SZ6/7 Overclocking 8400 GS 64MB..possible?

okay so I asked around and people said that the 8xx Series nVidia GPU is defective and its very high risk of bricking my PC if i do so, others have said that its possible but to a small boost which is more than fine for me, becuase when im playing games or whatnot, then my screen freezes for a second.like if im playing a racing game and i have the up arrow key pressed and turning right and have them both held the game freezes untili let go of both keys and it returns like it was just frame hiccup or something nothing major but its a bit bothersome.

It still irriates me ALOT that even though Sony moved up from 7400 GPU to 8400 GS then DOWNGRADED the video ram from 128mb to 64mb which really sucks. I just sold my SZ4 for a pitiful £250 and bought an SZ60WN/C off my uncle for 350, but I feel like the overall performance of the SZ4 surpasses the SZ6 I notice a good amount of slowness...im not gonna say lag but slowness in the things i do on normal bases whether its multiple tabs or photoshop or anything else.
Now I know OVERALL the 8xx cards are defective but I heard that only some models were defective does this affect the SZ6/7? and anything I can do to OC the GPU or speed up my system by anyway.
MY ram is PC-6400 667 bus speed would i get a good speed bump moving upto a 800Bus speed RAM?

 

According to Sony, the 8400 in the SZ is not one of the defective ones.

That stutter however is NOT due to the 8400, it happens when using the Intel card as well.

If you do burn up the 8400, the Intel card "should" still work, but switching back to the Intel coudl be a hassle, I have managed to do it once or twice without being in Windows, but it was very inconsistent. Probably easier to pull the bios battery to reset if it happens.

I doubt you will get much out of overclocking it though. You will probably get more by using the most up to date driver you can get.

 

okay thanks, umm im not really familiar with the whole mobile GPU drivers ordeal, why cant i use the newest 195.xxxxx version drivers? it shows up as ...has not detected any relating hardware or something like that cant remember cuz video2go has 190.xx and thats it., but the thing is the laggging happens whem im typing up speeches or articles, i get key lag for some odd reason, im typing and im missing out keys cuz of a couple key lags, and its irritating please help

 

Actually, you can use the the current driver and INF on video2go. Go to the main drivers page and follow the link, grab the driver and the inf listed, it should work for you. I too thought we could only use the 190.4 until recently.

I have no idea what to day or do about key lag, Make sure the rest of the drivers are up to date. Sometimes you have to click and tell it to upgrade or it will miss them, sometimes you have to go to Intel and others to get them.

 

yeah but the problem is that whenever i click on anything to update even if i direct it to the folder that has the files to upgrade e.g. inf. file and rest of the setup files or whatever it always says that this driver is up to date...then i have to go into my hardware setting and to select manually upgrade and not let windows upgrade everytime then manually select the folder to upgrade from, its such a headache. It totally makes sense to me now that one of the drivers must be not uptodate and causing slowdowns or something, if possible should i paste my tasks running to see if anything from there would be affecting the key lag?

Edit: (sigh) the reason i did a clean install was to avoid all these problems and make it run as fast as possible without anyproblems and alas ive stumbled upon another, i hope i can get some one to help me out here

 

I just realized you are on x86.
Whenever I ran X86 on my SZ I had a similar issue, I never bothered searching for an answer and never solved it completely as I prefer 64bit. I heard rumors it was a sound driver issue. Oddly, of all of the systems I have installed Win7 on (quite many), these are the only ones with the lag.

As weird as it sounds, try installing the latest Realtek driver. Seriously, I have seen it do weird things to systems that were not Realtek systems. It's worth a shot.


There are a couple things I have seen help Win7, however they didn't stop what you are seeing.
In system/advanced display properties, disable anything that slides or moves.
Download Winpatrol, that will allow you to easily disable useless startup items.
Download Windows7 Manager, and tweak Windows based on ram and cache and such.

All minor tweaks that add up to a decent gain.
It's possible something on startup is creating issues.

 

i wish you could just do it for me via logmein rescue oh well lets check it out and see how this works out, ill let you know how it goes

 

okay so ill download the latest realtek driver should i just install it for the files it installs or really install it over my sigmatel driver? meaning replacing?
Ill download Windows7 Manager as i just use msconfig from command prompt to remove all my start up crap
lets see if the manager helps i wont install the realtek driver before i get a K.O. from you or anyone else on my question.
I hope i get my lag fixed, i feel like i lost something selling my SZ4 but mostly im happy becuase it gave me alot of problems, too many parts and money going towards it so im happy with the SZ6 i bought off my friend since its in PERFECT mint condition except usualy wear marks on keys from typing but everything else is perfect and i just want as much ooomph as i got out of my old SZ, is that too much to ask for (tear)

 

The key lag (for me at least) was caused by the touchpad driver. It might have been a conflict with other software I had on the system but as I primarily use an attached mouse (and need the software for work) the touchpad wasn't as critical. After uninstalling it I've never had the key lag issue again. This occured for me on both x86 and x64.

