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

One of the 't' guys posted his 3dmark11 in the other thread. He's got his 6770 overclocked to 825/950 ish or something like that, and he's running an intel quad. anyway, here's a link to his score. You might compare that to 7's and my scores. He KILLS us on the physics test, and we are right back at cha on the graphics tests. On the overall, we both have him by nearly 300 points.
AMD Radeon HD 6770M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2720QM Processor,Hewlett-Packard 3388 score: P1778 3DMarks

I think the z crowd did all right.

seer

 

I did a clean install. I didn't reinstall HP support assistant. Or most of the rest of the HP stuff. I am using the CCC version from HP I believe its 11.6. I then let Windows update the graphics driver which is 8.861.1.2000. I think that's the 11.7 Driver. I tried installing the 11.8 beta set, but it doesn't contain the driver for my USB 2.0 ports on the left side. I honestly am enough of a noob that I don't know how to get just those from the HP file. If you need more info, let me know and I will help if I can. I played with MSI afterburner a bit, but I got a little freaked out and thought I fried my gfx card so I gave up for now. This is my first attempt at OCing so Im going very slow.
@ seer I got K10stat to load when I login, and that works well enough for now. I might try messing with it more later.
@ seer and 7words awesome stuff with the OC! Im very impressed with what these "cheap" systems can do, and Im interested in seeing how far they can be pushed. And thanks for doing all this and posting it so the rest of us can learn from it.

 

Oh best result I've done on a clean install is to install 11.8, go into device manager an manually uninstall the GPUs then run the SWSetup video package, and it will install the video driver and the other drivers required. Reboot and you're good to install the other drivers.

 

Has anyone confirmed that the ram is in fact ddr5 on the 6570?
seer

 

It says GDDR5 in CCC and I am pretty sure that the 6750m is only available with GDDR5

 

I ran that at 825/975, but both of the dv6t qe laptops I am testing are happy at 850/1000. For some reason the CPU clock was reported low and or not pushed at all during the testing.

 

Hey, thanks for the input Norse, btw the 2720qm is a pretty strong processor, well its actually a VERY strong cpu lol, so it was probably loafing thru all of 3dmark11 until it got to the physics test where it woke up and kicked our butts. If I remember right the 2720 matches the highest turbo of the fastest intel dual core and that's saying something for a quad. The physics test is the only sequence of mark11 where the focus isn't almost entirely on the graphics subsystem.

Seer

 

I tweaked the overclock and reran 3DMark11. I dropped Vantage and ran 3DMark06. Look at the 3DMark physics score now, this time the CPU was spun up.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...ng-radeon-6770m-dv6t-61xx-18.html#post7789324

Neither of the dv6t laptops I am working on are for me, but I would be content with either a dv6z or dv6t. People with a the AMD Fusion APUs are getting a great value.

p.s. I am apparently not running the best driver available, maybe if I dropped down from driver 11.7 to 11.5 I may get better numbers.

 

hello,
someone asked abt setting frequency/voltages in individual cores

This seems to work on my old laptop.
TurionPowerControl -
TurionPowerControl - Home

Its command line only and works in linux as well.
There is initial llano support. Perhaps you can check if it works?

Thanks for all the great work u guys r doing .. wish i had this laptop

 

That is a jaw dropping physx score! and i think you are right, I heard something about 11.5b being the best performing driver so far.

I also agree the z is hell for bang for buck, I'm over P2100 on my mark11 now and my graphics score is closing in on 2200 AND, my setup will run Kombustor's dx11 burn in at under 75C on both apu and gpu. Waaaay too much fun for a puter hobbyist

Thanks for coming over norse and posting how you're doing over in the 't' thread. Tho I still think that 6770 should b doing better with the overclockability you guys are seeing AND it obviously can't be a cpu bottleneck so something else is choking that down. With your 8 gigs of 1600 cas 9, doesn't look like its overall bandwidth limited either...Wonder what the hell intel/HP did?

Seer

 

Given the number of stream processors and the clocks (400 @ 400 mhz + 480 @ 600 mhz) w/ crossfire, you are getting pretty damn close to perfect scaling with 3dmark11. I say this as I compare to my Envy 17's 6850m (800 @ 575 mhz stock)

What clocks are you using to get 2200 graphics score by the way?

