dv6z-QE User Review (A8-3530mx/6755G2) with Undervolting and Overclocking Results

I am thinking about buying a dv6z (A8-3530mx/6755G2) tomorrow, I noticed driver update 11.7 is out (and beta 11.8 supposed to have 10% increase in Crysis 2 dx 11). I also noticed a bios update. Has anyone installed these drivers yet? If so, have you noticed any increased gaming performance? Could someone please tell me how Crysis 2 runs with the updates? FPS at medium, high, and ultra?

 

Where did you find the 11.7 update? Also, according to some people that reviewed the dv6-6135 at Best Buy, Crysis 2 runs very well out of the box. I can't vouche for them because I don't have Crysis 2, but I believe it should run fine.

 

Catalyst 11.7 Downloads

Catalyst 11.8 (beta)
AMD Catalyst? Control Center / AMD Vision? Engine Control Center 11.8 Driver Preview for Windows 7 64-Bit Edition

Ive read a lot about the 6750m getting weighed down by the 6620g crossfire, is this only a problem with dx9? what about dx10 and 11? Also benches were low for the 6750m, were the benches of the 6620 or the 6750, or both?

Plasmamuffins, could you let me know if the catalyst update lets you turn on 6750m only? I think someone mentioned earlier you have to do this for each application you want in the catalyst center or something?

P.S. any fps numbers for Crysis 2 would be well appreciated, thank you.

EDIT: BIOS update for the dv6-6124ca is available on the hp driver section, does anyone with the AMD A8-3530MX know if the bios update fixes the open gl bench?

 

From where are you planning to buy a dv6z with that processor? I just ordered mine and on HP online store, the A8-3530mx has been omitted on the Processor option.

 

futureshop.ca for 799, guess they sent all the goodies to Canada for once . you could try futureshop.com, they might have one (don't know if us has futureshop?)

If you ordered off hp.com at least you can equip a 1080p screen, and 7200rpm hardrive

 

That's what I did. 1080p/3510mx/ 1gb dual graphics/640gb 7200rpm Got my customized laptop at $760 before tax.

 

I kinda wish I did that instead of buying it from Best Buy...

Also, the 11.8 beta works on the DV6-6135dx. I installed it this morning. DX10 and DX11 games work flawlessly. DX9 is decent...and DX8 fails horribly. Don't even bother.

Edit:
I lied, I REALLY wish I did that instead of buying it from Best Buy. I picked all of the better stuff, and the price came out cheaper with the 30% off coupon. Unfortunately my father bought my laptop, and he doesn't want to return it.

 

Tell your dad that he'll save money. Who doesn't want to save money?

 

He's probably the most stubborn person on this planet. He'll not return it just to teach me a lesson that I can't return something to get something better and cheaper or something like that...I don't know. -_-

Also, I noticed that on the HP website, the dv6z has 1gb of ggdr5 ram for the gpu? The one from best buy has 1gb of ggdr3.

 

Tell your dad that Best Buy took advantage of him and sold him a lesser product for a higher price. You have every right to and should return it. There's no life lesson to be learned in getting snookered when you don't have to and can do something about it.

Seer

 

If only his mind worked like that. I'll try talking to him about it, but I don't expect much. xD

 

He probably has the 6490m. Just a guess.

 

Nope. 6750m. It's apparently a weaker version though? I don't know what they were thinking.

When I updated to the 11.8 beta drivers, it went from 6750m to 6600 and 6700 series. Trust me though, it's the 6750m.

 

Guys, some results in overclocking the dGPU?

 

Check this post.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-...6-now-shipping-amd-llano-129.html#post7759785

Here's my results of 3DMark Vantage
Stock GPU 600 / Memory 800


OC GPU 750 / Memory 900

 

Kickass. Is that the highest you could get it to?

 

Good, but i guess that 6750M will never reach the memory speed of a 6770M, that can reach 1600MHz (notebookcheck infos).
Well, and do you try to overclock HD 6620G?
I asking that because I didn't find overclock results about this "gpu"...

 

notebookcheck is wrong afaik it's only 1000 mhz

 

That's a typo. I can guarantee you that the 6770m cannot reach 1600mhz (or at least without frying itself).

Stock 6770m is clocked at 725 core and 800 memory.

 

Thanks.
But is 1000Mhz or 800Mhz?

