Need help with NP9170

Hi Guys. I ordered a sager NP9170 which I got last week. The laptop has a 7970 graphics card, 12 gigs of ram, and the 3610QM. I played guild wars 2 beta over the weekend and was getting roughly 50-60 FPS most of the time on completely maxed out settings, this is decent enough I guess, but the game stutters from time to time, and as a competitive player I can't have any stuttering at all so I'm a little bit disappointed since this means i need to lower my settings.

I expected flawless performance from the laptop in guild wars 2 on ultra, was I expecting too much or do I have a problem? I tried installing the graphics card drivers via the driver disk that came with the laptop, apparently they were already installed or something? When I tried to install them my computer went to a black screen with a command prompt line, stayed there for 10 minutes, then blue screened. Not sure if this could have affected my performance in game somehow?

Also, is there a way to check to make sure the game is using the 7970 and not the intel GPU?

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to increase perforamnce? I"m pretty bad with computers to be honest. I'm downloading MSI afterburner now to try to increase performance a bit but I really don't want to mess with on my own as I have no idea what I'm doing... can anyone help me out.

Thanks guys.

 

1) Are you using a solid-state drive?

2) The stutter happens when you are moving fast or when you rotate your camera?

 

Not using an SSD, I want to say yes to #2 but I will try to figure out if thats the case.

My base FPS is around 40-60 on ultra now though, that still feels lower than it should be to me? Dunno if I'm overestimating the specs though. On medium I only get like 70 FPS and when I record its down to 30-40. So I basically can't record on anything but low...

 

For GW2 you should wait for the release version. The beta have alot of performence issue, even the desktop 670 had hard time with this beta.

I played GW2 all weekend and utilization when to 30-80% and i dont think is enduro. The beta right now use CPU alot. In sPvp you should not have any issue running this game with 50+ fps with 50% utilization, in very big wvw and event i still get 25-30 fps GW2 7970M tons of players - YouTube so overall, still pretty playable.

If you get 50-60 fps im 100% sure your game using the 7970M.

 

1. did you try disable v-syn ?
2. make sure you set computer to high performance and add your game to ccc and set it to high performance
3. disable core parking, if you dont know google it
here the program

Coder Bag: Disable CPU Core Parking Utility

you should make sure you unpark all cores

4. download this beta driver:

AMD Catalyst

Make sure you read this other wise it will mess up you drivers and have to reinstall again:

when installing the beta driver , choose custom > select dis-select all or untick all (some of them cant un-tick leave it) > select only amd display driver and that is it and then install. please report here on result. thanks

 

I tried using that app to unpark my cores but whenever I try to start the app I get an error saying: To run this application you must install one of the following versions of the .NET framework:
v4.0.30319 blablabla...

also can anyone talk about how to overclock safely using msi afterburner?

EDIT: just remembered i had taken down some numbers from the beta, on ultra while my computer was lagging apparently my GPU usage was at only 72% and my CPU usage seemed even lower, there are 7 cores according to the resource monitor and most of them were at or below 50%, so im guessing this means the GPU is the problem, yet it was only using 72% while I was lagging in game. When I'm not lagging it still only uses 40-50% according to MSI afterburner, but that is producing 50-90 FPS depending on my settings, shouldnt it be running at 100% to produce the best frame rate?

 

Here's how to overclock with Afterburner.
First off, make sure you are using MSI AB 2.2.1.

What you want to do is open your notepad as Administrator. File < Open < Program Files(x86) < MSI Afterburner < (Change your search to "All Files" and you should see a CFG file named "MSIAfterBurner."
Select that file and your Notepad should open it up.

Scroll down until you see this:
UnofficialOverclockingEULA = 0
UnofficialOverclockingMode = 0

All you want to do it change the 0's to 1's.
Then File < Save, and exit.
Start up a game, then open After Burner. You should be able to use your core clock and memory clock. :]

(My settings are core clock - 1000. Memory clock - 1400

 

Okay, my afterburner version is 2.2.3 I assume thats okay since its later?

 

ok use these

Disable CPU Core Parking Real-Time - No Reboot

download 32 or 64 bit depending on your system. also install amd 12.7 beta driver

 

That thing scared the **** out of me... so many disclaimers... how badly can I screw up my computer by using it because I probably don't have the know-how to fix it if I break it.

 

lol it just registry tweak but it easier with simple clicks . its nothing happens it a way for windows to save power by disabling some cores here like optimus or enduro version of intel lol here some more info:

How to change Core Parking states in Windows

Windows 7 Micro stutter Fix - Core Parking - techPowerUp! Forums

 

I just did what the programs listed before said and it still says cores are parked in my task manager....

 

That's because some tools may have wrong...

Have a look at this document: PPM in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

To prevent cores from parking under a given power profile, use regedit.exe to change a few values in the registry:

The power settings in your registry should look like the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583\
(** Note the description: Specify the minimum number of unparked cores/packages allowed (in percentage). **)
Attributes = 0 <-- this will show the feature under the advanced power settings so you don't have to go into the registry to change core parking settings
MaxValue = 100 <-- Decimal (64 hex), this is the maximum number of cores that are allowed to be "Unparked"
MinValue = 0 <-- This is the minimum number of cores that are allowed to be "Unparked"

Then under each power profile (...that you want cores to be unparked) listed under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583\DefaultPowerSchemeValues\<profile n>\
AcSettingIndex = 100 <--- Decimal value (64 hex) ** this means that the "Minimum" number of cores that are allowed to be unparked is 100%. i.e. no cores will ever be parked! i.e. all cores will be unparked. ** AcSettingIndex is for when the laptop is plugged-in, DCSettingIndex is for when the laptop is running on batteries.

 

Make sure you run the .exe as administrator. EVEN if you are logged on to your PC with admin privileges.

Also, I use this on my 2008R2 VM host to ensure at 75% setting. It makes significant improvement on the VM (virtual machine) responsiveness since anywhere from 5-7 VMs are competing for the four cores (i5-2500K) use. Since it is a water-cooled desktop, I'm not concerned about heat or power usage. There is no realistic concern about removing parking on all cores on any CPU since the C2D; worst case is CPU hits temp max and is throttled. I'm not completely convinced in a laptop that the power hit is worth the potential improvement but don't let a concern about damage to your computer keep you from trying it.