 

You are correct. If only games performed like 3DMark11.. Right around 560M/5870M performance.

 

Hey Macho, thanks for the heads up. I took a look at some of the coder's new code for the LLano and it looks as tho we may be able to use it to really go mining into the llano apu itself. Unfortunately, i've forgotten 99 percent of everything I ever knew about coding which was dinosaur stuff compared to what he's doing (His name is Paolo , still I fired him off an email and let him know I was very interested in his work. The additional LLano code has not been implemented into his latest full release yet, so it will be a bit before I can try anything with it, but it looks promising as if I read his code correctly, he's zooming in on accessing and manipulating all the clocks, pstates etc. I'll keep an eye on it.

Seer

 

Didn't say I had 2200 *yet* but i am closing in My latest stable clocks are nothing compared to what everyone else is achieving but I'm within spitting distance of 2200 at 798/832. The ram on my particular gpu module sux and I'm not entirely sure why. Also, there's some kind of timing issue on the physix part of the mark11 test. I can throw up huge numbers on the previous graphics tests and even 99 percent of the physix test, but at the very end of that test, something is going wrong and locking me up. An awful lot of people are getting over a thousand on the memclock and 900 or so on the core. If I could even get close to those scores I'd be chasing 570 numbers, not 560m LOL, however, there's more than one way to skin a benchmark ....and the llano has some options left. Of course one of the really nice things that i've found is that undervolting lets me do all this while staying under 75C, even at the highest clocks I've achieved so far which frankly is some kind of astonishing for a laptop, much less a quad laptop.

Seer

 

You mean undervolting I'm assuming?

Are you using coolsense and in performance mode?

798/832? Wow. I couldn't exceed 700 on the GPU, but 880 mem seemed to be stable. All in benchmarks. Problem was with gaming the heat from both CPU and GPU made things lock up, even at stock speeds and CPU voltages a lot lower than stock.

 

Nope Wing, coolsense is a throttling program. it does the opposite of what I want it to do. I'm really relying on pstate transitions. by unlocking i.e un'ganging' the cores, if one of em has something to do that requires some speed, it can sit there and work on it while the others drop on down waiting for something else to do. By doing so they drop both power requirements, voltage, and heat , which the llano sees and makes its calculations as to how much boosting to allow to the thread(s) that are working. As I pointed out before, AMD does not rely on actual heat sensors to decide when to throttle, they rely on the occurrence of certain events, primarily core activity. So the boosting occurs when amd's algorithm says it *should* be thermally ok to do so, but as far as I can see, amd doesn't actually sample the temperatures with physical sensors.

Seer
oh, and good catch on the underclocking thing

 

Ok, just wanted to make sure. CoolSense was nothing but a PITA to me. But good to know that without coolsense you're running at 75C. Just a sanity check for my temps.

 

guys so i fianlly returned my DV6 the other day to hp. so today i went to best buy and i think i found the best deal for a laptop ever lol. its and ASUS k53T. it has a A6-3400 quad core 4gb ram. 500gb HD and a 1GB HD 6720G2 GPU.... for only $449... idk but thats a heck of a deal. if you guys want ill let you know how it over clocks and some benchmarks scores?

 

That seems like a very good deal. How is the build quality and battery life? And what is the heat like?

 

Build quality seems very good. its all plastic but its solid. the screen its the average run of the mill low end junk you see on everything.. so its about on par with the stock screen for the dv6. as for tempts they seem to be good so far 2.4ghz on all four cores is stable but im still working on lowering the voltage and then working on higher clocks which should be possible.
as for the battery life i have no clue saying i bought it like an hour ago lol.

ill keep you guys updated as im sure some of you are interested in getting the best bang for your buck

here is the laptop specs from ASUS if anyone is interested in checking it out
http://www.asus.com/Notebooks/Versatile_Performance/K53TA/#specifications

 

For those of you who got the $50 price adjustment, did anyone not get their credit yet? I got a $40 credit on a different issue the day after it shipped, but the $50 credit hasn't showed up yet. I'm trying to be patient with it but I'm starting to think they just brushed it aside.

