable adjusting the voltages though) temps dont go much above 65c playing skyrim

i am very impressed with the performance so far, i am able to play skyrim with maxed detail level at 1366x768 not overclocking the 6750m yet. I have to say the performance isnt really that far off from my toshiba qosmio x505-q892

So thanks for all the great info so far on this laptop!!! hope to contribute some of my own soon as i get playing with this box more and more


EDIT...... with my overclock i only changed the p2, p1, p0, and b0 states. everything below that is stock and it idles at 39c and stays right there while im browsing web and other light tasks
Also i cant thank the person enough that recommended disabling ULPS ! i seriously was considering shipping this thing right back to where i bought it from, now i have been using it like crazy opening and closing GPU intense games and other programs and so far absolutely no BSODs!! even if you dont plan on overclocking the GPU i really recommend disabling ULPS anyway

 

I've had the dv6135 for about 4 months now, and since I've purchased it all I've really done is drop the voltage and clockspeed for a little extra battery life. I noticed that recently it's been idling at roughly 50°C (according to HW Monitor). I'll admit I'm not very tech-savvy, but seems kind of high. What kind of maintenance can I do to alleviate some of this heat?

Thanks
Mo

 

cleaned up my desk yesterday.

Sometimes I hook the monitor up as a 2nd monitor. I find myself using my desktop less and less (it is watercooled and my psu is loud). But the raid 0 drives on my desktop are alot faster than this laptop. I suppose if I go ssd on the laptop, that will more than make up for it. I play my games on my laptop, I dont mind playing on the 15" screen.

Also more pics of my cooler which only cost me for spray paint, gorilla glue and movers pads to sit the laptop on, as I had the fan, grill and usb cable in my scrap pile, as well as the metal sheet (cut from an old metal drawer that my friend gave me). and the fake wood that was from an add-on to my desk that I did not use.

 

50ºC is fine if room temperature is around 20-25ºC.

 

Baii, there's no such thing as too much speaker haha

 

operating temperature of this processors is of 100 °C, at 95 °C begins throttling leaving it under 90 °C, then this is quite high, anything below it should be fine.

(Recommended temps however are around 75 °C max for a laptop, specially if you don't have any kind of mod installed)

 

Thanks guys. I guess I was concerned because when I first got it I was fiddling around with k10stat and picked up HWMonitor to record temps and recorded an average of 40ish idled when it was underclocked/undervolted. So I was alarmed when I checked the temp one day and noticed that it shot up.

This may sound silly but to clean dust from the fans should I just pop off the screws from the under the laptop and go to town on it with a can of compressed air?

 

i use the bookshelf speakers for music creation (poor mans studio monitors), and the smaller logitech 5.1 surround system for movies and games. Though i havent reconnected the rear speakers yet (its a pain to route wires to the rear of the room).

 

splinter22: See what I mean? I get roughly as much time in Oblivion as I do online, iGPU+Quietest settings.

jokerface: Non-clean, I have 84 processes right now. Including Steam (arg), Origin (NOOO), and all the other kruft. You can very easily get up that high soon after a clean install, Adobe Helper/Google Updater/etc rapidly balloons the process count.

Misfit: Skyrim is not super demanding, and even less after 1.4 introduced "modern CPU optimizations". Check temps with double burn Kombustor/Prime95 to get an accurate measurement. You can probably drop voltages at least a bit with minimal risk, it can save 5C and quite a bit of wattage.

mistamo: Sanity check, are you using QUIET MODE? And are you using laptop flat on a desk, in bed, or on a stand or lapdesk? My idle temps vary widely due to this.

 

Hi.

New owner.

Does anybody have a problem with skype login box being blank, so there is no where to type in your user name and password.

I have tried a skype and skype business.

Thanks

John.

 

Quick observation.. CPUz is showing my 6750m as having ddr3 memory as opposed to DDR5 is this a mistake of CPUz or do some 6750m's have ddr3 memory

 

Its a mistake by GPU-Z. It shows up on everyone's.

 

Ok good was worried, laptop was a refurb so I wanted to know for sure.

