W530 Graphical Performance

Relative to the Fermi series quadro cards, can someone here give me an idea of how much better or worse the K2000m is? I'm looking for an answer in terms of both CAD performance and gaming graphics (understanding that it is, of course, a workstation and not a gaming GPU).

 

Comparison of Nvidia graphics processing units - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think the prefix "K" means it's Kepler? Wikipedia specs say it's a GK107 28nm product, with 384 CUDA cores, hence *theoretically* almost double the performance of the 2000M.

 

3dmark06 12064
3dmark11 2019

superpi
1M 10.554s
2M 23.826s

From

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According to that, the k2000m (which might actually be called the 2100M or 2200m according to this lenovo thread) is barely scoring higher in 3DMark 06. I don't know how that's possible, considering the k2000m should be close to twice as powerful (or at least 50%, which I'd be happy with).

 

Actually each core in Kepler performs around half of a core in Fermi. So they will be equal in that respect. Supposedly it's actually worse for workstation purposes but a bit better for gaming.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk

 

I found this on Lenovo's forums:

Just got my W530 - Lenovo Community

 

I can confirm those numbers. Mine got very similar scores. Among the GeForce lineup, it's between the 640M & 650M, although I'm hoping that it will improve with updated drivers.

To whoever said that it was going to have the same performance as the 560M, you nailed it.

In comparison to the 2000M, the K2000M is somewhere around 30-40% more powerful in newer titles, based on existing benchmarks.

 

My K2000m is getting pretty mediocre FPS in Battlefield 3 (low/medium settings, 1600x900 resolution, ~35 FPS). I really hope this because of new drivers (they k2000's aren't even listed on the Nvida drivers page).
Edit: And yes, I do understand this isn't meant for gaming, I'm just trying to get my head around the specs Nvidia has posted.

 

Lenovo have listed a display driver package from 7 June including NVIDIA driver 8.17.12.9680: NVIDIA Optimus Display Driver for Windows 7 (64-bit) - ThinkPad. Are these the drivers you're both using?

 

Does it overclock better than the 2000M? Put on the 301.24 beta drivers and see how it fares then?

 

I'll try both your suggestions; which card do I pick to test 301.24 beta drivers (I'm guessing anything Kepler mobile)?
Edit: The drivers were actually at 8.17.12.9620 instead of 8.17.12.9680 (thanks for the link, I wouldn't have found that on my own), so I'm updating that now. I'll see how performance is and get back to you (my current drivers are from April, supposedly).

 

Alright, just upgraded to the .80 drivers from the .20 and here are my results. Ignore the crappy RAM and HD, those are both going to be upgraded. The most important thing is the massive increase in FPS I got. I went from ~33 FPS on the DirectX9 benchmark (on .20) to ~44.0 FPS on the new drivers (a 33% increase ). I'm not sure how this is going to translate in actual gaming performance but I'm going to load up Battlefield 3 and try playing on medium (last time I played with low/medium settings and the performance was just barely getting above 30FPS). This time, I hope things will be different.

 

Great news! .80 still seems to be a bit behind the most recent GeForce drivers so hopefully some more driver updates will come soon and things will improve further. Interested to see your BF3 results too.

EDIT: I'm also curious about your core clock reading. The author of this thread on the Lenovo forums has a K1000M and GPU-Z is showing a core clock of 851 Mhz. Your 3DMark06 readout shows only 405 MHz for the K2000M, and this page on Notebookcheck shows the core as 745 MHz. I can't see how this is right unless the GPU-Z reading for the K1000M is wrong.

Any chance you could do a GPU-Z reading on your K2000M? Or try HWInfo or a similar program to see what they say? (Link to GPU-Z: http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/) Would be much appreciated.

 

I'm thinking because it's a brand new card, they either didn't detect the right
information or just labeled it as a generic VGA device and ignored the specs.
Here's a screenshot of GPU-Z; I don't think the system would have underclocked the GPU, as I was plugged in and on high performance mode.
I'll submit those Battlefield 3 tests in a moment.

