Nofew

Khenglish: Just because he's got it running that fast doesn't mean it's a good thing. The faster it runs the more memory errors it hits and the slower it ultimately goes. buluunee: Try running your memory at 1200ish. At 1250 my card actually scores lower than it does at stock memory clocks, but 1200 helps quite a bit.

Okay, something's very fishy. Riri-Fifi, how are you running at 1.087 volts? How come your numbers aren't lined up properly and, above all, how in the world are you running at 1.2 ghz and only hitting 50 C? If you reply by saying "I'm using the 675m, it only has 384 cores", then how on earth did you get over 6,000? My 680m has 1,344 cores and at stock speeds gets 6,000ish. By that logic you should be getting 2,500ish tops even with your settings. Be straight with me: Is that screenshot fake? My bad. That's a 675mx. Missed the "X". Kay. Sorry. Yay for the edit button! Still, how are you running at 50 C? Are you standing outdoors in Antarctica or something?

svl7: Oh, good to hear. And yeah, Sony really cheaped out on the hardware for the PsP's. They also cheaped out on security; that's why we got their root encryption keys. They used a non-random key, really obvious pattern to it. (Well, obvious to whoever the people who cracked it are. To me it's jibberish.) Khenglish: In your signature it says you're getting a 330W PSU. Can you tell me if that works for you with the M17x? I've heard it shouldn't work, but my gut says it might be different now.

svl7: Oh, so there's not even an average range? Interesting.. The more I poke around the less this feels like overclocking a CPU. 'Tis gunna be interesting to see what happens once I start poking around at the voltages. While it's on my mind, is there a safe limit to how many times I can flash the vbios? The PsP's NAND could only take about 20 or 30 writes before cells started dying and things became corrupted. Riri-Fifi: How'd you get that high with a 675? o_o.. You have like, 1/4th the cores of a 680 but the score's so close!

svl7: What's the usual limit for a 680m at stock voltages? From what I can tell the typical limit is 1200 at 1.1 volts, and I'm at 996 now. Assuming things are linear that means I'd get near 1100 at 1.05..

Temisan Kpogho: This won't help you overclock your GPU. You just want a vbios for that. It might be worth doing your BIOS along with it if you want to adjust your fan curve, but in my experience so far changing those settings has no actual effect on the system.

ctasich: From what I understand you want a Clevo (4GB) vbios for your system. You may want to wait for someone else to confirm that though. As for overclocking, yes, you've pretty much got it right. Just keep in mind that you can't adjust your voltage from within windows; you need to flash a vbios with a new voltage in it. Also, clockspeeds are locked to bins of 13 mhz. In other words, don't add 1 mhz at a time or something like that: add 13 at a time, since 12 or less won't always have an effect at all and 14 or more might actually tack on 26 all of a sudden. When testing, be sure to run a variety of programs. Your GPU may run some fine and fail at others. This may or may not be acceptable depending on your personal preferences and desires for peace of mind. In my experience, the first symptom on my Dell 680m is a stuttering camera during 3Dmark's Fire Strike. It tends to stand still and then suddenly jump froward. After the jump, things keep moving but the camera stays still before it starts moving with the scene like it should. It's like the GPU tried to drop frames but didn't do it correctly.

It depends on what you say "safe" means to you. Personally I'd say yes, I'd say anything under 90C should keep your laptop running for years. I have another laptop that hits over 100C on stock speeds for long periods of time (12+ hours straight) and it's been working just fine for over three years. Believe it or not, constant fluctuations can actually do more damage than severe temperatures. The PCB's expand and contract slightly when you're going from 60 to 90 C and vice-versa. If you go from one to the other about five times an hour it may actually do more damage than running it over 90C for long periods of time. In other words, if you're doing a lot of benchmarking don't let your laptop cool between rounds. Keep going straight through unless you're trying to beat a record or something. Regardless, if you want to be sure it'll survive for the next decade, be sure to revert to factory speeds (or even underclock) whenever you don't need the extra power and keep your computer turned on (Not in sleep mode, keep it on) but idle when you're not using it so you don't make it go from 15 C to 45+ C and back every day. If you're super-paranoid it might even be worth trying to run a benchmark or something while you have a program with inconsistent CPU usage running just so your CPU's fed a constant supply of voltage rather than going up and down all the time. On the M17x, it's a good idea to keep your fans running at 2,500 RPM when the system's idle or under low stress as well. The fans can turn completely off and hold your temperatures for the CPU and GPU around 60 C, while having them at 2,500 keeps them down near 45ish. Depending on how much stress you put on it when it's not idle this may or may not help its longevity.

