Overclocking Performance - Games
The 3DMark results were certainly interesting, and they showed a couple of things. First, extremely CPU intensive applications may not benefit beyond the Bin-3 overclock setting. Second and more pertinent to our actual gaming tests is that the 3DMark results indicate there's a good chance we will be GPU limited in many gaming benchmarks. Of course, the only way to really find out how games will perform at the various settings is to benchmark those games. All tests were run without antialiasing except where indicated. As the XPS M1710 (and most other new laptops) features a widescreen LCD, we restricted our test resolutions to widescreen settings.
As expected, at the higher quality settings and particularly at the native 1920x1200 resolution, increasing CPU performance does virtually nothing for gaming performance. Battlefield 2 shows the best performance scaling from overclocking, but only without antialiasing. Considering you can average over 60 frames per second even with 4xAA, we don't see any reason to disable it on this particular notebook. In those instances where we do see a slight separation among the various processor speeds, Bin-3 and Bin-4 usually end up as the highest performing settings, although Quake 4 without antialiasing seems to favor Bin-2 at lower resolutions for whatever reason. Given the margin of error and the tightly clustered scores on these benchmarks, however, it is doubtful you would actually notice the difference in performance when playing games. For gaming purposes, users should probably just stick with the stock CPU setting as anything more won't really help much. Still, there doesn't appear to be any harm in running up to a Bin-3 setting other than slightly higher noise levels from the system fans.
The 3DMark results were certainly interesting, and they showed a couple of things. First, extremely CPU intensive applications may not benefit beyond the Bin-3 overclock setting. Second and more pertinent to our actual gaming tests is that the 3DMark results indicate there's a good chance we will be GPU limited in many gaming benchmarks. Of course, the only way to really find out how games will perform at the various settings is to benchmark those games. All tests were run without antialiasing except where indicated. As the XPS M1710 (and most other new laptops) features a widescreen LCD, we restricted our test resolutions to widescreen settings.
As expected, at the higher quality settings and particularly at the native 1920x1200 resolution, increasing CPU performance does virtually nothing for gaming performance. Battlefield 2 shows the best performance scaling from overclocking, but only without antialiasing. Considering you can average over 60 frames per second even with 4xAA, we don't see any reason to disable it on this particular notebook. In those instances where we do see a slight separation among the various processor speeds, Bin-3 and Bin-4 usually end up as the highest performing settings, although Quake 4 without antialiasing seems to favor Bin-2 at lower resolutions for whatever reason. Given the margin of error and the tightly clustered scores on these benchmarks, however, it is doubtful you would actually notice the difference in performance when playing games. For gaming purposes, users should probably just stick with the stock CPU setting as anything more won't really help much. Still, there doesn't appear to be any harm in running up to a Bin-3 setting other than slightly higher noise levels from the system fans.
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Tommyguns - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
$4000 for a laptop to play games on?!Not trying to bash the artical, but whats the point of testing products if the actual market niche for such products is sooooo freaking small!?
$2000, on a laptop is a lot of money. adding in the fact it needs to play games, do that many people really spend past 3k on one? let alone 4k+?
If 10-20total fps in DX9 games is worth $2000, then someone let me know...
Dell inspiron E1705 with a C2D T7200, 7900GS vid card, gig of ram, 9cell + 6cell battery, DVDRW, vista home pre., 17 inch UltraSharp Wide Screen UXGA Display, wireless N card,and a few other odds and ends can be had for $1875. Toss in one of the coupons available online, like the $500 off and its just shy of $1400 for a decently effective gaming laptop. is it the best buy? idont know, but the best well rounded one. also, the XPS 17inch laptop on dells site, with the same parts, retails for around $2500....wtf? yes, no coupon...but still.... I like dell, yet dislike them equaly as much.
Thus, review a 7900gs dell offering so us poor people can see what an additional $1200+, really can do...Thanks... I would buy tommorow if i knew what all these machines did in terms of gpu power
JarredWalton - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
Part of the point of the article was to show that the added CPU speed did little to nothing for gaming, so if you're interested in a gaming laptop I'd recommend getting something like the XPS M1710 but sticking with a T7200 and just maxing out the GPU. You can do that for under $3000. Also remember that the configuration as tested has a $500 Blu-ray drive thrown in that many won't care about. So, cut down the CPU ($700) and the BRD ($500) and it's a lot more reasonable.ziddey - Wednesday, May 9, 2007 - link
Hi, this is definitely an interesting article, but I was a little disappointed in how it was presented and the testing done on it. I hope to not offend, but if you still have the ability to retest further, here's some ideas.So we're talking about throttling. If that's the case, how hot is it getting? You can track coretemps of meroms. The popular rmclock can also show any form of throttling in log form as well, and also shows it in graphical format as well. It also features ability to manipulate some finer features of it, although of course, at your own risk.
Further, I'm assuming this is only possible on upwards unlocked cpu's. In that event, could you just use something like crystal cpuid to change the multiplier?
Most significantly, how about this: If temperatures are still in line (and based on the track record of conroes, I see no reason they shouldn't, as long as vcore is as low as merom's are), can you set to maximum overclock in bios, and then use rmclock to force maximum multiplier while on AC
Deusfaux - Wednesday, May 9, 2007 - link
either you're homeless or you have an excessive amount of money and a butler or i dont know whatbut for all the reasons that make a laptop advantageous over a desktop, you strip them all away by attempting to make it one of the gaming variety.
ridiculous cost
battery life
size
weight
hardly upgradeable
I feel bad for the continual string of people who are convinced they can get all the benefits of a powerful desktop in a portable package (and not end up being inferior in every aspect)
Get a laptop that has good portability, get a powerful desktop for gaming. dont try to do both in one.
araczynski - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
sounds like its a nice laptop for 1280x800 gaming. curious what the screen looks like at that resolution, in comparison to the native resolution 'sharpness'. Does it scale very well or look as crappy as you'd expect the desktop to look at that resolution?suryad - Thursday, May 10, 2007 - link
More like 1920 x 1200 gaming all except for Stalker which I dont care for much anyway. I am getting this bad boy tomorrow or next week Monday. Can't wait. Worst part is the wait to receive it in your hands...hope i can last the weekend. Also the 3dmark scores area bit low...ntoebooforums people are reporting slightly higher scores...but anywho...super speed here I come!kalrith - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
The spec page on page 2 shows *q* every place that quotation marks should be.Gary Key - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
Fixed, sorry about that, we are on a new engine now, bugs still seem to pop up. ;)JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
Heh... Gary's being nice to me. I screwed up my own table by reusing parts of an old article and forgetting to properly "convert" the generated HTML file into a clean format. That's what sleep deprivation will get you.redfirebird15 - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
Is it really possible to get thousands of FPS on Supreme Commander? I've never actually played it, but that looks like a typo. If that is correct, what is the difference between getting 500 FPS and 1000 FPS? I thought it was and RTS anyway.It must be a typo.