When playing games, how much stuttering is normal in a high-end laptop?

Hi, I've just bought a Rock Xtreme SL8 (the Clevo 901C) with the Q9450 Quad Core processor, 2 x 9800M GT, and 4GB RAM.

I'm seriously thinking about returning it mainly because of a stuttering problem during games.

It stutters (freezes for half a second then continues) every now and again (probably once a minute on average) during any game (ranging from Far Cry and Half Life 2 up to Call of Duty 4 and Crysis) and any settings regardless of frame rates, and often happens in the act of shooting.

I don't remember this being a problem on my previous computer, but maybe I'm expecting more of this one because it's a high-end machine.

Do others experience stuttering like this and treat it as normal? Or is there something wrong with my laptop?

 

sounds like an sli support issue to me.

 

What graphics drivers are you using?

try 177.92 from laptopvideo2go

I have an m17x with 8800GTX's in Sli and they work well. The only game that my system sturggles a bit with is Oblivion at full res on Ultra high and with 4096 x 4096 tiling... but, it's only when running so...

OB

 

Not normal. If you tried a few different drivers with the same result, exchange the PC.

 

Agree. Not normal. i have an Alienware M17X with 8800m GTX cards running SLI and no stuttering problems when game playing even at high settings.

 

Thanks for the replies. I'm glad I'm not imagining it or being too demanding.

I've tried the latest video driver (177.98) too but that has no effect, and in any case, that video driver prevents DVDs from working on my laptop (crashes as soon as the DVD is run; can't even get to the task manager to restart and has to be shut off cold.).

The SLi may well be an issue. In Crysis in particular it actually seems to run worse in SLi (even with patch). I can't really tell with other games as frame rates are smooth with or without SLi. But there is stuttering in all games at all settings.

 

I would send it in if I were you. Granted crysis is a demanding game but the others are not.

 

Well try XP and you will be pretty amazed how stutter free games run compared to running them in Vista. However it can be you haven´t got rid of unnecessery processes in the background and other junk.

 

I can tell you for certain that 177.98 causes intermittent stuttering on my system.

Try .92 and see if there's any difference.

 

Thanks for the tips. I just tried .92. It seems to have smoothed out a couple of things in Crysis (still slower in SLi though) but the stuttering is still there. And this one also makes the DVD player useless.

Unfortunately I'm not able to see if the Operating System is the problem Magnus. I've wondered that myself, with it being the 64-bit version too. But that would suggest that every owner of a Clevo 901C with Vista would have the same problem. Bear in mind this system is brand new so there should be no junk or unnecessary processes. I even disabled Vista's indexing function to no effect. And in any case, background clutter would affect games running at their limit, which should not be the case with a high-end gaming machine which is otherwise achieving very good frame rates.

Definitely looks like the laptop is going back.

 

Could it also be attributed to a the HDD speed? What kind and how fast is the hard drive?

 

It's a normal 7200-rpm and it's also in 3 x RAID (striped) so it ought to be bloody quick.

 

Well I dual boot XP and Vista. XP definitely provides sutter free games. For example:

Gears of War is stutter free in XP

Test Drive Unlimited unplayable in Vista, highly enjoyable in XP and runs at higher framerates.

Grid stutters a little in Vista, no stutter in XP and higher framerates too.

Well basically every single game I have tested on both runs better in XP with no stuttering and this with SLI enabled. First I refused to install XP, but thought I would give it a try and lo and behold my gaming experience is much more enjoyable now.

I like Vista but to me it holds no candle against XP when it comes to games yet. Vista has too much crap running even if you disable every single process games still stutter. Not all games but most of them and this with SLI enabled.

Though with XP it is a whole another story, give it a try.

Yep also thought the HDD speeds first, but no it is the operating system Vista that causes it.

 

That's pretty good info Magnus. I'm curious though, when you get your stuttering in Vista, is it with good frame rates and any settings? In my case, it is a short freeze - like a hard-drive load I suppose, but in between the freezes it is very smooth.

