Compal HEL80 Geforce Go 7600 OC Results

Can anyone explain why it's hard to set the clocks speeds at their default settings (400/500 I believe?). Did Compal have the memory replaced by slower memory or something?

 

And I was viewing some RivaTuner tabs when I found this:

It seems that two pixel pipelines are disabled. Can it do any harm to enable these?

 

tc03 are you accusing compal of disabling them purposely to lower performance and consequently heat of the card? us coolbits users would never have known. should that affect the ability to overclock at all? i dont really know what i am talking about, fairly new to the overclocking game.

an interesting find nonetheless

 

You are right, the units are there, but they are probably hard locked, nvidia started doing that on the early 6200 to prevent people from making them 6600s. More the likely Compal was more worried about battery life and heat issues then pure performance so they are probably undervolting the VRAM and have the clock speeds turned way down. It is all for a reason and probably has little to do with being cheap. Of course I am no longer a fan of Compal so they might have just been trying to be cheap and put the lowest speed bin video cards and found the cheapest memory out there. But all that is speculation.

 

I think its Compal saving $$. Compal doesn't manufacture the vid cards. The vid card manufacturers inevitably have some chips that they produce where all the pipelines aren't up to standard, etc. Compal saves money, the vid card manufacturers make more money and increases the yield of usable GPUs. The addition of using slower rated vid RAM saves Compal even more money...which I think was the primary reason....

The lower temp. and added battery life is just a convenient side effect...and I personally don't feel that the temps are actually lowered that much or the battery life is even extended that much.....but thats my opinion

Either way, its still more than capable of playing games.

 

I think the undervolt is more likely. iunno.

 

EQ, the spec for the 7600GO is for 8 pixel 5 vertex, the 7600 GS for desktops is 12 pixel 5 vertex all they did was disable a quad for the Go version. The is nVidia's doing not Compals and the only reason I can think of for doing it is heat genertation which I really don't understand cause the 7600GS Can be passively cooled. About the only thing compal has a choice in is what speed memory they want to run the cards with in this case they either chose really low binned memory 350mhz ddr3 isn't hard to come by or the undervoltaged teh RAM to get better battery life. In honesty though that isn't a bright move on Compal's part since your talking 1% better battery life but the memory would heat up less as well. I would also have to say given all the other weird quarks this laptop model has they probably chose to play things safe and not push the technology, that is just my opinion.

 

Hmmm. Just dl'ed and installed 3dmark06 on my Hel80. But when I try to run, I get an error message saying the program failed and did I want to send an error report to Microsoft. I tried running again (even un and re/installing) with no luck. Anyone else have any issues like this? Have internal bluetooth, mouse on it, but no external periph's.

Thanks regardless.

 

ok... i just o-clocked my 7600 to 442core and 372mem(auto detect setting) and i got a stable 3dmark05 score of 3548, which i am more than happy with, so i'm not going to push it anymore. it got me an extra 11 fps avg on cs:source

my question now is... what is considered 2d? i have this OCed setup for 3D, but do i need to change it when i'm on battery to conserve battery if all i would be doing on battery would be surfing the net, watching movies, listening to music, or typing papers? it seems like me that those would fall under the 2d category, but i am not sure. thanks!

 

That is pretty much correct, however when Vista comes out with Aero it will become 3D, but I wouldn't worry about ocing 2D, it would be pretty much useless.

 

is it possible to activate those "hidden" pipelines?

 

Yeah, I'm in agreement with you 100% regarding the minimal heat/battery differences the clockspeeds would do. Also, I said earlier that Compal didn't manufacture the video cards. The only choice Compal probably had was choosing which "flavor" of 7600 go they wanted for their laptop.

Either way though, the HEL80 is still more than adequate to play a lot of games! I'm happy with it, and I haven't even needed to overclock to play Call of Duty 2 and Battlefield 2.

 

I wish troll, unless you are really good with a sodering iron now you can't enable the extra quad. In desktops at least they use a couple resistors to determine what quads and vertex shaders are involved. I miss the good old days of software disabled pipes.

 

That's why I posted that picture. I remember the GeForce 6800LE (AGP), it had 8 software disabled pipelines. Some people managed to enable them all and double their performance. I was hoping it was possible to enable these 2 pipelines, but I don't think it's gonna work.

 

TC03, I agree with you, probably not going to happen, 2 reasons, 1 the spec for the card from nvidia is only 8 pipes for the GO version, and 2 I don't think anyone is going to take the chance to destroy their laptops video card to attempt this, I don't even know where you would pickup a replacement card for one. If there was some magic GPU bios that enabled them that would be nice but agian doubt your going to find one.

 

thanks aura and yeah i wasn't actually wondering about OCing 2d, it was more of should i de-overclock 3d on battery, but since you confirmed my suspicion that movies/papers/websurfing are 2d, i guess i won't need to

 

Are you using the default drivers? If so, that's your problem. I had the exact same problem, per se, with my HEL80. I had to use a newer driver set to run 3DMark06:
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3060&review=Compal
I used the 91.31 driver set, which I found had near identical performance to the original stock drivers. However, I had overclocking problems with the new set.