 

So, I re-ran Battlefield 3 and things were a bit better. Now I can play at all medium settings at 1680x1050 and get a steady FPS (that included some very large areas and a lot of smoke, so that could probably be a bit higher). At 1920x1080 (full resolution) I actually averaged 29.9 FPS (which shows that the areas in the last test were much larger and texture heavy). I also did a test where I dropped the resolution to 1440x900 (still looked fine) and the settings to low/medium (textures still at medium, mostly particles and shadows that were dropped). There I averaged a good 45 FPS. So, there were definitely improvements and definitely made me happier. The overall performance increase is somewhere between 8 and 15 FPS, which is good from early drivers. I'll now try loading the standard GeForce drivers to see if there is any benefit.

 

That's great, thanks. I'll try to do some tests as well when I get mine in the next couple of days.

 

Regarding the core clock, it's difficult to measure with Kepler because it has a feature similar to Intel SpeedStep or Turbo Boost where it dynamically varies the frequency according to load (at least according to the monitoring feature of GPU-Z).

 

Those results are for the wrong benchmark! Or, at least, I was looking for a 3DMark 11 score. I'm using the .80 drivers and they're giving me the same 20XX that I got before (between 2025 & 2057) for 3DMark 11. For PCMark 7 (the benchmark in the link), my score was 4793, helped tremendously by the fact that I've got an SSD.

 

For me, PCMark 7 is a good enough test for now. I'm still trying to find which drivers work best (getting the GeForce drivers installed now). What was your gaming performance in DirectX9? Was it ~45 fps?

 

Does the PowerMizer manager no longer allow one to force the NVIDIA card to be full frequency at all times?

On the Q2KM, at around 1700x1050 (windowed), I run Ultra textures, Medium shadows, and low everything else, no AA but 16xAF, SSAO off, I get around 30-45FPS. No apparent FPS difference for me between High and Ultra textures for me, and it's the textures that have the greatest effect, so use that VRAM.

SSAO eats FPS without offering much tangible visuals, so you should turn that off.

As an aside, Grand Bazaar has surprisingly low FPS for some reason, despite being such a cramped map. Keep considering that overclock though .

 

I tried to install the 301.24 beta, but it doesn't support the Kepler Quadro cards, even with a modded .inf from LaptopVideo2Go.

So far, the only game I've ran is Starcraft 2, and that seems to run fine at full resolution with max settings, although I've just started and haven't gotten in any big battles yet.

 

Yeah, I just got stuck on that too. Now, I guess we just have to wait.

 

AATroop, can you comment on the screen? As good/better than W520? Do you have an older TP to compare it to? I'm using the last of the Thinkpad IPS's.

 

Could someone tell me the manufacturer and model number of the FHD screen? Is it the same AUO B156HW01 V.4 previous W520 had?

 

Screen is great. It's very bright (when it wants to be) and has almost perfect viewing angles. I don't see any pixels but I'm usually about 1.5-2.5 feet away from it. I don't have an old laptop to compare it to, but I compared it to my 24'' Asus monitor (same resolution- 1920x1080) and they look pretty equal (the Asus is a great monitor; both have great blacks and good contrast). The colors on the W530 also seem to be pretty accurate. I haven't noticed any discrepancies (like I do on my GN).
I'm not an expert on screens, and I doubt this is the very best screen on the market, but I couldn't imagine anyone being disappointed in it. Djembe also received his model, if you want a second opinion.

 

I just got my w530 and would be glad to tell you guys if you can tell me how I can figure it out

Just as a comparison, I had the Dell XPS15 L501x with the 1080p screen and it looks pretty much like a matte version of it. Considering the Dell was basically just the glossy version of the T/W520, I'm guessing it's the same screen as the w520.

 

The screen is very nice. I can't get the manufacturer since Lenovo self-branded it as a "ThinkPad Display" or LEN40B2 in the Hardware ID, but it's definitely bright and the colors are vivid. I was running some more benchmarks and I'm seeing performance where I want it (between 650M & 660M) on the Cinebench 11.5 & Unigine Heaven benchmarks, so that's good.

 

Thanks, guys,
I'm still using a T60p that I've had for 5 years, because it's an IPS 1600x1200 and gorgeous, and I'm afraid Lenovo will never have a screen this good again. But Windows XP and this hardware is getting a little old, and I was hoping the W530 would have a good enough screen for me to make the jump and upgrade.