 

Seer,
Are you using k10stat to change the clock speed on individual cores? THanks

 

Definitely. If this gets similar battery life I might just pick it up. The 6650m is enough for me and all the CPUs are basically the same with overclocking, though the A6-3400m doesn't support 1600 RAM. Still a good deal.

 

I'm mad that the switchable graphics issue has been fixed for Intel laptops but not for AMD ones

 

Oh just fyi, in the brief time I had my dv6zqe (sent it in for an exchange), same-latency-as-stock (9-9-9-27, iirc) 1600mhz RAM didn't seem to make much of a difference.

Got like 31.5fps on the JC2 bench compared to 30.0 with stock and 10fps compared to 14fps on Unigine Heaven (yes, even less).

Ran the windows RAM check and there were no problems and HWmonitor reported the ocrrect frequencies so I don't think that the sticks are bad.

I'll do some more testing when I get my replacement dv6zqe.

 

Not sure if I understand what you are saying, let me answer this way. each ROW (ie. left to right) is set the same, that is that all four cores at a given speed have the same speed and voltage HOWEVER, having done all that, if you right click on the k10stat icon, it brings up a menu where you can set ho.w the cores are controlled. the first option is 'unganged' which means that any single core (column) is allowed to act independently of the others depending on the needs of the thread it happens to be assigned. Since threads are pretty much randomly assigned due to who has an opening in their workload, this lets each core react as needed. I see situations where one core is really grinding away at turbo, and the one next to it is down at 1k loafing. But i also see instances where two if not 3 cores are in turbo mode and the fourth is far lower. Now, a little theory here. 'Normally" you would get the best performance if all cores were made to react together at the speed required of the core with the highest load, and that is in fact the k10stat default, however, llano (i think) presents a different case because of the unusual way they test for whether the cores can handle a boost or not within the Thermal Envelope they have set. Unlike intel, which actually uses analogue thermal sensors to determine if the chip is getting too hot, AMD uses a digital type scheme if you will that determines 'heat' by what's going on in the chip's cores. If their monitor sees that all four cores are up at p0 or Boost, then it concludes that the apu must be getting hot and it throttles things down, but if it sees 2 cores relatively loafing, it concludes there's plenty of headroom left for the other one or two cores to turbo up.
Since *most* programs are still single or dual threaded (usually no more than 3) this is a good strategy as it lets the cores doing the work ramp way up and get more done. Again, I don't *know* this is exactly what is going on, but it does explain why my settings seem to be getting higher scores per clock than most others. Further since cores are constantly falling back to very low voltage low speed pstates, my overall temps seem to be lower, and I'm drawing less power overall. Hope that explains my view of things and what I'm doing.

Seer

 

I'd be on the phone. Mine hit just a few hours after it shipped.

seer

 

I think you may have a winner there, 7word has already demonstrated that the a6's can run with the big dogs. Keep us informed

 

well ive done some testing and it seems as though 2.4ghz on all four is stable at 1.175v and 2.5ghz seems stable on 1.2v but i still have to do some more testing on that... also i have prime running and the battery lasted like 2hrs but ill get more accurate testing soon. yeah these voltages are not as good as the mx cores but this isnt bad at all for saying this is a pretty cheap laptop with pretty beefy specs lol

also i cant figure out how to overclock the 6650m maybe someone on here could enlighten me on how they got the 6750m overclocking as im sure its the same situation.


thanks

 

if you'll scroll back a few pages or search the thread for Trixx and/or ulps, you'll find quite a discussion on how to go about it. First off, I'd download Saphire Trixx, MSI Afterburner, and the 11.6a driver. Basically something called ULPS which i think means 'ultra low power state' is preventing the overclocking. If you fire up Trixx, at the bottom of the settings page you'll see a check box for "Disable ULPS", check that and "Load on Windows startup" and you're done with trixx. (well actually you can go ahead and overclock with trixx after the reboot if you want, just change the first page from the 6620g or whatever to your discreet card, however, msi Afterburner is a superior product to my thinking because of the vastly better monitoring and fan control options it has. In any event, scroll back and read the pages. YOu'll have fun but be careful... baby steps.

seer

 

