Khenglish

Weird combo. ME FW supports overclocking, but BIOS does not.

Weird. Sometimes after playing around with my ME FW the BCLK slider goes away like it did for you. XTU reinstalls usually fix it though. On a non-modded ME FW it will show the BCLK slider, but it will be greyed out. Maybe try installing the ME driver from intel's site? I thought an XTU install would handle that though.

Yes that is unlocked. Does XTU let you change BCLK?

Setfsb supports direct SMBUS register writes so that in case the program does not have data on your PLL, you can use the PLL's datasheet and set the registers manually. If you can find the datasheet on your PLL link it to me and maybe I can figure it out.

The BCLK mod worked with both stock BIOS and prema's BIOS. Is the slider visible? Sometimes XTU decides not t show it at all for me. Have you tried the reset to defaults option in the BIOS? I know for some things I needed to do that. Not sure about ME FW though since I haven't flashed it much.

Surprising. My card will downclock once it hits 90C even with svl7's BIOS so I think your cards are throttled at all times. Is this a P370EM GPU1? Those things run stupidly hot without a lot of work. Big repetitive temperature fluctuations can warp the card and break solder joints, killing the card. 93C is borderline of causing that, especially considering the 90C throttle point, Your card might be OK with it in the long term, or it might not.

What is error 26? The ASUS dumps I have seen have unrestricted flash image access. A common error besides lack of privileges is that FTC does not have data on your flash ROM.

Paste not covering the whole die will increase temps dramatically.

I can't make anything out of your pictures. It's common for thermal paste residue to be left behind. Many pastes will leave a haze that is difficult to remove. If that radiator really is a perfect fit, then you can swap the radiators with a toaster oven, solder paste, and some C clamps. Your current radiator sucks, but that one is good. They will have used 63/37 solder, which melts at 183C/361F. Don't go much hotter or else the heat pipes will burst. If you are seriously considering the radiator swap, PM me.

Yeah I don't get how a single fan can cool 2 aluminum radiators. The P150/170 CPU fan isn't very big, but the GPU fan is.

I have a 240W and was getting shutdowns with the CPU at 4.3ghz and gpu at 1V 954mhz. I'm thinking that you will occasionally get shutdowns as well with a 240W. I recently got a 330W m18x PSU and everything is fine now. 19.5V is close enough to 19V that is does not matter. I suppose it's possible for a PSU to be significantly overspec and be an issue, but my 240W PSU is 19.48V unloaded, and the 330W is 19.58V unloaded, which are within 5% of 19V.

I'm not sure how the rumor started that overclocking PCI-E was bad. Maybe it's a throwback from the fsb days where overclocking AGP also overclocked the ATA, sometimes causing HDD corruption. The fact is that there is nothing bad about it. BCLK does not overclock the SATA. FSB/BCLK overclocking was done frequently by eGPU users on 4 and 5 series chipsets, and there were no negatives except possible instability. From a performance perspective though it is extremely minor with just 1 card. Not really worth trying unless you're on x8 2.0 or worse IMO.

Interesting that you could already move the slider. Before the mod my BCLK slider was greyed out. @cr0bar I just checked your dump and you forgot to edit the clock range definition section. The clocks have the wrong flags so that XTU cannot see them.

yeah I can't get the stuff off other than sanding, which is OK for the heatsink, but probably a bad idea for the CPU die.

The intel doc I got doesn't say why to change it, but it does recommend setting it to 0x00000888 from default, so I did. I wish I knew why. It would be great if intel explained their changes better so that maybe we could try some settings that intel hasn't already suggested. Ex. SATA is not overclocked, and even sata 3.0 holds back many SSDs. I see how to overclock the SATA, but Intel doesn't say why they don't overclock it, so I am afraid of trying it.

Installing XTU should also install the necessary drivers for changing BCLK. Upload your ME FW dump for me to take a look.

Yup that's the top end P150 screen. Thanks for linking.

the top clevo P150EM screen is very highly rated. I came from a 72% gamut screen for this, and 95% is a very noticeable and welcomed improvement. The screen is matte. It has some motion blur despite being rated at 15ms, but there are screens that are much worse in that regard. Mine does have substantial backlight bleed though, but it seems I am one of the few. The viewing angles are good for TN. It is a 6-bit screen so you can notice the dithering/banding sometimes, but I'm not aware of any 8-bit TN screen for laptops. The IPS screens I believe have poor response times so you will get bad motion blur, and the color quality will only match that of the P150 screen, so all you will gain is viewing angles. Also they will want a 50 pin connector while you likely only have a 40 pin. Unfortunately I cannot remember the model name off the top of my head.

At stock a 680m is hardly any faster than a stock 7970m, so in theory crossfire 7970m will blow away a single 680m. Unfortunately that is not the case since crossfire is currently broken. Crossfire gets meaninglessly high fps since both cards will turn out frames at the same time instead of properly alternating, so with crossfire you get the actual performance of one card.

When using my 680m on battery I force the card to run at 2D volts (.8375V) by running nvidia inspector in command line with "-forcepstate:0,8" (without the quotes). Then you can overclock the 2D clocks. Unfortunately the 2D clocks can only be raised to 405/400 (actual), which is particularly limiting, especially on the memory. Would be interesting if we could have undervolted 2D BIOSes. .8375V sounds pretty excessive for 405 core. The card boots up in P5 so an unstable P8 should not matter for flashing back.

Yeah the biggest problem is the crossfire. If getting just 1 card then a 7970m is fine, but 2 is no go (oddly though 3 works fine in desktops). I'm not expecting the next graphics card refresh to be significant, and haswell doesn't seem to be that much faster than ivy bridge from leaked results so far. In my opinion it depends on what you have now. As long as you at least have a fermi based card and a high end 1st gen i7 quad I would wait. Any worse though and I would just get something now.

Just an FYI you are however unable to use svl7's 80.04.33.00.10 BIOSes if you have a 680m. They don't work well with secure boot.

The only thing I am aware of is very minor power saving settings, and if you use an eGPU on x2 or x4 you can use FITC to permanently set x2 or x4.

Wow you stole that thing. The 680m alone costs close to $700. 953 core on stock volts seems standard, maybe slightly better than average if it's fully stable. Mine did 940 stable, with 953 just a hair unstable. How's your memory? Memory overclocks seem to vary a lot. Yeah I play with the lights some too. My favorite is red-green-blue. When using 3 different colors I just find green in the middle to make it much better.

I assume you're running the unlocked stepping 4 ES 3720qm? And what core clock?