 

I finally finished testing every P-state and set K10STAT to load on start up. The OC is now seamless on boot up and stays after coming back from sleep mode.
This is what I got-
stable MHZ voltage
B0 2800 1.2125
P0 2400 1.0875
P1 2200 1.0375
P2 2000 0.9750
P3 1800 0.9250
P4 1600 0.8625
P5 1400 0.8250
P6 1000 0.7375

This is the best cross between performance/temps for my needs. Max temp of 72C in prime95.

Now I would like to try overclocking the 6750M but I just can't get the controls to work. No matter what I've tried the sliders are maxed at 600mhz core and 800mhz memory. I installed the latest driver from the HP website and then installed 11.6b on top of it. I've tried setting both gpu-z and Afterburner to High Performance to no avail (crossfire disabled). I saw someone mention enabling ATI/AMD overclocking in the ini. I looked through it and couldn't find a setting that resembled that. Anyone care to offer some help ?

 

To overclock with MSI Afterburner open the .cfg file and edit as follows:
Find the Enable Unofficial Overclocking EULA in the afterburner config file and put this after it: I confirm that I am aware of unofficial overclocking limitations and fully understand that MSI will not provide me any support on it

Also change Enable Unofficial Overclocking to "1"

My temps are decent with Prime95 but with Bad Company 2 they both reach 88-90C. I think the combination of GPU and CPU on same heatsink causes this. Too bad they didn't design them with separate cooling systems. Then you could probably really push it to the limits. But hopefully nothing that some good thermal paste can't cure.

 

Thank you so much, controls are now unlocked
+1 rep

 

You sir are awesome. What are the safe levels that you overclocked to?

Also, make sure you don't accidentally overclock the 6620, I got the bsod by accident. xDDD

Edit:
Uhm...I'm pretty sure overclocking doesn't work with the 11.8 beta. BSOD on both gpu's. Oh welllll.

 

Is anyone else getting weird lags on applications when they overclock their gpu's?

Even if I overclock it just 100mhz, things like Crysis Sandbox 2 lag upon opening.

 

Yeah, I'm not finding overclocking the GPU is that beneficial.

 

hello been lurking these HP forums to find the right computer for the right price. So I went with the dv6z and bought it from Best Buy because I didn't want to wait. So far I don't know it is working right or not.

I tested Team Fortress 2 and am getting 20-60fps. I never expected it to go below 40 FPS. My driver version is 8.861. This was with crossfire so then I turned it off and TF2 was put on high performance. The results were the same. It definitely showed the dGPU working more on the monitor but the FPS was still similar. If I get poor performance from other games, I will probably return the dv6z .

 

You may not be aware but returning items to Best Buy is a terrible idea. Starting in 2011, Best Buy requires customer driver licenses to be scanned into their system for refunds. People are forced to decide whether they want to risk giving up your ID to Best Buy or just keeping the product for peace of mind. I'm guessing his dad read this return policy on the receipt and decided it's not worth the risk.

Rubex, you're pretty much stuck with the system unless you don't mind Best Buy having your ID on record.

 

Who cares if they have your ID? It's not like your drivers license has your social security number or credit card number on it.

At worst they know your name and where you live... But you also have to enter that stuff if you want to order from HP, don't you?

 

A driver license can expose you to all sorts of troubles. You are probably very young or have no real asset if you believe giving your driver license records away isn't a concern.

Also, do you think a retailer that treats its customers like thieves for returning items is going to safeguard your records with utmost care? Bare in mind there has been plenty of incidents where retailers lost customers data and the only recourse for the customer is an apology. The playstation network only expose trivial personal information, imagine what criminals with plenty of time can do with a driver license records. It would not be so carefree when you get a notice in the mail letting you know you fail to show up for court because someone used your license when they broke a law.

Anyway not to stray off topic, anyone experiencing erratic framerates should consider setting the windows minimum processor state to 5percent and maximum processor state to 49percent. Then just manually select your overclock speed in k10stat. For whatever reason, I found that setting any other values tend to make k10stat throttle to the lowest pstate but 5-49 locks the overclock.

 

Best Buy can't steal your assets based off a copy of a drivers license. No one can. And Best Buy isn't retarded - mismanaging personal information could easily land them in a messy lawsuit.

Do you realize how many of the details on your drivers license - name, address, phone, age, picture - are freely available on the internet or through government sanctioned public databases?