svl7: Since you're apparently doing voltage tests, would you mind overvolting the Dell 680m 80.04.5B.00.02 card to 1.025 or so? I've asked before but it got buried pretty fast. aziraphale: His vbios's have the splash so people don't steal his work. This is fairly standard for any hacker that has to resort to hexediting. Google around a bit. As an example, "Dark_Alex" did it too when he was making modified firmware for PsP systems. Later people actually tweaked the notice so it read their names and tried to pass his work off as their own. This led Alex to rewrite part of the firmware to essentially self-destruct on the PsP if the bootsplash was changed. In other words, don't muck with it. You can deal with a two-second pause during boot.

Actually, a 580's just better than some 600-series cards. It depends on what the game's trying to do. I don't know all the technical details on this one but I know the 580's still got some special stuff compared to 600's. You may want to Google "architecture" or "chip architecture" to get a better idea of what I'm talking about. The game coming out of beta won't fix it. Almost every game is designed to be as easy on your system as possible to ensure smooth gameplay across all systems so the developer can make the most money; they wouldn't make a lot if their game was only playable by people with dual Titans. As a result, these games won't put your GPU under enough load to force it to run at higher clockspeeds. Regardless, this isn't a problem, it's actually a perk. It means your card's so powerful that it "isn't even breaking a sweat"!

phila_delphia: Some do, but not many. I don't understand why it'd be useful. As it is the nVidia cards have four clockrates: power-saving (135 mhz on 680m), balanced (405 mhz), full load (758) and boost (however high you +set it). The card automatically changes between them as required. This extends the lifetime, keeps your temperatures lower and helps your system stay stable. I don't see why anyone would "need" to run it faster 24/7. If you think you do because you're "not scoring as high as you should" and "I can see my usage is over 90%", that's normal. It only clocks up if the usage is consistently near 98% or more. If not, it'll downclock its self until it is. In this case the bottleneck is actually your CPU, not GPU. Go play a more graphically intensive game and it should stay up at higher speeds.

xZorbZx: phila_delphia's right, I didn't mean to offend, it's just that geeks with high standards always have an air of arrogance and harshness around them to not-as-geeky people. It comes with the "cut the bullcrap and get to the point" attitude we all have. I don't mean any offense with the following post either, though I'm fairly sure you'll read it like that anyway. I really am trying to help though, so read it (don't skim!) and the page I link to. It'll help you a lot. I was treated great when I came here. I adhered to the rules; one of them states that you must make a minimum of five quality posts upon joining. Based on this it's safe to assume that the majority of the community consists of hackers. Asking for help without giving out help yourself doesn't count as a quality post, it just means you're begging. No, donating $5 doesn't give you any special privileges or respect, it just lets you download things sooner; you still need to make a few good posts before people will respect you. The fact you made two posts in a row rather than editing the first and appending your new post shows that you really don't understand how these forums work. Stuff like that ticks people off, especially when a mod has to come around and merge them for you later. I really, really recommend that you read this. It explains exactly what communities like this expect out of people and how to conduct yourself. Long story short, new people need to prove their worth. They need to show they can figure things out by themselves and that we aren't going to sink hours into them and get nothing back. This happens really often, especially from people who say things like "kay, here's $5, now give me a nice big chart." This is a community, not Wal-mart. </rant> Annnyway. I did answer your question, you just didn't read my post. In case you're having trouble understanding it, a simpler answer is "there's too many variables". Every single chip, even those with the same model number from the same distributor, is completely unique. 1.05 volts on one chip will have different results than 1.05 on another. Heck, if you have a particularly bad sample then you might already be at 1.05. The 3630qm will pull close to 80 watts if you have it running under maximum clocks. (You /can/ overclock it, just not very far. It's locked in firmware. (Yes, even CPU's have their own BIOS's. Well, it's actually called "microcode", but the concept's close.)) Khenglish: Just out of curiosity, have you ever tried disabling Turbo Boost so you don't have your PSU pushing so close to its limit? Depending on your game you might not notice a difference between stock speeds and turbo speeds.

xZorbZx: See this post. Also, 1.5 is going to kill your card. I highly suggest you start overclocking on something that's not expensive to replace -- You will blow your card to bits if you push it much over 1.05 and don't know what you're doing. Seriously, do your homework (or midterms, in this case -- Overclocking is a lot more in-depth than you think!) Having a PSU period will limit how much voltage you can put into it, naturally. You'd need to be connected directly to a lightning storm or something to give it anything close to "infinite" volts. If you're asking "will I be limited compared to, say, a 650 watt PSU", then yes, you will. I can tell you from experience now that 240 watts is going to limit you to choosing between a 4 ghz CPU/+135 GPU or a stock CPU/+450 GPU. Depending on what you're doing you may want to switch between the two.

