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

There is a really good review on AnandTech - The AMD A8-3850 Review: Llano on the Desktop showing how desktop llano likes the faster ram. My guess is that mobile llano would get some bump in performance from 1600 DDR3 as well. I'm not as tech savvy as a lot of people on here, but I make guess based on that and other reviews showing the same trend.

 

I see no reason that DDR3-1600 wouldn't have the same performance increase on the mobile Llano. I do plan on getting 8GB of it soon but I have to wait for some money to come in first.

 

That's the problem with these things, you have to "LOOK CLOSELIER" heheh.
First, different versions, second, you picked the highest one, overclocked and apparently sli'd, third-you picked one running the latest and greatest second gen i7, and fourth, if you look at the graph of "similar systems", you'll see the VAST majority (like thousands) are clustered around 1700..

seer

 

I see...somehow missed the histogram.

That's interesting - my HP Envy 17 6850m (1950 in 3dmark11) could be better than a 460m...

 

WingNut's idea of the faster ram is a good one. LLano gets a much bigger boost from fast ram than I' whatevers..

 

Ok, got mine ordered Says August 8. Build is identical to Abadd's cept I sprang for both a six and a 9 cell batt. Should be good for 12 hours or so

seer

 

I still can't select a 3530MX - how did you do that seeratlas?

 

How'd you manage to get the 3530MX?

 

I had it saved in my cart while I thought it over last few days. It *blipped* a couple of times as I was going thru the checkout, and I called customer support to make sure it was really going to give me my configuration before I hit the "send order" button. they confirmed it and it went through.

You might try fibbing a bit and telling them you had it in your cart and it suddenly disappeared...see if customer support can punch it in.

gluck
Seer

 

I am not going to be able to give you guys 1080p numbers, I sold my monitor last week because I rarely ever use it, but at 720p with the same settings that r3d mentioned for BC2

I get between 50-60 FPS, usually closer to 50 with dips to 45 every once in a while. Lowering textures and effects and raising shadows to medium gets me around 60 on average, slightly more max. This is online. During the opening part of the story, the movie and the part where you knife the two guys, I get anywhere from 55 to 105 but an average of about 70. Gonna try Borderlands and Metro next.

Also worth noting that the max temps got up to 74-75C after about half an hour but that could be because the ambient temp is now close to 84-85F.

 

Accidental post

 

"HEY ABAAAD" !!
(ok, anyone who doesn't get that is too damned young
Anyway, I wanted to make sure of the ability of the 3530mx to handle 1600 mem and this is what I found. quick answer "probably". Not listed in the maintenance manual BUT with an on chip mem controller and the A70m chipset (which is confirmed) the 3530 is listed by a white sheet that Tom's got hold of as handling either 1333 or 1600 memory so 3530's *should* be good to go...
HOWEVER,
and here's something the rest of you potential buyers should try and run down...
According to that same white sheet, not every LLano CAN use 1600...
quick list as follows:

A8-3530mx yes
A8-3510mx yes
A8-3500m nope
A6-3410mx yes
A6-3400m nope
A6 3300's nope

seer

 

Great! I'm having a feeling I'll be returning my Sager NP8130 and sticking with this machine. Advantage of 6+ hours battery, saving $450, although the upgraded screen on the NP8130 is supposed to be phenomenal, but not worth the $450 and loss of battery life. Hmm, wondering if they'd notice if I swapped screens... no I'm not that evil.

 

More OC, see attachment, 2600Mhz @ only 1,05V(!) SuperPi 1M 29,9Secs...Unbelievable, great machine.

Edit:
3000Mhz @ 1,15V is also working, SuperPi 1M 25,567Secs.

 

Excellent. It is good to know that I can OC the CPU if I ever need to, What are temps like and care to try something multi-threaded like Cinebench? And would you mind taking us through how you OC'd it? K10Stat won't allow me to change the frequency.

Edit: 3GHz with all 4 cores is stable? At that speed it is going to beat any mobile i5 is 4+ core performance and only like 15% behind the i5-2410m with 2 cores and 25% with one. Add in that the 6770m still isn't overclockable, as far as I know, while the 6750m is for us and I don't know why anyone would buy the i5-2410m over the A8-3510/30mx

 

Wow this is indeed unbelievable. There is no reason to get sandy bridge now. You have sandy bridge level performance with a great gpu for half the price. I really feel sorry for all the people who bought an intel cpu and are suffering with high temperature and reduced performance. Llano is amazing.

