How do I improve my x205 s7483?

Hello all.

I've read several posts on here where people mention great 3dmarks scores and having the ability to play games on high settings with no problems. These can't be stock configurations that achieve these results. My Computer crawls to a halt on games such as Age of Conan. My question is what tweaks do I have to complete in order to reach my computers full potential? I've read about upgrading my cpu and am going to probably buy a t9300 tomorrow. Also which drivers should i be using for my 8700m? I currently have the latest nVidia driver installed, 175.19. This is the most stable one I've found so far. Other drivers I tried made my external monitor have to scroll left and right to view a whole webpage at full screen. However my computer now recognizes my card as an 8600. Aside from just the video card and CPU, what other things should I tweak and fix to improve my computers performance?

My computers specs are straight factory X205 s7483.

Thanks in advance for any help at all with this.

 

correction: I have upgraded ram to 4G instead of the 2G original.

 

I can't help you with the external monitor problem. The T9300 is a great processor and is what I'm using in my X205 as well. I upgraded to 4Gb ram, swapped my hard drives out for a WD Scorpio Black 320Gb for the primary and a Toshiba 160Gb 7k200 for the secondary. I use the 177.41 driver and Rivatuner to OC my 8700M and have no issues playing most games, when 64bit Vista will load them at least.

 

Thanks for the tips. I'll try out your oc settings and driver version later and see what happens . As far as the drives go, I've been looking into those as well. New Egg is going to love me this week.

 

Don't jump straight to the settings I have. Download a good benchmark program like 3dmark06 and use that to see the effects of your OC attempts. Start out small and add on to that in steps, once you start seeing issues, back it down 2 places from where you had the problem at and you should be safe. If you jump straight to high settings and have issues you're not going to know what a stable and safe setting is.

 

Good advice. What sort of problem will I need to look out for? Tempeture or something more subtle?

 

Temperature is very important, but you'll want to look for artifacts, anything on the display that doesn't look right while the test is running. Even after you've got it set and it looks good on Rivatuner, play one of your more graphics intensive games, I like to use World in Conflict or Crysis, and see how it does after some time in the game.......make sure you don't start seeing any issues.

 

Well after a week or so of modifying my X205 s7483 I have seen some improvement. I have replaced my T5450 with a T9300 and also replaced both of my hard drives with WD 320G 7200rpm scorpio blacks. On Age of Conan I have jumped from an unplayable 15 fps to 30-50 fps depending on game settings. Looks like all I have left is to adjust my video card.

Any ideas on which driver might be the best for 8700 m? I have tried several 174.74 seems pretty good. Also is there a guide on overclocking for complete noobs somewhere? The reason I ask for a guide is because I attempted this once before with riva tuner at similar settings to yours and everything looked great on high settings for a few hours then all of a sudden my screen started going snowy, so I removed the settings.

Thanks again for all your help.

 

Found a great guide on how to Overclock. Thought I would post the link in case someone else is searching.

http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=89472

 

My best results come from the 177.41, I've tried 177.66, 175.75, and 177.70 and 177.41 outperforms them all in addition to being more stable, on my system at least.

 

Im going to give you'r driver a shot today as I have recently been getting screen flashes while playing AOC. The window mode will flash very quickly a couple of times then go away for an hour or so then do it again. Not a big deal but kindof annoying .

Also my mind keeps churning, trying to think of other things I can do to upgrade and make this a bigger and better machine. I could buy a whole new comp, but upgrading and learning how to play with things is fun . I was wondering if its possible to replace this motherboard with another from a different model x205 that supports 2 GPU's and run with 2 better GPU's instead of one? or is that just silly?