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

The 6490m is roughly half as powerful as the 6770/6750m and when playing HD video the CPU is more important but any modern CPU can play HD video with no problems, anyway.

 

Probably its using the integrated GPU and not dedicated. Try turning off Crossfire and start up your browser then set it to "high performance".Close your browser and start it up again to make sure it's using the dedicated GPU.

edit: Quake is OpenGL only, so it will be using the integrated GPU only. I just tried it and in a window could get 125fps, but full screen it would run 80-120 fps.

 

Thanks so much. So the Intel i5-2430M will be more than adequate for playing movies/video online back correct?

 

Yes, that build would be more than enough

 

Hey seer, are you sure with your p1 setting with [email protected]? All the other states seem to be good, but that particular speed/voltage combination seems out of place. If that one is really burn-proof, i'd run that 24/7 ^^. (I would have guessed for 1.2v needed for a speed like 2667...)

And do you think you could break the 2200 with the new 11.11c's? I'll probably run them myself tomorrow, but I'd be lucky to hit 2100 with my 6520G

 

I have been gone from this thread for awhile. Can we overclock the gpu with software now without modding the bios? With current drivers (11.11)? If so that would be great everytime I try to my screen goes to a garbled mess and then a restart.

 

OK, I only asked because I searched for fusion tweaker and just found brazos tweaker. Thanks for clarifying.

I just can't understand how you're getting such a better score than me. Even when I had the same HP 8.832 driver as you, crossfire "working", my gpu at 780/880 and my cpu just slightly slower than yours at 2.6/2.9, I only pull around 1700 in 3dmark11. Does the f18 bios really make that much of a difference? Because that's the only significant difference between your setup and mine that I can see. (I'm on f21)

 

Ah, I really wish they'd let us force the use of 6750M GPU . So the discrete card is basically useless for me right now =(. Counter strike source seem to only use integrated graphics also ={{. Two of the game I play the most. So, is there any word that they'll let us do that in future updates?

I will try what you suggested when I get the chance. Thanks.

 

Hmm, thanks I will look into that if something like that happens again. How do I do that, if my screen doesn't turn on, and I can't access bios settings?

It blinked once, a steady blink and then pause for the same duration, and repeat for how ever long the laptop was on. I'm pretty sure that meant one blink.

 

Couldn't u somehow set the rendering mode to direct3d, instead of opengl? That way it would use your 6750m.
Aside from that, there was a dude that made up some newer catalysts that ought to support opengl (or was it opencl, or both? ) on the dedicated switchabel part. But don't ask me where that was...

 

Just turn off crossfire and set the game to "high performance" in "Configure Switchable Graphics" That is forcing the 6750m. If you get only a black picture (which i have many times) it is because MSI afterburner is messing up the drivers. Reboot and try again without afterburner. If you need to see the % usage, launch afterburner but do not change any values.

I run CSS and TF2 off of the discrete card so it must work.....

 

Any SB, as well as Llano, CPU will be more than adequate for HD playback. Even netbook processors can handle it pretty much fine.

 

This thread has been amazing. The dv6qe handles just about anything that I threw at it. It's perfectly fast for the average user and handles games pretty well also. No complains here. If it can last for 4-5 years I'll be a very happy person.

I ordered a cto dv6z qe with the 1080 screen and I must say, its amazing to go from the 1366x768 to 1080.

I did the kstat to undervolt and overclock the processor. This is my stats.

State Clock GHz Voltage up% down %
B0 2.6 1.25 80 30
P0 2.2 1.1 80 30
P1 1.8 0.975 80 30
P2 1.6 0.9125 80 30
P3 1.4 0.8625 80 30
P4 1.2 0.8125 80 30
P5 1 0.775 80 30
P6 0.8 0.725 80 30

Here is the strange thing I've noticed.
My clock rates bounces around like crazy. At one point, it's 800MHz but the moment I open a program, it jumps to the B0 or P0 state and stays for 15 sec or so before settling down to P1 or P6. At the B0/P0 state, Kstat reports that only 15% of each core is utalized. It doesn't seem to stay in the P2-P5 state too often but likes to be either in the highest or lowest states.

I would think it would go through each of the state between the P6 and P0/B0 and stop at a clock that keeps usage between 30-80% instead of jumping to the higher states right away.


Did I do something wrong or is it just how it is?

If I really want really low power consumption state for just word processing/internet browsing, do I have to make another profile and lower all the clocks to like 1.4GHz?

Thanks for all your help.

