thanats007

Yeah... as stated in the rules, you need 5 posts in order to see attachments.

Liquid Ultra has a great performance, but you have to make absolutely sure that you don't spill a single drop on aluminium... it will corrode almost instantly.

A paste like MX-4 is much easier to handle.

If you are not certain about doing it dont use the liquid but MX-4. The performance is very good too and its no risk. But if you want to risk it you should only use the liquid on the CPU when it is pulled out from the mainboard to exclude any risks.

Dont use it for the GPU since you cant remove it from the board.

M14x R1 is an epic fail in thermal design. Let Dell try to repair it 3 times then ask for a replacement M14x R2 cause the heat and throttling problems cant be solved. Best advise i can give you. Even with repasting it still throttles cause of heat. If you dont want to go thru the Dell services - turn off turbo and let it repaste then it should be nearly ok for WOW at least.

+1 for avoiding IC diamond, on my desktop rigs I'm not the greatest fan of it

Thanks for the write up tho, your place of choice for the liquid is..?

Still not sure but if you mean where to put the liquid ultra on id only apply it on the cpu since 1) it needs most cooling efficiency and 2) you can remove the cpu and apply it safely away from the board. hope thats what you wanted to know.

EBay has them but you usually need to buy 5+ at a time. $1 a pop IIRC.

Edit: I see goldpart has them 2 for $1 now shipped from China. Prices have gone down a little.

Sent from my Sensation

Yes thats right i bought mine from ebay. I was lucky to find a private seller who maybe wanted to push his reputation and sold them one by one for 1 Euro each.

Next step is to use low profile small copper heatsinks for the CPU together with liquid metal paste. Maybe in a week or so.. will post results with pics then.

These are the temps while running 3dmark vantage + max OC with svl7`s VBIOS mod. Waaay cooler than before! At the moment we also have very high ambient temps of 27 C in my living room (damn summer).

edit: Maybe it has nothing to do with this but i found the test graphics feels like running much more fluent. Before i think i can rememer a bit of a tearing effect which has gone now.

Hey, cool idea!! Do you have some pics of the mod? I'd love to see it

sorry forgot to make pics :/

But its easy to do this mod. you only have to remove the cover + battery ofc. Then remove 2 screws from below. Then peel off the keyboard surrounding plastics. Then remove the keyboard and right below it sits the PCH lid and the PCH itself on the right side.

here are some pics to show you (not my own):

PCH location

copper shim

15mm x 15mm x 1mm fits perfect dont buy a more thick one it could be a problem maybe.

Hi all,

since im using my M14x R2 mainly with an external monitor my PCH temps were quite a bit too high for my taste. So i bought a copper shim of 15mm x 15mm x 1mm to put it between the lid and the chip. The PCH is the most important chip right after the CPU and GPU so i thought it needed proper cooling too.

I also removed all stickers on the lid and backside of the keyboard since its not good for passive cooling too. Then i repasted this chip (->which comes only with a crap cooling stripe factory wise) with IC Diamond and put the copper shim between the chip and lid. I used the drop method and let the lid pressure spread it evenly.

These are the results:

before mod in idle:

with mod in idle:

Since its a passive cooling mod its mainly for idle cause the temps cant go down that good due to the lack of active cooling. While gaming or other PCH stressing activity i had up to 78 C on that thing. Now i guess it will rarely hit 70 C. Will post the stresstest temp results later.

hey thanats007 I am new here so I could not see your attatchments ... did you make sure you put the AA and AF at max? along with max tesselation? Just checking , if so and you are stable WOWZERS that is a GREAT clocking card !!!

Is this your overclock with the same BIOS linked to in this thread or with an experimental BIOS that has voltage adjustment? Cause my fully stable plus 240 which gives me about 64C in temps is FAR from your plus 360!!! I mean I am very happy with my boost LOL but not as much as I was before I saw your AMAZING OC LOL

When I go to plus 250 or 260 I eventually get a driver crash and a black screen that recovers to the desktop ... does anyone else here have an OC they can report on? as I am curious whether thanats007 has an exeptional chip or I have a very not exceptional chip LOL

cheers

Only tessellation was on max and resolution was 1920x1080 on external monitor the rest was standard settings after installing it. And yes its svl7 awesome unlocked VBIOS for higher OC clocks of the GPU. Dont be frustrated. I had to let Dell replace my board 2 times before i got this stable GPU.

