noric

@rhx123 Thanks for your benchmarks! Would you mind looking at device manager to see what's the PCI address space required by the GTX 750 Ti? Older GTX 650 Ti card used to require a higher PCI space than all other nvidias. You will find it out in device manager > GTX 750 TI > Resources. Thanks! @the_grinch You want a PE4L or a PE4H. If you don't plan to change your notebook soon, older versions of PE4L or PE4H will work too, but if you plan to switch to a sandy bridge or later system you want a PE4L 2.1 or a PE4H 3.x.

Great news! What's the PCI address space required by the GTX 750 Ti? Has nvidia increased it over previous cards?

I don't exactly understand what you are saying. If I use a blower fan (they use to call this way fans which exhaust out of the pci-express bracket) it won't blow inside the enclosure, it will blow outside.

I was wondering if it would be better to use a graphics card with a blower (single) fan (which exhausts hot air out of the rear of the vga) instead of a double fan (which cools down more effectively but doesn't exhaust air out). I was wondering this especially if I'm going to use a closed enclosure. Would it be wiser to use a blower fan vga?

You may want to search if a custom bios with removed whitelisting is available. https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/forum/55-lenovo/

Thanks guys, your knowledge is almost endless! About the 5V thing, I think I'll supply extra 5V juice too, since I don't think it's a good idea to pull much current out of the express card. My notebook does stand an external hdd through a usb3 expresscard adapter, so it may work for eGPU too, but it's better not to stress it, if possible. Another option is waiting for the new upcoming PE4L and see if they eliminate that 5V requirement. AFAIR it's one of nando's requests to the manufacturer.

Would you mind showing me an example of such dropdown circuit? I'm not so expert. :-)

Would it be possible to use a 12V power supply such as theese? Or will the 5V requirement of the PE4L make this not possible?

Would be interesting to see how these new Maxwell architecture scales on our limited 5Gb/s bus. Do you think we should expect any difference versus previous Kepler/Fermi cards? It looks like GTX 670/760 are already bottlenecking our x1 PCIe interface.

Thanks for replying! Unfortunately not the results we were hoping for sandy bridge laptops... :( I don't think you'll be able to go past x29, because even if you lowered the temps, you are already hitting the 45W tdp wall. However, you may want to increase thermal dissipation so that you can run x29 in a more fresh environment. 93° is quite high.

Thank you very much kaladeth! Did you get those results during the TS-bench? If that's the case, you did it right! It would be a great find for SB systems, because Tech Inferno Fan's findings here would appear to be limited to his specific system (HP 2560P).

Yes, I agree with you. This should be the test to try.

Hey Nando, do you think we can safely assume win8.1 allows 1.2 link with disabled integrated graphics? Something like xp days?

Yup, very well. Thank you very much. Very interesting list of battery tweaks.

About your xbox psu (very interesting ), How did you get the red cable (5V) to be detachable from the PE4L? It can't go through that 8 pin cpu cable, can it?

Can such a huge downclock be related only to TDP? He probably had some overheating, because from 36 to 45W there's still some headroom. Nice step up on IB, by the way. About idle power, I read on a german forum some time ago that the Lenovo E530 was also more power hungry ad idle than the E520. It was something like 5 vs 6 hours battery life, so pretty much the same as you are finding on your hp notebooks.

Hey nando, what about idle power consumption in SB vs. IB? That's a very important factor in a mobile environment. Did you say anything about IB being more consuming at idle? This could only be tested on IB system, by pulling the IB cpu and plugging a similar specifications SB cpu... @kaladeth: could you please try to see in throttlestop the voltage and TDP at maximum multithread performance and at x27 multiplier (such as nando is testing)? Also, what about the temps of your 2860qm? Thanks.

No, I don't have it yet. But I was wondering if it would make any sense going for a GTX670 to play at 1080p.

@bjorm: do you think there would be any advantage going from a GTX660Ti to a GTX670, with a 1080p configuration? I ask because the only difference between those cards is the memory bandwidth, which (I think) could be more than enough for a 1080p configuration even on the GTX660Ti.

Great idea! But how did you get the red cable (5V) to be detachable from the PE4L? It can't go through that 8 pin cpu cable, can it?

Did you mean 3x12V and 3xGnd? Also, what did you do with that 8 pin power extension cable? Thanks.

Thanks Tech Inferno Fan. I was thinking that the GTX 670 weren't so appealing, because it's the same as the 660 Ti other than a higher memory bus width. Isn't such a high memory bandwidth a bit overkill for playing in 1080p? Just asking. Edit: to accomodate the 670 with the 175W psu, would I be able to do it by undervolting the card? Or it wouldn't startup?

Thanks for the info. About the memory allocation, I think you're right. The second memory block in your screenshots is a 128MB block and the other two are even smaller, so I'd guess this vga is like ordinary nVidia ones. Infact the chip is different from the stock GTX 650 Ti, if I'm not mistaken. Would you guys think that the XBOX 203W psu would have enough juice for a GTX 680 (rated 195W by nVidia site)? Other option would be a GTX 660 Ti (rated 150W), for which I would opt for the XBOX 175W adapter. What do you think about it? If the XBOX 203W adapter can't power the GTX 680, then I'll go for the smaller 175W psu. Thanks.

Thanks for the benchmarks! Could you please tell me if your GTX 650 Ti Boost needs a 256MB memory block (like ordinary GTX 650 Ti) or if it uses 128MB+64MB+32MB slots (like all other nVidias)? Thank you. You can see it in device manager. Edit: also, could you tell me anything about your 175W XBOX psu implementation? Is it any different than the 203W psu?

Well, I thought ME firmware were included in the bios. However, if you say that Intel officially doesn't support this, I doubt that Lenovo will. I wonder what microcode they have implemented, by the way... Thanks for the info, anyway.