I'm not sure if it is or not. My card doesn't actually have Optimus in it so I've never heard that sound before. Yesterday though, while I was helping someone with computer issues we heard that sound (albeit on an older laptop that didn't have a dGPU to begin with) while it was failing and taking its last breaths. If I were you I'd back up any important data before doing anything else just to be on the safe side, but considering that Optimus actually turns your dGPU off rather than just downclocking it, it's also possible that what you're hearing is totally normal. Like I said before though, I don't know for sure.

You'll be fine, don't worry about it, but you don't need this BIOS for overclocking on that system. It won't help you one bit. It's mostly just for curious minds, I'd say. Really, I've had it for a while now and I've never adjusted any of the extra settings. Contrary to what the pictures show you, you cannot downclock your iGPU on an M17x with this bios to free up more room for your regular computation cores. You can't on an m18x either, unless you've got the i7-3940xm.

dadam: Define "clicking issue". Also, open up MSI Afterburner and watch your GPU clock in the bar graph. Run a benchmark and see if it remains steady. If not, and your temperatures are in check the entire time, and you've got your laptop plugged into a strong enough charger, then one of svl7's vbios' would probably help. tigyi and Trach62: There's a "thanks" button on the bottom left of everyone's posts. Click that if you want to give thanks rather than just saying "thanks" in your next post. All quality posts need to contribute a decent amount of information rather than just trying to up your post count. I'm not saying that was your intent, but that is the result and the reason the button exists. There's a lot of forums where people ruthlessly thank everyone just so that number gets bigger. Thanks for thanking me, though! (And same to everyone else who thank'd me!)