The first was good it was completly new but they wanted to replace it, the second was crap and crashed even at 135mhz OC. The one i have now is refurbished but exceptional good compared to the last one i got. So an OC of 250-260 seems common for most users here and is not bad and not very good for this card. But on the other hand my PCH is really bad on this board. I never had one which has such high temps... so there are good and bad sites as you can see.

Yeah, only positive. I'm running on a 920XM ES and on a 7970m ES, hahahahaha

And before this I had an ES 6990m, and before that an ES 6970m, lol.

Thanks thats enough for me being confident buying one. 400 Euro doesnt sound too much for one. Btw do you think an 3920xm is even cooler at standard clock speed than the 3820qm? Im not yet planning to OC the CPU at all only temps are important to me. Hell i wish there was an i7-3667u to buy somewhere even it has way lower performance. But 17W sounds too good for me^^.

Yes, there's a huge difference between a 3820QM and a 3610QM, the 3820QM will run cooler at the same speeds, possibly even at higher speeds, it has a lower default voltage and is far superior to the 3610QM, but also much more expensive.

Im planing to buy me a ES version of a 3820qm from ebay for 400 Euro. Any experience with Engineering Samples or Qualification Samples?

These midrange keplers are fantastic overclockers for sure. @svl7 was telling me how great his was overclocking until it mysteriously died...

ugh dont tell me this lol^^

Nice run but noticed tessellation was turned off. Try running it with that on and see if it stresses the GPU temps more.

So i turned extreme tessellation on and let it run for about 1 hour. No artifacts and temps were pretty much the same. frames dropped alot from average 40 to about 20-25 max.

runs absolutely stable. and again TSW is way more demanding.

Here is the score with 350mhz OC, extreme tessellation and full hd:

And this is the same without OC:

btw i wanted to see when heaven crashes and oced to 380mhz. At test 2 it began to get artifacts and crashed at test 6.

This is how high i OCed it in detail:

Ok was a bit curious and tested this heaven tool lol. Its not demanding at all. The fans didnt even kick in with max OC.

Here is my result:

Temps of my CPU barely reach 73 C. When i play TSW temps are min 78 C for the same duration running it. GPU also was very low at 62 C. See pic below:

Wow if you are stable at plus 360 or so AMAZING, I seem to top out in FULL stability at about plus 240 ... I do not know much about that game but if you are maxing it on this card and on an external monitor it is not that demanding especially compared to heaven and bf3 and crysis 2 with hd pack ....

I also know that people who are testing desktop 680's are stable in 3dmark 11 quite a bit faster than they are in heaven ... so I would recommend downloading the heaven 3.0 benchmark and looping it for an hour or so as it will help show if you are really stable and some reports is crysis 2 shows instability even moreso (but I have not tested that yet)

Of course if that is your main game and you are stable in it ,

Congrats on that GREAT GPU in there!!! my modest OC compared to yours is great and I can only imagine another plus 120 like you have

if you are getting stability in

Hm sounds like i have to test this heaven tool. How do i see in this tool if its stable? Will it crash if not? I dont know this tool since im not a hardcore gamer...

Anyone got a crashed system cause of it yet? ^^

Im not a friend of Furmark too cause its unrealistic extreme stresstest the GPU would never see in real usage.

What speeds are you stable at in Heaven 3.0 fully maxed?

I had a driver crash at 280mhz ... seem fine at 250mhz on the core and will see if 260 is stable ... GPU temps are in the low 60's

and THIS modded BIOS ROCKS , SOOOO much more performance!!!! little temperature change LOVE IT!

- - - Updated - - -

I am mostly interested in what the unlocked OC can do for gaming ... so for me looping heaven for an hour or so is telling of the stability and I would welcome any one else's experience with overclocking stability in heaven or crysis 2

Well with max OC i can run its possible for me to play TSW in ultra settings + full HD on external monitor. My fps are about 25-30 which is awesome for this demanding game. Without the mods highest for me possible OC i had to run it in mid settings + full HD with nearly the same fps 30fps+). I was playing for max 2 hours per session. Only the CPU temps and the PCH temps were relatively high then (83 C CPU highest core / 78 C PCH temps). GPU never went higher than 64 C. Its only repasted with MX-4 not liquid metal yet.

Sorry but i dont use heaven or crysis 2. But TSW should work the same way i dont know a more demanding game - bf3 is very low compared to TSW.

And yes this unlocked bios rocks

About the Bios, yes for some reason it is not updated... I'll clear that out with LV3

Any news from your LV3 request [MENTION=4186]Alienware-Frank_L[/MENTION]? Its 1 week ago you wanted to clear that out.