It was actually my intention to run a Vista/XP dual boot system - 2 x RAID HDD for Vista and 1 x HDD for XP but when the machine arrived they hadn't bothered to configure it as I asked :-/

 

hah, I sorta get the exact opposite results as you. I'm pretty sure now as well, Vista has and is faster than XP in a lot of regards. But anyway, I get much better frame rates in Vista then XP when gaming.

 

make sure to disable any Powermizer settings, and set the Power Options to Performance mode.

and you must connect notebook to AC power to gain full performance.

I just used someone else new D901C... they were using 176.09 (Clevo drivers)... it worked perfect:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=20341

 

Aha, somebody with the same machine; I was hoping somebody who'd used the same computer could confirm that they are indeed supposed to run smoothly. I was concerned that I might have to put up with it as a characteristic of the model. Thanks Gophn.

The 176.09 is the stock driver so... been there, done that, and probably have to stick with it too because the others I've tried render DVD playing useless.

Good advice with the Powermizer. My frame rates are being boosted nicely with some of this advice but the stutter will not go away.

At least I can be pretty certain now that it's faulty.

 

do a 3DMark06 test and post the screenshot of the results... I can tell if its the videocard(s) or the CPU.

 

maybe u got anti virus or some other programs running

 

If you are using 177.92 reinstall with this modded inf file... it's modded specifically Clevo's-- all smooth on my system.

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19675&st=0

EDIT: Works on Vista64 - recently added

 

Disable everything not related to your chipset and GPU in msconfig.

 

Does DOX modded info work for Vista 64?It says XP!

 

I have played a few games (Crysis, Assassins Creed, AoC, Warhammer Online, LOTRO, Grid, the complete Half Life series, Portal...just to name a few) on my 9262 with no problems at all. I have tweaked Vista according to the guide here on the forum and I must say that it helps. I have only used the drivers recommended and downloaded from Sager. I have experimented many other drivers but always ran into problems with them: errors resuming from sleep mode, random lock ups, poor game performance, etc.

 

The drivers from sager are adequet but not brilliant.
Unfortunately the modded inf on from laptopvideo2go are good but flawed, since it cover all possible laptops configurations, which obv. causes problems on others.

as the sager and clevo drivers they guarantee 100% functionality with the laptop, but the FULL use of the drivers are not included in them for some reason and the perfomance are for some reason good in 3D mark and average in games.

The mooded INF I make are very similar to the default clevo ones which does guarantee a stable and compatibile driver as best as it can be.
Its mainly designed for gaming though

 

On a D901C with a Q9450 and Sli 9800 GTs, you should not be getting stuttering under normal operations, so it's almost certainly a sign that you've got something screwy going on with your complement of drivers. It's possible that there could be some defect in the hardware causing the stuttering, but that's much, much less likely than there being a problem with your drivers and the way they're installed.

Basically, as near as I can tell, based on theory and online discussions with owners of earlier gen-D901Cs with the Q6xxx series quads and the 8700/8800 series GPUs, the problem is largely one of latency on the FSB - something is taking up way much more time than it should be monopolizing the FSB with a high-priority process, and is causing the GPUs to have to wait every so often to get something they need back from the CPU (or, possibly even something back from system memory, which is also read across the FSB).

First thing to do is make sure that there don't seem to be any problems with any of your components: hard drives, GPUs, CPU, memory - in particular, make sure there aren't any defects in the physical RAM that are being whitewashed by the OS. Run some of the benchmarking tools and see if your components are performing within normal range, or not.

Next, go through your event logs to see if anything's been logged that seems to relate to video stuttering, or to a driver hanging, or taking too long to finish its job, and in particular, look for any issues with wireless or bluetooth - each time the wireless card or the bluetooth module polls the aether looking for signals, the system basically locks until the polling is completed. On XP, the event logs are found under the Administrative Tools object in the control panel - I think that's still there under _Vista, but I'm not sure).