 

I didn't have any problems running 3DMark06 (or any of them) on the stock drivers.

 

I was using original. Interesting. I wonder what tthe cause is considering poster above had no issues.

 

This is kind of a stupid question, but where can I find the Nvidia Control Panel? I don't know where to find it and I'm pretty sure I had it when I first got my computer, but it seems to have dissappeared.

 

Look in the System Tray for the icon, or go to Start>Control Panel>Display>Settings>Advanced.

If you don't find it either place, reinstall the drivers.

 

in the overclocking tab there are 3 options:
1.no overclocking
2.auto overclocking
3.manual

in manual there is "optimal settings" option. which sets the core to 356 and the memory to 370

"356" ?

 

My "optimal setting" for the core was similar to that as well, and I think that is pretty normal

 

Really, ignore the optimal settings button... I've heard of it overclocking people's cards too far, and in this case I'm pretty sure it just sets the clocks very close to default. I don't know what mechanism it uses, but it seems pretty flawed.

 

Edit: TCO3, on page 11 said "Can anyone explain why it's hard to set the clocks speeds at their default settings (400/500 I believe?). Did Compal have the memory replaced by slower memory or something?"
appologies for not direct quoting first off

This basic question has appeard in other threads..what's holding the Hel80 back? etc.. many have supposed the core is underclocked and perhaps memory too. The Nvidia site states in spec that the go7600 can carry gddr1,ddr2 or gddr3. http://www.nvidia.com/object/go_7_series_techspecs.html And I have seen claims of memory at 500mhz also but have nothing to back that up except a mention.

I saw the question asked a few times, but no answers. I don't have the compal personally and I'm not aware if there are different versions US. vs EU. vs Timbucktoo, but here's a link showing our famous Compal Hel80 with none other than.. DDR2 video memory

I had a big quote here that i miss read, mybad..this was the juicy part. In the specs, you will notice this "Grafische kaart / Geforce GO 7600 ddr2 / Grafisch geheugen (MB) / 256 MB" TRANSLATION "Graphic card Geforce GO 7600 ddr2 graphic memory (MB) 256 MB"
http://www.pcmweb.nl/hardware_review.jsp?productid=1139

And oh-boy, I can't read this, ?Italian? but the very first post on that page is about the Hel80 and states -

Video Controller
----------------------------------------------------------
Nvidia Geforce Go 7600 w/ 256MB VRAM ddr2
----------------------------------------------------------
- NVIDIA G73M
- G73M with 256MB(16M*16*8)
- Performance request into Video chip section(TBD by NVIDIA)
G73M 375/350MHz , 16W/3W~6W
------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1202579
Further on it talks about OCing and even shows screen shots of the lcd.. can someone translate this?
So, this is a possible answer to all those curious, but is it true?

 

JimyTheAssassin, I can't find the question in your post.

 

edited, sorry for not being clear

 

It's not as simple as that my friend . The raw MHz doesn't really matter in the end. What matters is the bandwidth. And that is determined by the combination of bus-width and the clock-speed. The bus is either 64bits, 128bits or 256bits. So you could have 400Mhz RAM on 128bit bus, or 200Mhz RAM on a 256bit bus, and the end-result would be (more or less) exactly the same.

Now, vid-cards today are usually bandwidth-bound, so increasing the speed of the memory is the way to go. If the mem can't be clocked higher, upcloccking the core is the second-best choice. Of course the best choice is to overclock both .

 

have been also a proud user of Compal HEL80 for a week (C2D T7200, 120GB 5400rpm, 2GB 667Mhz). So tried to use the optimal settings the driver suggested me (362/381). Actually everything was fine until the nature test (in 3dmark01). Based on what others have reached i might say that the suggested 381 is way too much, so i'll try with a lower mem clock some other day.

And..the score in 3dmark01 /w def settings is ~20.5k, in 03 ~7,6k, 05 ~3,1k, 06 1,66k

 

Could the 3dmark scores be lower for this machines b/c many people w/ the hel 80 have a higher resolution screen? I'd be curious to see the difference b/w people with the 1200x800 vs. 1680x1050.

 

3dmark scores would not be influenced by the native resolution, as the tests run at the same resolution regardless of system settings.

 

Howdy Folks. I just got my hel-80 and my network card dont seem to be working. The rest of this gem is amazing, Forget all the scores. This machine is amazing. Anyways. What can I do with my LAN. Thw wireless works GREAT. the LAN dont work at all. It knows its connected to something (I have comcast and the connection is super fast with my desktop) but it will nto work with this laptop. thanks in advance

 

Call tech support

 

I have to say although i've only briefly read through this thread and am new to overclocking the difference in maufacturers specs for Graphics cards seems immense.
I'm just ablout to purchase a Zepto Znote 6615-Gamer and that has a 7600 with 512MD and is clocked at Core 450 Mhz and Ram at 700Mhz. Which is a darn sight more than the 350/350 Compal on the first post. I suppose it must be because it is aimed specifically at gamers. If they themselves have uppped it's speed does that mean i will have a hard time overclocking in the future if need be?