A more techi based answer? I'm not a semi-conductor engineer... but if I'm not mistaken it has a lot to do with the quality of the chip. A better die quality results in less leakage currents and thus run more stable and able to sustain higher clocks. Still a very basic answer, yes... but it really makes a difference.

E.g. look at the 3000MHz RAM which currently gets sold for insane prices... those chips are cherry-picked, each one gets tested before they solder them to the RAM. By only using highest-quality chips you can make a huge difference, far more than only 10-20MHz.

Theoretically it would be possible to release a 650m which runs stable at 1300MHz without much additional heat... but it would simply be too expensive since only very few chips have such a high-quality that they can run such speeds at stock voltage.

Look at Intel, each CPU has it's own basic voltage value... it gets tested and the basic voltage gets set according to the quality of the die. So my 920xm might run at a slightly lower voltage than the one Stam uses... That's a relatively complex process, but in the end it makes a difference.

Thats the answer i was looking for. +1 for you in my hall of fame...again^^. However when i understand correctly its the same difference why a chip gets the name f.e. i7-3610qm (low quality chip) or i7-3820qm (high quality chip). The difference is that they are technically the same chip but run stable at lower or higher clocks. And the same goes for the GT 650m but within the same model number even.

So the conclusion is when deadbydawn has a i7-3610qm like GT 650m and i have a i7-3720qm GT 650m the one with a i7-3820qm has yet to walk into this forum and show us a max OC of like +400 mhz that is stable and what results he gets by your VBIOS mod since this would be the max possible unlocked OC.

because cards are different. each one has it's own personal flavor of OCcapabilities. i.e. in my m17x-r3 i had 3 different 6990m, for each one i had to search for it's max overclock at first, since they were all different.

Thats the logical part i could answer myself. I was looking for a more techi based answer

how i stated, the lower baseclock of the card

And why can i OC it to 350 and you only to 327? Since temps are no problem at all.

lol, right after i wrote it and walked away i was thinking just that ^^ i did disable turbo on my m17x-r4 once and gpu score dropped waaay down!

Yeh thats why i was asking why you got the worse GPU score. What can be the differences between the same specc GPU to another? Heat is definetly not the problem. Specially not from the GPU. And CPU never went past 83 C with highest OC.

Any ideas someone?

My GPU score is even higher than from deadbydawn. I wonder why since he has the better CPU.

NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3610QM Processor,Alienware M14xR2 score: P13698 3DMarks

Ive just submitted the first M14x R2 score. Dunno how to link the statistics here.

This was the highest OC i could run stable on my system and just achieved a new category for my config! CHEERS M8!

NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3610QM Processor,Alienware M14xR2 score: P13698 3DMarks

At 360+ clock OC it begins to become unstable. Maybe my incoming heatsink mods + liquid metal repaste im planning will provide max OC capabilitys.

What does this mean? "You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to svl7 again."

i want to thank you not anyone else lol. However YOU are amazing and thanks alot im only waiting now to test your final version of stock / unlocked BIOS and see how high i can get my 3dmark vantage score .

Hopefully the upload server will be ready soon i cant wait.

Thanks for the tests and posting the results, very interesting findings! Our internal testing showed IC Diamond was the best but we hadn't used Liquid Ultra at the time. Since I'm about to repaste my M18x, I may give it a try and see how it fares. I guess with it being electrically conductive and difficult to remove, many users may still opt to use MX-4 although personally I think MX-4 loses its heat transfer properties far too soon (few months in my case). I was tempted to switch to IC Diamond but of course that scratches surfaces which makes me reticent to try it.

Since svl7 was so helpful for me and the techi comm at all here i wanted to contribute something too. In my opinion its the most effective and productive forum cause of all the modders and competent people here.

IC Diamond has in my opinion now maybe the only advantage of longlivity vs MX-4. The few differences in temperature is not worth the scratches on the surfaces. Only the liquid ultra seems to have a real advantage over the standard TIMs (or any other liquid metal TIM). Sanding the copper heatsink surface to remove it was very easy and quick too. Ofc it leaves some scratches then but thats no prob. However since it needs no cure time and always performs the same it may be that it will really last for years but that needs some longer tests ^^.

I would not prefer IC Diamond over MX-4 but thats my personal opinion. The gain is too few specially under load. I would always use a liquid metal paste from now on and since the liquid ultra is the easiest to apply and remove (for a loss of maybe 1 degree compared to other liquids) i vote for this one.

Maybe i should ask them for some advertising money now but i guess its too late