My finely tuned machine is starting to fall apart on me . It started with the weird fan noise and now today I decided to monitor temps because it was feeling kind of hot. From just playing WoW with undervolted cpu/stock gpu clocks I was getting 81C on both the cpu and gpu. I mean come on, WoW isn't that demanding and I had everything on low. I tried propping up the back of my computer even more than the 9cell does, about another 2 inches. Still the same temps, so it isn't an external airflow problem. Is it possible that my heat sink wasn't fully attached and it is slowly wiggly out? The fan noise is leading me to believe something is loose. For reference, here are my temps when I first got it-
Prime95(10min) stock cpu - 70C
Prime95(10min) undervolted @ 2.4ghz - 73C
And here are my temps on Prime95 today-
Prime95(10min) stock cpu - 78C
Prime95(10min) undervolted @ 2.4ghz - 81C
My gpu used to top out at around 76 when gaming and now it holds steady at 81-82C.
Considering the above, what would be the best action to take (exchange/rma/return/deal with it)?

Note- Room temp is also the same as when I got it, 73F.

 

Sounds like something broke on your fan.

 

Agree with abaddon, something's come loose in there. You have two options, open it up and look? or get an rma. I wouldn't mess with it without addressing the problem, its not going to fix itself.

seer

 

Ok, I remember someone in the thread has been concentrating on going the opposite way from overclocking, i.e, he was trying to underclock, undervolt for max battery life. I'd be very interested in hearing what results you guys got as I'm now setting up a minimalist profile for just light browsing on battery.

thanx in advance.

Seer

 

2 hours with Prime is pretty good.

 

Woot Mine shipped I hope to get it by the end of the week.

 

IMWithStupid11 - Exchange it. Something isn't right. My fan seemed to be working right, but would get temps up to 95C, so it's going back. Don't spend money on something that doesn't work right!

 

they can come fast Fed X is the catz azz. Guy drove it over 75 miles in 110 F. cause he knew I was waiting on it Hope you get a "good one".
Some advice, don't go nutz with the overclocking i.e., don't assume you can instantly get the clocks everyone else is posting,(I can only dream at getting the 6750 to clock like 7Word's) work your way up slowly and methodically. You CAN injure your mboard. Also, when you fire up k10stat, write down the stock settings or take a screenie or something before you start changing things. I'd go with the undervolting first. Then if you have to raise em back up, you'll know what stock was.
Lastly, at the extremes, the difference in running the ragged edge vs a more stable and rational o'clock is but a few benchmark points. The increase in heat etc. comes at a diminishing return when wringing out those last few clock cycles, you can go ahead and try for the max if you careful, but afterwards, back it down to safer levels for daily use. you'll hardly notice those last few fps if at all. Good luck Oh, one last thing. Take the time to calibrate and set your display INCLUDING making sure that Windows clear type is set. Makes a HUGE difference on the quality of viewing on any monitor, and quite a change in the 1366/768 one if that is what you bought. On the 1080p model i can only assume its gravy but almost nobody takes the time to do it. Std. settings as shipped almost always suck.

Seer

 

Another question, has anyone opened up their Dv6z to see if they used paste or pads on the apu and gpu? If they used pads, that might explain why they were so conservative on the stock settings.

Seer

 

Seriously - use the edit button if you want to add or change something instead of making a new post. And use the multi-quote button if you want to address more than one person in a reply. Wall of text via multiple posts is not cool.

 

Perhaps my warnings were a bit over the top, but I'd rather have too few people trying this out, than too many. But now it turns out nobody is willing to give it a go. Note that I understand what I'm doing, and I'm not just changing some random things. Chances of bricking it are just very very slim. Also note that Insyde Bioses have some excellent mechanisms built in to recover from a brick.

Info on recovery is found here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-compaq/304332-cq45-insyde-bios-recovery-using-usb-thumbdrive.html
And here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/5055420-post57.html

It's going to take a while before I can test it myself, because notebook manufacturers are usually very slow in releasing new notebooks in The Netherlands. But it would be great to put to this mod to the test, so I can create custom bioses for you guys with the speeds you guys want to run your 6750 at. Thanks!