If nothing shows up under any of those tests, then I would recommend that you do a complete, clean reinstallation, from the ground up, and make sure that you get the latest drivers for everything - even the boring things that you wouldn't think had anything to do with performance, like the KBC controller - and reinstall the drivers in the correct order rather than willy-nilly (again, here I have to apologize for not having the "correct order" to hand myself, if you're not sure, Gophn or one of the other Clevo cognoscenti should be able to give us a list showing the order in which drivers ought to be installed).

If, after all of that hoo-haw, the stuttering still remains, then I would definitely send the system back. Also, if you're running up on the 30-day limit for getting a refund, then I'd send the system back anyways if you don't have enough time left to do all of the diagnostics and re-installing.

 

I would run some tests on your hardrive(s) that stuttering could be related to bad drive, or even lose cable, I have had that with my desktop and my sata's.

 

Thanks for the replies again everyone. Nice explanation Shyster, I've tried some more of the solutions here but the stutter persists (as well as some sound looping).

I think I'd send it back before trying a clean reinstall. I used the factory recovery function already, to no effect, although I'm not sure if that is a clean reinstall or just a return to a previous state.

All tests - 3DMARK06 (I'll post a score shortly Gophn), Passmark Performance/Burn-In, Memtest86, the Windows memory test - all check out fine. It's just in actual gaming where it is evident.

 

If you're nearing the end of the 30-day period, or you don't have the patience (or the experience) to dig into the nitty-gritty with that deadline fast approaching, then it's probably best to start talking to your reseller about sending it back and/or having them take a shot at fixing it (if you do that, try to wangle having the 30-day period suspended, or tolled, until you get the thing back from them - it'd be terrible to agree to let them take a shot at fixing it, only to have them fail and then tell you that you can't get a refund because the 30-day period expired).

If the problem has to do with a badly installed driver, I doubt very much if using the factory recovery function would correct it since the bad installation would almost certainly have happened at the factory, and would therefore be incorporated into the image used for the factory recovery.

I don't know how much time you feel like devoting to learning how to do fine-grained performance monitoring in _Vista, but _Vista has a significantly better set of performance monitoring tools than XP does, and it might be possible to set up a performance monitor on your GPUs, and specifically the drivers, to see if anything crops up showing where the lag is coming from and what's causing it. I haven't read through MS' materials on _Vista monitoring (I've barely gotten my arms around some of the XP stuff ); however, MS TechNet has a whole library section devoted to discussing _Vista monitoring and how to set it up, starting with TechNet Library article CC722173.

At any rate, good luck whichever option you finally take.

 

Thanks again for the info. There's a lot to chew on.

Firstly, I took the plunge and did a clean install of Vista. And guess what... yep, still stuttering! Also, the driver install disc that came with the laptop shows a list with the order to install the drivers in so there's nothing more I can do with regard to drivers.

The TechNet document looks like heavy reading.

Here are the 3DMARK06 screenshots, also with SLi disabled. It's interesting that the 3DMARK06 videos don't seem to stutter.

I also tried some hard drive tests and as always the machine excels. It actually did a disk read test in 1 second while my 3-year-old Alienware desktop took 2 minutes :-/

It's been a nightmare trying to get through to RockDirect to arrange to send it back and it makes me worry that I would be really screwed if something went wrong outside the 30-day refund period. Most likely I will get a refund and buy from somewhere else. Not many options in the UK though.

 

UK Clevo vendors are:
- www.kobaltomputers.co.uk
- www.novatech.co.uk
- www.rockdirect.com

MANY European vendors in the Clevo Guide.

 

Yeah, I know. I'm looking at Kobalt. Novatech are still on the 8800M GTX. And Rock are who I'm trying to get away from

The others are also a bit or a lot more expensive than Rock too.

 

If you contact Kobalt, they are good with price negotiations... Neil is arep here on NBR.

 

It's really amazing how the different Quads have such different scores. You got in the mid-12k's with the same setup as me, but the Q9450 instead of the Q9550. I got about 14000-even. Another user with the same setup but a Q9650 got about 14500 or so without OCing. You seem to have run that test with at least sidebar going. Turning that off, you should see some sort of increase.