 

LOL, hold your horses. SuperPi 1M for Sandy Bridge i5-2410m is 13 seconds according to Notebookcheck - so no, it's not really Sandy Bridge level performance. Temps are great, however.

And there are quite a few problems with Crossfire scaling and DX9. Until these are solved it's not quite superior to the dv6t.

Abbadon, can you test Bad Company 2 at these settings: 1366x768 high, HBAO on 4xAF 1xAA

 

Superpi mod is a single core benchmark which has always been in favor of intel chips. It is not indicative of real world performance. It is good however to get a quick assessment of the same cpu at different clockspeed, to confirm the overclock is working which it is in this case. And no matter how you want to justify it, a 3ghz quadcore cpu for less than 700dollars is an amazing deal and one would be foolish to stick with intel after this overclock result.

 

Don't exaggerate. First, it's not half the price, it's maybe 20-25% less (relative to the 2720QM). Second, you are nowhere close to Sandy Bridge performance.

I am a little bit curious about the low voltages. AMD's Turbo increases voltage significantly higher than that to get lower clock speeds (IIRC, it was at something like 1.3V when going to 2.3GHz). Are you sure that the overclock is stable? If so, then they were really, really conservative with these chips...

 

Like I said, I know they were crazy conservative with Danube so it would make sense that they were equally conservative with Llano. I was able to lower the voltages on every p-state on my Danube CPUs by around .15-.20V. It was stable at under 1.0V on the N970 at 2.2GHz. If the same is true for Llano it isn't that surprising that it can run at 3GHz at 1.15V

 

Cinebench R11.5 Score with 2,8Ghz @1,15V is 3,22. But Temps went up to 89°C, the fan ran at highspeed. With 3Ghz I had bluescreens with cinebench.

 

Well, I'd give it a yes and no on vs. sandy bridge. Clearly if you want to run SuperPI all day, then SB wins hands down ! (tongue firmly in cheek). Point being, what is it that LLano is trying to do. For general purposes, including light/medium gaming, the design target should be to make sure you have enough cpu power not to bottleneck your gpu's potential and vice versa.

Once you have *enough* of each to do what you want, then the other tradeoffs become important-i.e. batt life, heat, noise, ease of use, construction quality, not to mention price, etc., i.e. the whole laptop experience.

Imho from what we're seeing now, this box is going to measure up pretty well , especially at the price, for an awful lot of peeps. Apparently including me I have a gangbusters Envy15 that practically burns my palms when I'm gaming...Yeah it has a stronger processor, yeah it has a stronger graphics card, but the tradeoff of the all around experience (not to mention cost) seems to tip towards this dv6z. We'll see how it goes.
And as for the drivers issue, well, AMD is betting the farm on this *balanced* laptop approach, and from the revenue numbers coming in from LLano, I just have to believe that some of the old ATI boys are going to make sure they get these bios and driver issues handled. There's a certain corporate *attitude* that shifts when they finally get back into the *black* . Let's give em a bit to *come through* with the support goods.

Also, if I was a game developer, I'd have someone on the phone with AMD's bios/drivers guys making sure theirs is not the game that's going to get the bad rap. The BC2 and StarCraft guys must be smiling.

 

Superpi is only favorable to Intel chips because Intel chips are better at single threaded performance. Single threaded performance can be hugely important in video games - few applications are like x264, which scales perfectly to as many cores as you give it. 4 Intel cores > 4 AMD cores. (yes you can make the argument about x87 instructions but that's skirting the issue)

I bought an Envy 17 3D. I paid 1200 after tax. I don't at all regret buying Intel because it gets me superior performance at that price range. You are correct in saying, however, that [once the crossfire bugs are ironed out] getting a llano notebook is a great deal.

I was hoping abbadon or another llano owner could do a benchmark on any one of these games at the settings on that page so we could determine if the dv6z could beat the dv6t at anything, and if so by how much.