 

Intent was to make it easier for people to address responses to individual posts.

seer

 

Thanks Seer. + rep

How do you calibrate the screen? I have never done that before on a lappy.
Seer When I go to over clock I planned on leaving profile 1 at stock. 2 stock and undervolted, 3 overclocked, and for 4 and 5 I wanted to attempt to turn off or lock 2-3 cores extremely low and overclock the other 1 or 2 as high as possible for when I am running single thread apps. DO you think that is possible? As for gpu I am hoping to shoot for core speeds of a 6770 and a small memory oc since that seems to be where the bottle neck is.

 

well i just ran 2 bench marks with the ASUS. cpu at 2.4ghz and gpu at 700/950

3dmark 11 = P1560

Heaven dx11 at 1366x768 = 19.2fps


o and btw i forgot to mention before the cpu doesn't get hotter then 83-84C at full load even after hours of prime and benchmarking. also more on battery life.. when your at 100% and unplug it and start surfing for a few mins it calculates 5hr of battery life on saver mode but real world would probably be closer to 4hrs as who uses saver mode lol

if any one wants me to run any other tests or have any questions let me know.

 

So dv6z has Insyde bios? I have a very bad experience with it on Toshiba.
Fan doesnt work on Linux among other things and could never get it to work.

Can anyone please test how it works on linux?
The driver support is supposed to be available in 3.0 kernel

Perhaps you can test it on latest ubuntu alpha or gentoo live dvd ?
[Phoronix] Gentoo Releases New LiveDVD (Gentoo 11.2)

 

Im curious as well if paste or pads were used. Part of me wants to pop it open and apply some AS5, but the other half of me is like "if it aint broke dont fix it". Im torn lol

I also notice that my comp calculates considerably better battery life in HP Recommended mode vs Battery saver mode. Weird

 

Is that the Best Buy model in your signature? If so, how do you like it? How is its gaming performance? I know you can't expect a whole lot, but if it can run Source-engine games smoothly, I might have to pick one up.

 

ok, first, Thanks for the Rep
Now on to calibration- quick and dirty
go to this site and download "quick gamma"
QuickGamma

install it and run the help. There is a complete discussion of what it is and how to use the various controls. You'll need to open your ATI vision engine control center and go to "Desktop Management/Desktop Color" You can also take a look at this page if you REALLY want to understand what's going on and how the pro's do this-more information than most people would ever want to know LOL:

Monitor calibration and gamma

now after you've finished with quick gamma, hit your start button, and down at 'search programs' type in cttune which will bring up the clear type install proggie. Do this AFTER you have your monitor set for color, brightness, contrast and gamma. Go thru the clear type tuning sequence and you'll end up with the best looking type for YOUR eyes with YOUR monitor.

Tho there is an awful lot more you can worry about, like matching to printer colors, professional photo digital/film etc., you should have at this point a pretty pleasing looking screeen

Seer.

As to your planned pstates, i would say yes that is possible, however, I don't know about locking specific cores down as I can't predict which core is going to get assigned which thread. If the software i.e. game you are running is only going to use 1 or2 cores...it will only use one or two cores leaving the others to run other cpu background functions at low speeds. That seems like a better set up to me, AND, i might add, the pretty experienced and talented guys at ATI now AMD appear to have reached the same conclusion. (or did i come to the same conclusion as they did LOL Also note that the llano has a built in ability to completely turn off a core or two if not needed though I haven't seen a utility that lets you do that manually. Finally, make sure you have k10stat set to 'boost' and that you have your profile set to 'unganged' to free up the cores to react individually.

Lastly, since the 6750 and 6770 are the same silicon, I don't see much problem reaching the 6770 clocks UNLESS you get one with junk ddr5 and or a speed crippled gpu chip which I think unlikely. If you do run into performance/heat problems, remember not to push too hard cause you have that igp on the apu kicking in to help also.

Seer

 

Yes it is! I absolutely love it so far! At first I was disappointed with the clock speed of the 3500m, but the ease of overclocking took all my pains away lol. As far as gaming goes, it is great for me. I know it's not a demanding game, but it runs WoW on ultra settings without any hiccups. I do plan on picking up SC2 soon, so we will see how it runs that, as I know that is a pretty demanding game. Maybe someone who does more gaming on the PC can chime in, but for me it's great.

 

So there don't appear to be any issues with overclocking non-MX chips then. This is very, very tempting. I'll be heading out to BB right now to take a look at the system.