Was running some 3dmark11 tests this morning at stock clock speeds and with small GPU and CPU overclocks, ran fine with about 150 more points for the oc score, however when I enabled xfire(dual graphics) my score was 100 PTS lower than stock settings and skyrim wouldn't run without the graphics getting all jarbled up again, ran the 12.1a uninstall amd reinstall and all seems well again but I won't be enabling dual graphics again

 

Tinderbox: There must be something wrong with Windows or you are missing a basic software component. You should employ the powers of Google-fu to discover common solutions for the empty box issue among users in general.

Misfit: dGPU Memory is soldered on the motherboard when it is manufactured, not even refurbs will have wrong video mem. Hybrid Crossfire only benefits a few games like Shogun 2 apparently, disabling it also permits running two windowed video games on the two separate graphics chips.

 

Yeah Im not too worried about it, the 6750m does well enough for what I need. And I was wrong about being even close to my toshiba. I just haven't used it for gaming lately, I forgot how nasty that gtx460m was haha. At 900p resolution I have everything completely maxed and it runs at a steady 40fps

Still for 600 bucks I can't complain one bit about the dv6. I can play some games with decent settings and for my work entertainment it is gonna work quite nicely.

I just wish I could have gotten one with the multitouch screen.. This would have been the perfect toy to play with windows 8. I actually bought a dell Inspiron duo to test win8 but it was such a dog I couldn't take any more and sold it

 

Unfortunately I think I was unlucky to get one with a defective webcam, mine is not showing up in device manager and Skype will not detect one. I read that some of the dv6 notebooks had cams with a short connecting wire. Might this be the case or did I wipe a driver while messing with the amd graphics drivers?

 

I searched around in the thread but couldn't find it so I have a couple of questions.

Is there now a definitive way to disable thermal throttling without startup lock issues, etc?

Does the GPU not have a vBIOS anymore or something? Since you can control GPU clock speed from the modded BIOS?

At what temperature does the fan kick into full speed?

Is voltage on the A-series processors locked below a specific value (e.g. undervolt but no overvolt)?

I'm planning on a heatsink mod too. I'll keep you guys posted with pictures once that's complete.

 

Disable CnQ in unlocked bios should get rid of most throttle. Haven't heard startup issue, mine just froze from s3 sleep though, so I disable s3 sleep when I do that. Flashing a non-unlocked bios over the unlocked bios after changing option seem to make the bios more stable and brake less.

I am not a expert on motherboard architecture, so I have no clue. But then the GPU is soldered on the board so there is probably no need for vbios.

the fan is full speed around 80?

On some the limit is 1.3, other had seen 1.4 for VID? but doesnt really matter as anything above 2.4ghz start giving heat that doesnt scale. Heat probably is more of a problem before hitting max VID? (dedicated cooler is exception)

 

Hi.

It takes ages to boot my notebook if i have my wd 2tb external hdd connected to one of the usb ports, I did not have this problem with any of my other notebooks, is their a fix for this.

Thanks

John.

 

quick question, what is the latest amd cat driver that is still overclockable and *works*? Anyone try 12.3 or .4?

seer

 

They keep going back to 12.1a apparently....

Tinderbox...is the system displaying a boot menu or similar? It may be scanning the USB for an OS before proceeding. Just plug in the external HDD later in the startup process if it's slowing down your POST.

 

12.1 or 12.1a, few days ago did clean install, I just stay with 12.1sb and ccc.
Anything else seem to make it unstable?
And the fact that newer driver seem to have 0 performance gain.

 

thanks guys
seer

 

I'm on 12.3 and i can overclock with MSI Afterburner just fine

 

Is everything running stable? I thought I was good with 12.1a and ulps disabled but now every time I open skyrim the screen is all distorted when I set it to high performance(6750m) but looks fine when set to integ graphics(even though framerate sucks obviously)

 

If you clocked the dGPU try backing off slightly. Did you experience a freeze or similar issue recently before noticing video corruption in Skyrim?

 

looking at your signature I see that you have hang issues on the k53ta, why is that? my brother is running now Musho's bios and is working wonders O_O

 

No not at all, completely stock everything it's really hit or miss I can play for fourty min no probs, then quit for a bit start it up again amd maybe 2 minutes in it gets corrupted. Once that happens any game I have set to run on the 6750 is corrupted as well like star trek online, odd thing is I can force quit with task manager and fire up 3dmark11 and that looks fine?