About construction, this laptop has been back and forth from home to office and back, or out of town and back, in my briefcase, almost every single day for five years, and *nothing* has broken on it!

 

Now construction is something I can talk about. This laptop is solid. Incredibly solid. The hinge has the perfect amount of resistance to it and hardly wobbles or shakes (even in a car). The keys have just enough weight to prevent accidental key-strokes; they also have a sturdy feel and I can type ~70 word per minute (my maximum is 80 words per minute on my Razer Blackwidow. Still not as fast as Freddie Wong :\ ). There is almost no flex as well anywhere on the laptop; obviously, if you push without an excessive amount of force, it will shift ever so slightly, but I feel like this laptop could easily survive a drop from about 10 feet without suffering anything but minor scratches. I've heard a lot of praise about the construction on Thinkpad laptops, and this thing certainly lives up to it.

 

Going from 4:3 directly to 16:9 will be painful. You're going to miss the vertical 120 pixels. As for colors and brightness, the FHD is really great. Of course viewing angles can't compare with IPS but are not particularly bad either.
Ironically, I have started to use my 5 year old T61p again because of the screen real estate (and I'm not burdened with operating system issues).

 

That's interesting -- I thought the 3DMark results posted earlier were lower than the 650M? I wonder why these other benchmarks would be different.

 

Maybe k1000m vs k2000m?

 

Nope. My K2000m is still under performing the 650M (just barely). I'm still waiting for modified GeForce drivers, and I think the Quadro drivers could still use a lot of fine tuning. The issue with tessellation benchmarks is that they kill anything that wants to be 100% accurate. So, Unigine benchmarks are a bit of a hit or miss. If tessellation is off, it should be accurate, but if not, the benchmarks might not be good indicators of actual performance in DX10 games.

 

Yup, when compared to Notebook Check's listed benchmarks, 3DMark03, 3DMark05, and 3DMark 11 are comparable to the 560M, 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage are more closely comparable to the 640M, and Cinebench and Unigine are better than the 650M. These are all with the K2000M. Perhaps this shows a bit of how the drivers are tuned differently in Quadro cards(?)

Overall, PCMark 7 scores are comparable to (although just a bit lower than) the Retina Macbook Pro.

 

No, it was lower (35fps). This is baffling to me, since I'm using a higher-spec (more memory & SSD) version of the same computer with the same video driver. Here's a link to my score: Generic VGA video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3720QM Processor,LENOVO 2436CTO score: 4793 PCMarks

 

2 things that (might) set us apart.
1) I have a better CPU (i7-3820qm).
2) I set my settings to ultra high, and I had turbo boost on (it's under battery management).
I really want you to replicate my results, this way I know mine weren't a fluke (were I accidently got insane FPS for no reason).
Also, what ram are you using?

 

Despite what one may tell you, neither extraneous RAM nor an SSD will improve framerates in 3D games. A faster CPU and GPU will.

Maybe the NVIDIA Control Panel is enforcing different quality settings (AA,AF,AO,etc.) and decreasing your framerates.

 

Generic VGA video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3720QM Processor,LENOVO 2436CTO score: 4940 PCMarks

I did what you did and enabled the "super turbo" fan speed setting, and that upped my DirectX 9 scores to 43 FPS as well as raised my overall score by approximately 150. Nice deal and thanks!

 

AWESOME! Perfect. That's good to hear. The 1 fps difference can easily be attributed to the different CPU's. The new INF drivers were just released by laptopvideo2go, so I'm going to try and get those running by tonight and see if there's any boost in performance.

 

Does laptopvideo2go's modded .inf support the Quadro K2000M now? I tried it a couple days ago and it didn't.

 

I'm not sure. It's in the INF file (under k2000M- 0FFB), and I switched it with the gt 650m (first the ddr5 version, then the ddr3 version). So, I did get the GeForce drivers to install. HOWEVER, all of my benchmark results were lower. My unigine score dropped by about 100 points and I only achieved a maximum of 33FPS in PC Mark 7. I'm not sure why this is, but my guess is that it's because the drivers haven't been optimized for the new Quadro cards yet.
I'm going to re-install my old drivers tomorrow (I'll be getting my SSD), because the GeForce drivers did not help at all. You could try to replace them yourself, just to confirm.