 

So after sending 3 RMAing 3 laptops from newegg I finally got a fourth one that has been working. I've been testing it out with a few games before I start OCing. I noticed when running GPU-z that the default clock doesn't change even when running video games. Is this how it is supposed to read?

http://gpuz.techpowerup.com/11/12/11/hfv.png

I see the default clock says 100 and 81 when the gpu clock says 600 and 800. I am running games at highest settings while looking at this and wasn't sure if my dGPU was being utilized. The game was skyrim.

 

Quake is OpenGL only, no Direct3D that I know of. CS:Source is DirectX only. Just make sure you set the game to "High Performance" in the settings and it should use the 6750m.

 

Do you have K10stat up as a process? Because if you do, It seem to conflict with the bios/window cpu control for some reason. (Idle, you will see spike of p6 then turn back to p0 immediately.)

If you close all k10 process after setting p-states, when you plugin the power and use high performance (window profile) it will keep it @ p0 or b0.

If you use balanced/power saver and unplug the power, It will auto lock it down to p-6.

I have no clue why sometime k10 clock control works and some times it doesnt

 

I have it set up as a start up item using the following instruction

K10Stat Guide

The funny thing is even when I lock the clock speed to 1200MHz, it will still fluctuate.

My next question is why does HP lock down the AMD-V (virtualization) feature in the bios...
Why can't the manufacturer leave the BIOs options open for us.

I was trying to run VirtualBox and dedicate 2 cores to it but I'm getting an error.

Musho, I wonder if you can mod the BIOs to unlock it.

 

the virtualization options are available to be activated, look into the bios options, mine has it. (DV6-6110sg)

 

^ +1
Virtualization works fine.... I have to program for classes in C and run VMWare and it works perfectly.

 

Hey Guys,

Joined just for this laptop as i found the deal on [H] forums!
So my question to you guys:
What is the best known settings for k10stat? i have 2.4 just curious as its hard going through all these pages its all i've been doing for hte past 2 days.
For the guys claiming to get 40fps minimum on battlefield 3; what settings did you use? mines drops alot as in spikes but a decrease in fps.
Also does anyone else have problems with sounds in battlefield 3, it drops the sound effects preety often as if it cannot handle that many sounds at once?

I also flashed the bios with the modded ulkmenu bios which rocks, wish i had more fan control though.

I applied Arctic MX-4 and i get a max of 83 celcius at 2.4 so im preety happy As soon as i completly understand k10stat and all the bo and p0 stats i will try to come up with my own profile i like.

 

I have the 2.6 and run at 2.8 on bf3 with 770/970 gpu and I get a solid 30 FPS minimum. I say this because I get 60 looking at the ground and 40+ during normal game play. Using all medium setting no AA at 1080p.

To get my minimum I like to cut fraps on and hop in a jet start flying towards something explosive and blow the crap out it and the bail, blowing the jet into pieces at the same time. Just a quick assesment.

I dont know my temps when playing bf3 but when running kombuster I get up to 72' C with near max load. artic cat 5'ed.

I hope this gives you some idea of what your performance should be reasonably near.

 

How are all you people getting like 950+ on your GPU vRAM? I can barely break 900!

 

Hmmm I dont know. The funny thing... YOU are the one who I followed through this thread for information >< I dont know if there is a difference in the parts inside models but i have a 3510mx version, silver case, when I disassembled to change the paste, mine already had silver paste, no pads except on what i assumed to be the north and/r south bridges (which have to use the pads because there is too much room from the heatsink to the chips to paste. Other than that my heatpipes were copper which impressed me. Same with everyone else?

I used the bois mod here....
Free File Sharing Made Simple - MediaFire
CAUTION TO ANYONE... slowly over clock using MSI afterburn and kombuster to see what is stable before jumping to these.

 

All GPU are not made equal.( quote from somewhere i forgot)

If you drop your core, u probably can raise your memz clock.
I can do either 740/900 or 730/950 ~~ iirc.

 

edit : yea and I was really sad, maybe i should do a few more RMA till a better GPU after this 1 back to me.

 

I've tried many combinations. It was more of a jelly statement than anything.

 

Eventually you will have to be happy with what you have... It could just keep getting worse!

:-( dont be jelly. I bow to you. "we're not worthy"

 

Serious? I get like 20fps on low at 1080p with 750/850. Are you using crossfire?

 

Yes, explain as i would like to know your secret!

 

So what is the best upgrade for 1080p; specifically a dv6-6135dx 15.6? I recall someone mentioning a auo but I don't know the model I saw a LG for a preety good price and its matte, I might jump on that. Opinions?

