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Lenovo T410 + 560Ti internal LCD poor performance


Aragorn

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Hi folks.

My wife has a tidy Lenovo T410, and likes to play Guild Wars 2. She has a desktop PC with a reasonable graphics setup, but in the evenings finds she prefers to sit in the lounge on her laptop and play while watching TV, as it means shes not being anti-social and disappearing off to the study to use the proper PC.

Ofcourse the T410 only has onboard Intel HD graphics and as such is pretty hopeless. Being a first gen i5 its not even the half-way decent SB/IB chipsets. Shes been putting up with it for a long time, and as a xmas gift i got her a 560ti and a PE4L 1.5 from BPlus. I hoped that this would give her desktop-like performance and massively improve the game play. I should add that i chose the 1.5 version as i wanted a detachable lead, and as far as i could see, the later ones with soldered leads are only needed if your using a newer laptop with PCI-e 2.0

I spent some time yesterday getting it setup, and was pleasantly surprised when it all Just Worked. I hooked the card up to a spare ATX supply, plugged in the PE4L and installed the latest nvidia drivers and everything was detected and worked great. Optimus seemed to be doing its thing and displayed everything on the internal LCD and it even hotplugs perfectly happily while the OS is running. I did the usual and ran some benchmarks, scoring ~P3300 on 3DMark 11, and a score of 1306 In Heaven 4.0 (Basic mode + Fullscreen). While not a patch on the same card in a desktop PC, the results seemed pretty impressive to me, easily outscoring a "proper" GTX560M laptop according to the 3dmark leaderboard, i was pleased and handed it over to the wife to have a go playing her game.

This is when the problems seemed to arise.

She launched the game and set it to "Best Appearance" which cranks the quality up, and set about trying to play it, which lasted about 5 seconds because she was getting about 5-10FPS. She quit and i disconnected the eGPU and went back into the game with the internal card to get some baseline figures, reset all the quality settings to minimum, and noted the frame rate: 20-25fps in a quiet unpopulated area. Quit and switched back to the eGPU, this time leaving it on the same minimum quality, and now the frame rate was showing 35fps, an improvement, suggesting the eGPU is doing something, but still completely awful compared with what the card should be doing.

This morning i benched the internal gpu using RE5, and it scored 13fps. Then i benched the eGPU, and scored 50fps. Still pretty disappointing given how much better this card should be, but in % terms significantly better than the in-game results from Guild Wars.

Is this sort of performance typical? Or have i missed some crucial option or setting? The benchmark list on this site shows much better figures in RE5 for this exact same combo of laptop and eGPU. 110fps was achieved in RE5, and i expect that missing 50% would make all the difference from it being hopeless to being perfectly usable and exactly what she needs!

Cheers

Kev

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This morning i benched the internal gpu using RE5, and it scored 13fps. Then i benched the eGPU, and scored 50fps. Still pretty disappointing given how much better this card should be, but in % terms significantly better than the in-game results from Guild Wars.

Is this sort of performance typical? Or have i missed some crucial option or setting? The benchmark list on this site shows much better figures in RE5 for this exact same combo of laptop and eGPU. 110fps was achieved in RE5, and i expect that missing 50% would make all the difference from it being hopeless to being perfectly usable and exactly what she needs!

Cheers

Kev

Attach an external LCD to the eGPU to get that missing extra 50%+. That is the configuration used for the leaderboard results. That way none of the precious x1 bandwidth is being used to carry the display image. Instead it gets piped straight out to your LCD. In addition, disable the NVidia sound devices so the notebook soundcard is used instead. Again to maximize the x1 pci-e link.

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Yeh, i figured as much and i've not tried that yet, mainly because she wants to be able to play using the internal LCD.

I'll give it a try with the external monitor just to see if that sorts the performance, and if so i'll have to take stock and decide what to do.

x1.2Opt would give me twice the bandwidth, but requires me to go and buy a new laptop and probably the newer version of the PE4L module, as the one i have i believe only supports x1.1.

What sort of performance would i expect from x1.2Opt with internal LCD in use?

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Yeh, i figured as much and i've not tried that yet, mainly because she wants to be able to play using the internal LCD.

I'll give it a try with the external monitor just to see if that sorts the performance, and if so i'll have to take stock and decide what to do.

x1.2Opt would give me twice the bandwidth, but requires me to go and buy a new laptop and probably the newer version of the PE4L module, as the one i have i believe only supports x1.1.

What sort of performance would i expect from x1.2Opt with internal LCD in use?

Compare x1.1Opt vs x1.2Opt internal and external LCD performance at http://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-gpu-projects/2747-%5Bguide%5D-12-dell-e6230-gtx660@[email protected]

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