 

I already ran BC2 on the same settings as them and got about 70FPS on medium. I will try Metro tomorrow but those are the only ones they tested that I own.

 

I thought so. And Cinebench doesn't even push the GPU; I suspect if you maxed out the 6750M at the same time, the machine would overheat. Realistically, 2.6-2.7 is probably what you can get away with. But that's not so bad -- it's unacceptable for me, but probably perfectly fine for people who only stress the CPU when gaming.

 

The notebookcheck's 6770m benchmarks are apparently on all high, HBAO on, 1366 x 768.

 

abadd,
What's your general feeling about the box? Are you getting that warm fuzzy techie feeling? or is it beginning to irritate you LOL.

seer

 

On their high settings, yeah, but their medium settings are 1366x768, medium, HBAO off and 1x AA/AF. On those settings I got about 70FPS average during the opening part, which I what I assumed they did to test as well. Same settings online get me about 60FPS average.

 

could you please try the high settings as well?

 

I will do that tomorrow with Metro and Borderlands. Right now I am testing the battery under normal internet use.

 

Sweet. So, if you can run a constanr 2.6GHz, and OC the 6750M, it should reach the gaming potential of the DV6t.

 

7? did u oclock using all 4 cores or did you just clock up one or two?

seer

 

I am liking it a lot. Even stock it feels great to me and with overclocking on the GPU and better drivers this could be by far the most powerful gaming laptop for the price. The stock CPU speed is good enough for me but I will probably try to OC eventually just to see how far it can go. Even 2.6GHz with all 4 cores would be great, at I don't think that will be hard to achieve.

 

How are the temps at 2.6?

Does the processor still downclock when the load is low or does OCing make it run at 2.8/3.0 even when idle?

edit: 3.22? That's higher than the i5-2410!

@Abbadon: What program do you use to OC the GPU?

 

Judging by the score what he probably did was to use K10Stat to set P0 as 2.8/3.0GHz. The A8-3500M at 1.5GHz gets 1.88 on Cinebench R11 so at 2.8GHz he should be getting around 3.5. If he set P0 to 2.8GHz it would run at that normally, except when it turbos. Seeing as it does turbo every once in a while, it probably ran at 2.8GHz for most of the test with "turbo" to 2.3GHz every once in a while. That would explain the score of 3.22.

In case anyone is curious, battery life seems to be around 4.25h with the standard, 55WHr battery, which is about what I expected. It is slightly less than the dv6-6135dx and about the same as the dv6t-QE.

@r3d - 7words says MSI Afterburner works after the BIOS update but I haven't tried yet. OCing is a Sunday endeavor, tbh

 

abaddon4180:

Please run me a 3DMark 2001 SE just with APU power! Thanks!

 

I'll try tomorrow but I already tried 3dMark06 with and without Crossfire enabled and got the same result. I will try setting 3dMark 2001 to use the power-saving GPU and disabling Crossfire, that might give me the APU result. But you should just look at the benchmarks of the 5650m in the Envy 14, the 6620g is basically the same as it.

 

I've been lurking in this thread for a week or so and decided to share my undervolting/overclocking results and back up the low voltage claims.

I picked up an HP dv6-6128ca (a6-3410mx) for $650 a week and a 1/2 ago and besides the minor crossfire/ switching niggles (driver updates should clear them up), this laptop indeed is an very good deal.

I too run K10STAT with similar voltages. I ran Prime95 overnight to check stability without any errors. AMD indeed does apply very liberal voltage settings to its parts. I can confirm this with my Phenom II 720 and Athlon II 240 as well.

It feels good to know that you can pick up an A6-3410MX and OC it to A8 levels (and beyond) and not have to worry about overheating all while saving a couple hun.

Here's a screenie of an earlier test I ran



I've since upped the speeds so now I run

turbo: 2800Mhz @ 1.1625v - default: 2300Mhz @ 2.5v(!)
p0: 2400Mhz @ 1.0375v - default: 1600Mhz @ 1.0375v
idle: 800Mhz @ 0.8750v - default: 800Mhz @ 0.9125

faster speed with same or less voltage .. yum yum!

 

I am gonna try this tomorrow for sure now but how are you guys changing the frequencies with K10Stat?