 

I use Crossfire with BF3 and it runs pretty smooth. I get 30-50 fps depending on the map. Sometimes dips to 20 something, but definitely pretty playable. I turn up textures to high, and other features to medium. I turn off AA, HBAO, and shadows to low. Those seem to have the largest impact. Haven't played it on my laptop much lately or with the 11.11c drivers or BF3 patch, but will give it a go later. Interested to see how it well it works out!

 

i did manage to break into the 2200's after Rmac and a couple of others did it, but the system was unstable in graphics intensive games. 2180 is running solid.

AMD/HP specifically locked down the bios when they discovered how much extra performance we were getting. The "z" was not intended to trash the "t" models heheh. Also, Amd was planning to release an unlocked apu and wanted to ensure they got more cash.

it has to do with how much time you're actually spending at the highest clocks. The amd chip has throttling built in, but it is NOT based on outright temp sensors like the intel chips do. Instead it is built on checking performance criteria. While Amd has not released ( that I know of anyway) exactly what their formula is, from my testing, it *appears* that their algorithm checks the number of cores being used, and the clock speeds of each of those cores. The difference between fusion tweaker and k10stat is that fusion tweaker permits you to essentially reprogram the clock progression so that when the apu senses a demand for more resources, you can set it to jump directly from the low pstate to the highest and hang around a whole lot longer. Further, you can set it to fall slowly from that high state back down to the low states such that more power is available instantly should additional resource demands occur during the fall.

If you notice its not just my top state that is high, the ones immediately below it are also high.

One last thing, I run effective cooling on this box and monitor temps carefully, and I have a pretty good apu. It is actually stable up to a bit past 3100, but i run out of thermal headroom. One of these days i'll get around to disassembling and repasting/modding to optimize the internals, but frankly, its already running so well, I haven't felt the need yet (cept on my weak dedicated gpu- if I had rmac's gpu's ability to mem overclock over 900 I'd be waxxing his scores heheheh).

Oh, one other thing, my xfire seems to work particularly well, where many get graphs showing steady use of the dedicated gpu, while only getting intermittent spikes on the igpu, I can often get smooth graphs indicating say 90 plus percent dedicated gpu utilization and upwards of 70 percent out of the igpu which gets me performance approaching nvid 560 performance in some apps.

last note, it is difficult to get fusion tweaker and k10stat to work together, but when you hit the 'groove' you do get a noticeable kick in performance (but also in temps so be very careful).


seer

 

Quick question on updating the graphics drivers for the 6750M:

The normal process for updating graphics drivers is to uninstall, reboot, driver sweep, reboot, and install new drivers. Should this be done or will this screw up the drivers that coordinate the two gpus? Should I just install the 11.11c drivers over the top of what is existing from the factory?

Also, can you overclock the 6750M with the 11.11c drivers installed or do you need to use an older version or modded BIOS?

Thanks for the clarifications

 

You can uninstall GPU drivers only and you should be fine. I do this by going into device manager, right clicking the GPU and select uninstall. I do this for both GPU's. Otherwise don't uninstall the full package because you will lose switchable graphics and other drivers inherent in the HP drivers (like USB 3.0, HDMI, etc). Lately I've just installed over the top of the old drivers without issue.

And I believe Seeratlas got a unique chip or machine configuration because his runs like a champ compared with everyone else's. An anomaly of sorts.

 

Ok guys, looking for some help here. My dv6z is currently non functioning. It was working fine, but I came home and the power light was blinking like it was asleep. When I tried to wake it I got nothing. I unplugged it and popped out the battery and still got nothing when I plugged it back in. Tried a different power adapter and nothing. Tried swapping in my old hard drive that still had the OS and software on it and got nothing. I popped out the CMOS battery and let it sit for a while and got it to come up. It gave me a message like the CMOS checksum was wrong but started to boot. The windows recovery screen came up and I selected to start windows normally, it worked for a few more seconds then went back to blank screen and the power light flashing but never booted into windows. It was then completely dead again for a while but after removing the CMOS again and letting it sit I got it back with the same results as earlier. I am going to try and flash the bios to a non modded one if I can get it working again. Any other suggestions would be great. Thanks in advance.

 

Just to point out....having continually watched this thread and saved OC numbers as I found them, it seems the A4 (naturally) has a bit more headroom but not nearly as much as one might hope. Getting into the 3.0GHz range temp will still skyrocket with any practical laptop cooler.