According to Zepto UK Site

For performance enthusiasts (rounded):
3D Mark 2001: 19800
3D Mark 2003: 8200
3D Mark 2005: 3550
3D Mark 2006: 1900

I don't really know what would be considered fast, could anyone tell me?

 

It may be that they've overclocked it themselves. Also, the ram speed is the same (350*2 ... just alternate ways of saying the same thing). That suggests to me that they are using the same cards, and did overclock it themselves, which makes me think you're right that you probably won't get it much higher.

3550 for 3dmark05 is fairly similiar to other laptops with graphics cards in this class. 3dmark isn't really the best way to compare performance among systems that are close to each other though. they'll tend to win in some games/applications and lose in others, even if one is a winner in 3dmark.

(there was a thread that touched on this in the gaming forum recently. it compared the x700 to the x1400.)

 

Well i'll download speedfan and use coolbits when i get it and tell you what i managed to get it all up to! Hopefully without melting a brand new computer!

In a week: (I hope!)
Zepto Znote 6615 Core 2 Duo T7600 2.00Ghz, 2GB DDR RAM, Geforce Go 7600 w/ 512MB 15.4" Widescreen!

 

I do believe that the Zepto runs the RAM at same speed as Compal does, they just calculate the speed in different way. The RAM used with 7600 is DDR-RAM (double-data rate). Which means that it tranmits two bits of data in every clock-cycle. So the 350Mhz RAM in HEL80 has an effective data-rate of 700Mhz.

Take the hi-end desktop vid-cards for example. They are advertized as having RAM that runs at 1.2GHz (or something like that). They don't REALLY run at that speed. They run at 600Mhz, but since they transmit two bits of data every clock-cycle, you could say that their effective speed is 1.2GHz.

Same thing with the Zepto. I bet that the RAM run at speed of 350Mhz (same as HEL80), they just quote different number than Compal does. Compal quotes the actual speed of the RAM, Zepto quotes the effective speed. Neither is wrong in the end, but it can get a bit confusing.

 

Lets see.. I OCd clock to 469, and mem to 366..

that made my CS: Source stress test average fps go from 49 to 59... pretty big increase!

 

I believe that these drivers are tweaked for specific use with mobile cards so maybe they would give better results.
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/index.php?drivers

as yet i dont own the notebook in question I am unable to personally check the drivers.

 

I used the most recent one with my oc.. i actually ocd core to 500 mhz and mem 370, and at 480 for core i could go 379 for mem, but these scores were a tad unstable...

 

so what are the latest drivers that everyone is using and where can i download them? nvidia has basically no support for this card.

7xxx series cards are supposed to have support for h264 hardware acceleration, though only the beta drivers for xp and mce have this capability per the nvidia web site.

do the drivers linked to two posts above me support these features or are they based off the 92.91 beta drivers found here: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_rel70betadriver.html

thanks much for any insight

scott

 

before 350 350 1877
after 430 372 2153
is it harmful or is it allowable core and memory speed?
TECH:Intel® Core™2 Duo T7200(2x2.0 Ghz,667Mhz,4MB Cache, 64 bit),256 MB nVIDIA Geforce Go 7600, 2GB Dual DDRII667 Mhz,80 GB 7200RPM SATA 8MB

 

I can't guarantee it's not harmful. I noticed with testing that FarCry will really expose any graphics glitches. I can't get any meaningful overclocks that work well with FarCry. 3DMark05/06 still runs fine, but FarCry shows all kinds of problems. Depends on your testing.

 

rice: sorry I didn't answer your question earlier. All your drivers, etc. can be found at www.laptopvideo2go.com

 

Im amazed my HGL-30 7600 go is yielding better overclocks than the HEL. Hasnt anyone else hit at least 4000 in 3d mark 05?

 

From what I've seen/remember, you've hit a higher core clock speed than any I've seen on either Compal model.

 

Dont think there have been very many ppl who have actually overclocked their compal, maybe a few. Every card is different, and I dont think the scores really matter all that much. I just wanted the xtra +10 FPS that I knew the overclock might yield. This is definitly the max though...any higher and problems galore.

 

that seems like an awfully high overclock. I got artifacts while playing games (NOT in 3dmark05) with anything past 369 mem. The highest stable core people have reported seems to be around 480. its nice that your card can handle that, but you should probably be cautious about using it at your max overclock.

 

Well your right, mass artifacts after more than a few minutes. Reduced my my specs a little. 469/379 is the max, have tested for hours. If I even push the memory or core 1 more mhz, I get artifacts on 3dmark05 during the 3rd graphic test with the giant fish and the flying ship. Think its a conspiracy, so stupid how i cant hit 470/380 without panic ensuing. O btw, I can lower the memory some, then raise the core, but its better to just have the extra memory instead of a higher core correct? The 379 memory seems to yield better results than having 480-490 core instead.

 

Hey I tried changing the registry like explained in Windows Vista, but no clock showed up. Should I look somewhere else or are there different entries I should make for Windows Vista?