The 8400M GS also uses system RAM in addition to it's dedicated 64MB. Because the system memory is slower this causes a bottleneck when swapping large textures back and forth. You can eliminate some of the stuttering by decreasing the texture detail (in-game).

You can also squeeze a few more fps out of the 8400M by investing in lower latency RAM for your system. The stock RAM that I received from Sony was horrible. One of my older posts had benchmarks of the both the stock vs lower latency RAM in both Vista and XP. It wasn't a huge difference but it helped a little.

 

yeah i replaced the original 2x1GB PC5300 with 1xGB 6400 and 1x2GB 6400 i just wanted to ask are these memory sticks 667 bus speed or 800? because on stick it says PC6400-666-.......so i assumed that it was 667 bus speed but my friend told me that pc6400 are 800 bus speed. uninstall the touchpad driver makes sense and i wouldnt mind doing it if it wasnt for the side scrolling features i cant live without it and its not available on the stock mouse driver that windows 7 provides.i really dont need anyother feature from the touchpad except side scrolling so if there is any 3rd party software to do this i dont mind.
the key lag is so irritating because say i wrote a paragraph and i press and held the delete key to delete half of it it would stop randomly anywhere and when i let go of the delete key it shows the text it deleted according to how long i kept it pressed so say i pressed it for 30 secs to delete it all it would stop halfway through the 1st sentence and after 30 secs when i let go it would show that all of it go deleted.
i just ran windows 7 manager and going through to delete alot of stuff, lets see if any of this helps, still holding out for the realtek and touchpad driver before someone can answer my questions, and thanks alot guys for your help so far

 

Latency is not the speed of the memory.
6400 is the bus speed, think of it as the speed limit.

Latency is timing.
It will be something like CL4, CL5, CL6 or CL7. It can also be labeled 5-5-5-12 or similar. The lower the numbers the higher quality and faster ram. Think of this as how many stop lights you have to wait for. Yours sounds like CL6. I have never seen any noticeable gains from latency. FSB, rarely. Then again, if you are borderline playable, I guess it could be noticeable.


If I have time in the next day or two I'll see about putting an x86 install on real quick (I have spare drives I can test on) and see what happens. I also wonder if this is effecting the 64bit as well.

As for living without scroll and such...
Get a cheap bluetooth mouse.

 

oh okay i think im starting to understand latency...wow that would be really great, after i've run the windows manager 7 i havent used anything yet to test it out, ill play it out and see how it works out
so any more info on the realtek driver and the mouse driver? i cant use the bluetooth mouse all the time becuz i dont always sit at a desk.actually i rarely sit at a desk i usually keep the laptop in my lap and usually around several people so no space to keep my hand on the side for a mouse anyways
the reason im stumped about the lag is becuase im not getting like 25 FPS in gaming im getting around 35+ to 43max which is really smooth and should and was playable smoothly but someTHING is creating the key lag. lets see how it works out and then ill get back to you guys

 

well, i think this turned out badly, after my clean up and optimize process with Windows7 Manager, my laptop is using more CPU usage and is slower than before especially during start up, it takes over 3 mins from the welcome screen until it loads everything properly, it stays on the welcome screen for a long time then the screen goes black with the cursor available and then slowly the taskbar shows up and loads up really slowly, otherwise before my laptop took a total for around 45secs to 1min or so to load up everything. and even if its showing less process its taking up more CPU and RAM and all i have open is yahoo messenger and media player classic and my video is really stuttering and isnt playing smoothly until i retart the player again to play the video. cuz usually i was able to run 3-4 video at the same time along with dreamweaver and/or firefox with no problem whatsoever. someone please help me, whats going on?

 

What did you do?

 

I just went through the optimization wizard, 1 click cleaner, and in the repair center i did the windows file protection.

 

Strange, I have never seen that cause an issue on the hundreds I have used it on, but there is always one. There is probably a way to restore the registry which should fix anything it caused. There may also be an undo in there.

 

the problem is that i backed up the registry but the 1st time i went through i had to shut down my PC so i stopped it and i guess it did like 60% so i just backed up and cleaned it up then i retarted came back to the same stage skipping all the other ones since i already did them and when i re-did the registry then it found another 400+ and i didnt save that one so i cant entirely redo what i did, unless there is a undo button somewhere.

oh yes and can you tell me how to update using the modded info from L2G.com and driver from nvidia? i wouldnt of mind keeping what i have but the problem is that i want the Digital Vibrance and Sharpness feature enabled and its not in this version for some reason, becuase i was reading this, http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=182116&page=2
and it wasnt available on mine. im using 190.40 from L2G.com right now and nvidia has 197.16 and its like 73mb vs 110 so there must be some good changes in it.

 

Just go to l2go and get the download the newest driver on the driver page. Grab the inf as well.

Extract the driver, copy over the inf, then go into device manager and update the driver.

You no longer need to search for the hardware ID.

 

Try AnVir Task Manager or its free version. It shows everything running on a computer. I've been using it for about 4 or 5 years on a couple of pc's, and I've been really happy with it.