 

You are very naive. If you think a messy lawsuit is going to be your shield against a data leak, then you've never been involve with litigation. Unless you're willing to spend several years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a lawyer willing to take your case, chances are you'll probably go with a class action suit in which case you're looking at a 100 dollars compensation at the end. I work with doctors managing their computer systems, and let me tell you the majority of them know nothing about security. There are many opportunities for a disgruntle employee to steal very sensitive patients information. I'm sure best buy spends a lot of time and resource on a security consulting firm when they came up with a shortsighted return policy to increase falling revenues.

Let's get back on topic.

 

You still haven't given any example of something on your drivers license that is (a) not available publicly and freely and (b) can be used against you.

You've written 2 paragraph long posts but you've only vaguely mentioned once what somebody could do with that information, something about your assets. So, how, pray tell, would somebody use a picture of your drivers license to take your assets in a way that is not possible without the picture?

Because if there isn't, then returning something to Best Buy isn't a big deal.

 

Don't want to be part of the fun police, but lets get back on topic guys. Whether or not someone wants a store to scan your driver's license is a personal choice, let the user decide for themselves.

 

Good catch on the 5-49 tweak There

seer

 

Scratch that... I OCed my A8 3500m from 1.5ghz to 1.9ghz, and bumped up the voltage a little bit just to be safe. I havnt run intelburn, but I did the windows performance assesment and CPU performance rating jumped from 6.6 to 6.8 after OCing. Both graphics ratings jumped from 6.3 to 6.4. So far everything seems stable, no BSOD. Will I need to run intelburn or will I be ok? P0 is 1900 at 1.1125, and I left B0 at 2400 at 1.3125. Does that sound good to anyone who has OCed their llano? Should I turn the voltage down or up? Thanks for the help, and sorry if I come off as a noob. (well I am hahaha, never OCed before)

 

I got it from here: K10stat

 

If you want to check the stability, then yes it is. But I guess that's only if you're planning to undervolt as well.

 

Thanks R3d. Ill probably just leave it there. Also when I restarted, I opened k10stat and all the values I had set reverted back to the stock settings. Is there a way to save the settings so that it always runs on the profile I choose?

 

There is. A quick google of "k10stat tutorial" turned up this: The Unfused Journal: K10Stat: A Guide to Increase Power Efficiency

There's probably more guides if you google.

Also, new BIOS out for DV6zqe as well! Doesn't seem to be any major changes though.
HP Notebook System BIOS Update (AMD Processors) HP Pavilion dv6z-6100 CTO Entertainment Notebook PC - HP Customer Care (United States - English)

 

I gave the gpu overclocking another go. I uninstalled 11.8 preview driver and used driver sweeper. I then installed the latest stock driver from HP. I overclocked it to 750/900 and ran 3dmark11. Here are my scores with and without crossfire enabled -
Crossfire on - P2025
Crossfire off - P1473

I was surprised that crossfire added that much. The max temps during the benchmark were 76C on the cpu and 76C on the 6750M. I'm going to try a few games and as long as there isn't any glaring issues, I think I'm pretty happy with the results .

 

Nice. Now we need those numbers to transfer into real world games and we'll be set.

 

That's the problem. Vantage and 3DMark11 score higher than the GTX 460m, yet they are a far cry from the same performance in games.

And I have had no noticeable performance increase when using Crossfire in games.

 

I'm installing Starcraft at the moment, I'll give that a go once it's updated. I'm not expecting it to do anything, but the fact that the numbers are there and eventually might translate into gaming performance through better drivers is a comforting thought.

 

What program are you using to check the temps?

 

^^ Yepp. And may I also add that the 460m outperforms its 3dmark score.

AMD mobile cards seem to have been "tweaked" for 3dmark benchmarks. Nvidia cards may get lower scores, but may still be better in games.

Starcraft is not going to be the game in which we see the fruits of 3dmark11 scores, because of it's CPU dependence.

Crysis 2 DX11 would seem like an ideal candidate given it is GPU limited heavily.

 

There's a lot of programs but my favorites are HWmonitor or HWinfo.

 

I don't think that is true. Crossfire is just working very well in benchmarks because said benchmarks are designed to take advantage of it and SLI. Not all games are optimized for Crossfire so the improvement doesn't carry over.

 

I'm not just saying that because of this particular card. The 6770m gets 1k more points in 3dmark vantage and like 200 more in 3dmark11 yet is pretty much equal to the 555m for instance.

 

Thanks for all the help R3d!