Although I have never seen another 3DMark06 score with your exact configuration, the number seems 1000 points lower than I would expect. Also, my single-card (non-SLI) score is close to 10k (9900). A friend with the M860TU has a single card and a 2.53 GHz dual core and he is getting around 8500-9000.

 

Thanks for the tip Gophn. I'll give Kobalt a try.

Just got 12418 with the side bar off; that's actually a bit less than my original score! Weird.

Your system looks pretty similar to mine Baconcow. Is it smooth in game?

... just did another 3DMARK06 with a lower resolution. Perhaps I've been doing this wrong as I just got 13477 at 1280 x 1024 (I was doing 1920 x 1200 before). Is there a standard way of doing a 3DMARK06 test?

 

the standard 3DMark06 is to run it at everything default... even leave the default resolution (1280x1024) for the test

 

I'm not sure if it means anything, but on my setup (see sig, very similar to yours, same cpu, SLI 8800M GTX which is practically same as 9800GT) I get 13670 with SLI enabled and something over 10K with SLI disabled.

 

If those 3DMark06 scores were run at the default resolution they are abnormal. The CPU score seems OK, but the graphics scores are way off in both SLI and non-SLI. In SLI mode, for example, SM2 and SM3 scores should each be about 1000 points higher!

Are the GPU clocks OK?

edit... Opps. Just noticed the tests were run at 1920x!

 

Heres my recent scores- Not great , but not bad. Specs are in my sig.

 

Interesting to see the scores. It looks like mine, with 13477, is about right after all.

But the problem is in "real world" (if you can say that about games ) actual game play.

I see some of you have similar set-ups to mine; what are your impressions during games. Is it smooth? Any momentary stutters similar to the freeze when a game saves checkpoints although shorter? Any looping sound or cut-out sound? Anybody had the computer freeze after the RAID screen on boot-up and emit two alarm-like beeps?

I reckon I've established it's faulty but I still welcome any impressions from users of similar set-ups.

In any case, I've ordered a new one from Kobalt from a guy called Andrew. Thanks for the tip Gophn, they were quite helpful (although customer service post-delivery is the true test of quality!).

To their credit, Rock did make a final effort to help me out but it was too late.

 

There are some very recent threads discussing real-time gameplay. Drivers play a very big role for your video card. I prefer thee 177.92 Driver w/Dox's new inf. Crysis gameplay is very smooth. I don't notice any hiccups and the minimum FPS are quite good.

 

I'll have to try Dox's modded inf in Crysis, although the DVD player is not compatible with those drivers.

At the moment, my Crysis actually runs quite sluggish in SLi and quite smoothly (stuttering aside) without it, even with patches and Windows updates.

 

Yep that sounds like it's time for a new driver

 

Hello there I'm sure i've heard about your issue at our offices

It deffinatly sounds like a case of Vista and bad drivers. I can't put down the advice you have already been given it is on the mark

I understand having the new machine labled a beast you would expect it to go wild on maxed out settings lol. I always expect the same my self.

I wouldnt really worry to much though if you had choppy lines or hardware related issues then i would get that machine sent back to us.

Do keep me updated on how its going and how the different drivers ect tuneing settings and also possibly processes and trying xp.

I will always nosey around the building and grab the RnD guy and find out what the teststers recommend.

And if possible could you whack up some configuration settings on what your actually running the games on?

Best Regards hope to hear from you soon
Jack.H
Rock Team

 

Thanks for the response Jack. I think you've picked up the phone a couple of times when I've called the sales line

I've tried games on all settings. With Crysis I have to stick to 1600 x 1020 and a mix of high and medium to get about 25 fps, which in itself is a bit worrying as others here with the same model are posting 1920 x 1200 on all high for about the same fps. In other games like Call of Duty 4 I have actually tried as low as 1280 x 1024. I've also tried Far Cry and Half Life 2 which are quite old now and should be a walk in the park for this machine. The thing is, the stuttering is present even when frame rates are amazing. With SLi on, Call of Duty 4 is in the 100s at high settings but it still stutters (not choppy, but freezing every now and again like a very short checkpoint save) and has occasional sound problems.