@gerbik - Are those second set of clocks you listed stable? And was 2.5V really the default your turbo state is that a typo that meant to say 1.5V?

 

The ones in the screenshot are - tested stable with Prime95 for over 4 hours no errors.

The settings I have listed underneath I did a quick 20 min Prime95 with no errors - so far so good...

Ill try wPrime and others later...

 

nice to see that you can sustain that oclock with all 4 cores. When you go for a look at max, you might consider only upping one or two cores. As per both intel and amd design, the chips are set up to let you really fly when you cut back on the number of cores. Should give you some more headroom to push, while staying within the tdp limiter.

seer

 

Go DL newest K10Stat K10stat
Drop it in a folder wherever. Start it up.

Select a profile to save your settings...
Then set the p-states (power states) selecting whatever p-state you want to adjust ... You will only need to change b0, p0 and p6. p0 is normal loaded, b0 is turbo and p6 is idle.

Then select the cores to OC/UC and change the multipliers (FID and DID) to achieve your desired speed. Then adjust voltage accordingly. Hit apply and your changes should take place immediately.

When you find your sweet spot, drop a shortcut to K10Stat in your startup folder with the command line options " -lp:1 -ClkCtrl:2 -nw " where lp is which profile to load (1 in my case), ClkCtrl determines how K10Stat will control cores (i use 2) and nw loads without a window or tray

heres a good walkthrough Aspire Gemstone: K10STAT AMD Griffin Processor UnderVolting Guide

I wouldn't recommend doing a big overclock as your laptop cooler is pretty small and obviously designed to only dissipate a small amount of heat - but if you keep an eye on temps with CoreTemp , you can get an idea as to whats safe.

 

Okay. I was too busy looking at the frequency that I didn't even notice you could change the multipliers. I don't plan on doing much, either. Probably gonna just undervolt some and set p0 to 2.6GHz and turbo to 2.8GHz. Should be achievable.

You probably haven't had much time to check but are you getting any battery life difference? Undervolting my Danube dv6 got me 15-30 minutes depending on what I was doing.

 

Haven't had the time... I picked up a 9 cell from an online shop for 50 bucks - so that coupled with lower VCore should help alot methinks.

On another note, have you tried OCing your 6750? I was reading that ppl have (apparently it easily undervolts while holding an OC) - Ive tried ATT tools but all it sees is the Llano 6520G

Does anyone know of any tools that let me select and OC the discreet and not the onchip video?

 

7words says that MSI Afterburner works after you update the BIOS to F.1D. I updated the BIOS today but haven't had time to try to overclock the GPU yet. I am gonna try that tomorrow.

 

After seeing the ease of overclocking llano cpus, I went ahead and bought the one on sale at bestbuy. I managed to overclock this monster to 3.5ghz, the only thing limiting me is temperature. I cannot believe amd set the mobile llano to have unlocked multipliers.

Right now I'm still trying to find the best clockspeed with the right combination of temperature and noise. To be clear, llano is completely unlocked, so the sky is the limit. This laptop is absolutely the coolest in terms of temperature I've own, and I've owned 6 laptops.

At 2.8ghz, this 400dollar laptop matches the performance of my 3ghz core2duo desktop. This is verified by running an emulator on both machines, a real world application that demonstrate processing power and not some synthetic benchmark.

From what I see so far, I feel sorry for all the amd bashers and intel fanboys. We have an unlocked cpu, great graphics, low price, low temperature, low noise, long battery for a fraction of a supposed superior sandy bridge. I predict once word of overclocking laptops gets out, only fools would buy intel.

 

I just checked HP online store and I noticed that the AMD A8-3530mx processor option is now removed. Any ideas?

 

Yeah they took it off, possibly due to high demand.

 

The big Canadian big box electronics stores (FutureShop & BestBuy Canada) had several pre-built HP Llano models appear on their website and in stores this past week. Most seem to be the A8-3530 with a 6750M. Curious... Just wish the included LCD were better than the 1366x768 BrightView.

 

If you're talking about a 15.6" 16:9 screen, anything higher is just doesn't work IMO... unless, of course, you enjoy squinting at tiny icons and small fonts

17" on the other hand...