A6 and A8 are (un?)surprisingly very equivalent. They should be cut from the same die, so performance with A6 depends why it was binned sideways. For the A8s, the 3500 is practically identical to the 3530 (binning for envelope vs binning for speed). If anything, 3510 chips are probably the least promising binned parts. Although practically any A8 should be stable between 2.1 and 2.4 GHz P0, 2.4-2.6GHz B0.

Crossfire scaling inconsistency has led me to speculate on the QC for the link between iGPU and dGPU. I think some people just have a logic grid with better timing, hence less renegotiation and other performance losses. So the AMD switchable graphics/hybrid crossfire control hardware needs more work. If AMD advances with Trinity plans, I expect the APU hybrid access controller to have been overhauled in line with iGPU improvements.

 

Try to remove and put back the ram, I had that problem twice and solved it this way. (try swapping the slots too)

 

As far as I know the trinity arquitecture will not improve this, AMD will push another arquitecture for the fusion processors, including the piledriver processor arquitecture and its new family of graphics.

 

I think that, more likely, AMD bins based on a clock speed/voltage ratio and the A8's with the lowest ratio are the 3500's while the highest are the 3530's. If it can't run at the highest speeds (1.9-2.6GHz) at a voltage that will allow it to stay within thermal limits in a notebook cooling system then they just lower the clock speed and voltage and make it a 3500. Then they run the same test with the rest and the ones with the highest clock speed/voltage ratio become 3530's while the rest are 3510's.

 

It came back up for a few seconds. Gave me the CMOS checksum error again. I pressed enter to boot and it crashed down again with the caps lock light flashing like I needed to flash the bios. After I turned it off to flash the bios, I got nothing again. Any other suggestions?

 

i have 2 questions, what does rmac mean?
and how do you get a performance increase with K10Stat + fusion tweaker?
it seams for me that they both do the exact same thing.

edit:
ow xD , ehm yeah nice to meet you too
thought it was a real secret configuration
got never higher then 2056 points

 

1) im rmac nice to meet you

 

hi guys, I am planning to get the DVZ6 Quad laptop with A8-3530MX CPU and the AMD 6750 GPU. If I am not mistaken this is now labelled by HP as the "dv6z-6b00 CTO Quad". Some questions:

1. Does this model suffer from the previous swictable graphics problem or it is all fixed? Will I be able to use OpenGL stuff like Photoshop, etc?

2. Does the CPU perform noticably worse than the Intel CPU in the DV6T models? I will run some large statistical models. Cheers

 

1. OpenGL is still stuck with integrated GPU

2. As stock AMD GPU will be about on par with i3 for single or dual threaded apps. Overclock and closer to i5. But hard to judge with multi threaded apps since the A6/A8 are true quad cores and no hyperthreading crap.

 

I run at .77v for 1200mhz so I think your fine. When I found a stable voltage I bumped mine up one increment just to be on the safe side too.

 

Personally, I would say go with Intel for your usage. At most its equal to about an i5 2410M on the CPU side (Intel CPU architecture is superior) after overclocking to at least 2.4ghz and OpenGL will still be locked to the APU's integrated graphics. This PC isn't made for models or photoshop. Its made for basic office work, browsing, media and gaming entertainment in my book. I love it for my usage, but it doesn't touch my i7 on number crunching.

 

Vect, i wouldn't be too quick rule out some improvement here. I've seen a trinity run and it is fast. There was some discussion of link optimization, not to mention the *apparent* inclusion of not only some dedicated memory for the igpu, but also a kind of side port arrangement. One of the bene's is that the apu clock can really be boosted in trinity, which really juices the igpu, which in turn lets you get a better interleave with the dedicated in xfire. THEN, there are the as yet undisclosed 7 series improvements which I understand include some new tweaks that add considerably to fusion cooperation between the gpu's. Frankly I'm pretty stoked over what trinity is shaping up to be.
Fortunately, I expect to see additional tech leakage into the wild come january.

seer

 

I just so much want that this technology matures even more, I'm looking fordward to my next fusion laptop in perhaps 3 years, I can't imagine what kind of monsters can get out of this tech, it's just really a nice bullseye for AMD. (Now.... if only they allow for easy aftermarket cooling...)

 

It's nowhere near as you describe, not at least the models with the discrete graphics. Yeah, I7 outperforms but seriously, this laptop doesn't lag behind by a far wide margin.

 

If they can beat Intel to the punch before Ivy Bridge that would be nice. I am anxiously anticipating some good information on Trinity and if all pans out as expected, will probably go with a Trinity notebook sometime next year and should hold me over for a couple years. Will probably spend the proper coin to make sure I get the right CPU and GPU too.