I've also done a clean install of Vista and reinstalled all the drivers in the order shown on the driver disc menu. Later video drivers don't cure it and you may also be interested to know at Rock that the DVD player crashes badly with video drivers newer than the stock driver (which is maybe why you don't use them ).

I did want to try XP but I've no idea how on SATA HDDs with no floppy drive for the slipstream disk.

Let me know if your testers have encountered anything like this. Although from what I can tell here on the forum, everybody is having a smooth experience with this model.

 

hmm I had a few similar issues to what you are describing..

In the end i resolved it by updating my sound drivers, directx version and my video driver. Also have you got any firewall / anti virus running?

Another big thing I found is how silly windows can be with cpu usage.
If you go to your network options and manually set your ip configuration aswell as the network cards duplex settings this will significantly reduce stuttering when shooting and turning corners into new areas, cpu usuage is reduce by a amazing 25%! so give that a bash if you havent mate and let me know how it goes.

Best Regards
Jack.H
Rock Team

 

Thanks Jack. I'm just looking into it now.

I haven't yet installed any anti-virus or firewall. There's just the standard one in the Windows Security Centre.

I did originally update the sound drivers but I'll do it again.

Do you mean DirectX 10.1? I can't find a way to download it. It's supposed to come with SP1 but dxdiag still shows 10.0. (I also spotted dxdiag stating the model as 900C - I thought these were 901Cs...)

Which video driver are you using? The ones I've tried render the DVD player useless.

The problems you mentioned with the shooting and turning corners describes my problem quite well, but how do I do those network configurations?

Thanks for your help!

 

I'll second that, it was I who pushed Magnus into getting XP .
And he's not regretting it apparently

 

The only difference between the 900c and the 901c is the colour, same as the 570ru/tu and the 571ru/tu

900c=blue
901c=black
570ru/tu=orange trim
571ru=silver trim

So all the units will report themselves as the first one

 

How to set network configuration settings manually in vista...

1) Go to Start and right click on Network and then click Properties.

2) Network and Sharing Center window will appear, then click Manage network connections.

3) Network Connections window will appears. Here you can right click on the network card that you wish to configure and click Properties.

4) In the Local Area Connection Properties window, tick on Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and click Properties

Manual IP Assigning

You can now key in the IP address, Subnet mask, Default gateway and DNS servers.

If* you do not know them go to the command prompt and type ipconfig /all and just key in the numbers as you see them.

Setting Duplex Settings

Method 1: Change the link speed to 100 Mbps Full Duplex
To change the link speed to 100 Mbps Full Duplex, follow these steps:1. Click Start, type ncpa.cpl in the Start Search box, and then click ncpa.cpl in the Programs list.

If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.
2. Right-click the Gigabit network connection, and then click Properties.

If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.
3. On the Networking tab, click Configure.
4. On the Advanced tab, click the property that is in the Property box.
5. In the Value box, click the value that represents the 100 Mbps Full Duplex setting, and then click OK.


Method 2: Manually enable flow control in the transmit (Tx) direction
To manually enable flow control in the transmit (Tx) direction for the Gigabit network connection, follow these steps:1. Click Start, type ncpa.cpl in the Start Search box, and then click ncpa.cpl in the Programs list.

If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.
2. Right-click the Gigabit network connection, and then click Properties.

If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.
3. On the Networking tab, click Configure.
4. On the Advanced tab, click the flow control property that is in the Property box.
5. In the Value box, click the value that enables flow control in the transmit (Tx) direction, and then click OK

These reduce slow perfomance video playback errors do to how silly windows can be this is known and noted by microsoft it self

 

Opps almost forgot i'm using some drivers from guru3D i basically browsed through them trying them one at a time untill one felt right ... I can't remember the exact number on it and the lappys sittin in london with me brother but i will try get hold of him an get him to cough up. it was deffinatly one of the vista32/64 ones an was a 177.XX. And as for the directx 10.1 issue refer to the pm im about to send you