You might just have a bad chip, then. Technical stuff below! You don't need to read it. Long story short, some chips just don't come out well and can't be overclocked as far. When microchip manufactures make their devices, they don't actually know what'll come out until it's done. Let's say you're Intel. You have three chip designs you can make today: i3, i5 and i7. Let's say you settle on i7's for the day. You get the mold (which is basically a film like you'd find in a camera) and shine a light through it onto a large wafer. Anything that's not hit by that light will then be etched away by dumping it in a tank full of corrosive chemicals. Once it's done, each copy is cut out (and there's hundreds to thousands per wafer) and some further assembly is performed. At the end of all that, each chip is tested by a "chip tester" that essentially asks them very low-level questions and makes sure they all come out right. Now, here's the catch: About half will be wrong on the entire chip that it's just discarded. Of that half that makes it through, not all of them are perfect! Did you know that every i7-3930k actually has /eight/ cores, which actually makes it a Xeon, but two are defective and are thus deactivated in firmware and then sold as an i7? Yeah. That's really what happens. All chip manufacturers do the same thing. If they didn't, they'd be flat broke. GPU manufacturers are even more sensitive to these issues. The 680 GTX has 1,536 cores. That's a lot of places where things can go wrong and get it demoted to a 670 GTX. They hope for the best; they hope for all 1,536 cores to work just fine and the chip to conduct electricity as it should, they hope they can make 680's, but in general this won't happen. 660 and 670's are far more likely. It'd be stupid to throw out a partially broken product if it can still be fixed to work within lower expectations. I mean, if you have a bag of potato chips, you don't only eat the big whole ones and throw the rest away, do you? After that, they still don't know what they've made. They can classify it as an i7, Xeon, etc, but don't know the model number yet. To find this out they put the chip on another device that carefully raises the voltage and clock until it finds a good balance. This is why some chips with the same model number use more or less voltage and are more or less overclockable. A "golden sample" is like the Holy Grail for overclocking. Those are chips that have exceptionally low voltage requirements for their model number. Typically this happens in one of two ways: Either Intel ends up with an i7-3970x and says "We have too many. They're not selling. Let's put an i7-3930k label on it instead and sell it as that so whoever gets it has longer longevity and we don't have a surplus of stock.", or the sample scores just below the requirement to be an i7-3970x and becomes an i7-3930k. In either case, you suddenly have the power of an i7-3970x (except with only 12 megs of L3 cache rather than 15) with an i7-3930k label. You can overclock it as far as you would an i7-3970x. You might be asking, "But Nofew, pray tell, if the factory sets the voltage the chip runs at, then shouldn't people with a Golden Sample still have the same overclocking potential as the rest of us since their vbios probably lowers their input voltage too?". You'd be right, that would be the case, if it wasn't for a guy named Werner Heisenberg and the fact circuits on chips are so small, under 30 nanometers. There's this thing called the "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle". (EDIT: Okay, apparently this isn't the correct name. What's coming next is all true, save for the name of the phenomenon.) Basically, it boils down to the fact that we have circuits so small that only about 100-200 electrons can actually fit in the circuits at a time. Voltage is the "speed" of the electron flow. The lower it is, the slower things will move and the less heat it will make. Amperage is how densely packed it is. Believe it or not, your processor uses over 40 amps. That's huge for small electronics. It's like trying to get a massive, constantly-moving group of people to walk across a bridge that's only 60 feet wide. Everyone has to stand shoulder to shoulder, and each row has 40 people in it. They have to move slowly or some will fall off, and they all need to keep moving so 40 come out at the other side every second. If less people stand in the same row, they need to run faster. If they run too fast the bridge will break from swaying too much, and this is the typical limit people run into with overclocking. However, when you're at this small of a scale, the fear is that people will fall off and you'll need to speed up more to keep the same throughput, which in turn knocks off more people and creates a nice feedback loop that inflates the voltage required. Things are happening on such a small scale that errors can't reliably be detected. Higher heat and voltages cause these errors to happen more often. In other words, less is more! Seriously! There comes a point that decreasing the voltage is more beneficial than increasing it. Due to the way the atoms are acting, pumping more voltage in throws more out of whack than you put in and you're effectively pushing less voltage into the chip. Trying to cram less inside in the first place keeps things tame and lets them do their job properly. This is why Golden Samples are golden. They're below a critical threshold that lets their owners actually do this to them. Regular samples already have their voltages too high to work this way; they're going to keep leaking electrons too fast and there's nothing special that can be done. That being said, it does not mean that if you have a Golden Sample that you always decrease the voltage rather than increase it. You still bring it up from time to time but there's different rules in play. The potential is higher, but there are certain "magic islands" that are kind of randomly left in the middle that you need to find rather than caring about your temperatures (since your voltages, if you find an island, will be lower than someone with a regular sample trying to hit the same clockrate). These islands are special little places where the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is kept at bay so the extra voltage is actually helping rather than hindering. They'll push the chip faster than non-Golden Samples at the same voltage can ever go. Finding them is complete guesswork in most cases; It's called the "Uncertainty Principle" for a reason! Much like the Golden Samples, there are what I call "bad apples". These can come about in various ways, but in general they arise either due to a shortage of stock that forces the company to accept lower-grade components as higher-grade ones, they're damaged at some point during installation, or temperature kills part of them. In any case, these parts require extra voltage for some reason. This lowers their overclocking potential. These samples still follow the same rules as normal chips do when it comes to overclocking; they simply have less potential. So yeah. By the way, nVidia GPU's work in groups of 13 mhz at a time. Although you think you changed only 1 mhz, you really tripped over a line that caused it to change 13. Likewise, if you ran at +349, it'd be the exact same speed as +350. Same with 348, 347, 346 and so on, down to 338. Just sayin'.

Trach62: No. There's better cards than what you have, like mine. I typically get P7.7k with no overvolting. "Mobile" nVidia cards are pretty much just desktop cards with a vBIOS that limits overclocking. They're otherwise pretty much identical. The 675mx is a desktop 660, the 680m is a desktop 670, and the 680mx is a desktop 680. Notice how the core count and memory transfer rates match, even though the clockrate and memory capacity differ. (Remember that we're just comparing the GPU core, not the entire platform. The core is the only part nVidia makes; the rest comes down to Dell, MSI, Galaxy and whoever else decides to purchase from nVidia.)

Trach62: You can't. Apparently the voltage modifier in Afterburner and such can't be unlocked (or it can be but svl7 hasn't found the right things to play with), so instead you have to ask for a vbios that comes with a pre-modified voltage. Maybe if we get enough people together asking for overvolts he'll do them all at once. That'd be shiny! And zappy.

Suddenly, silence. Guess that makes it okayish for me to just ask.. Is there any chance you can mod the Dell 2 gig 80.04.5B.00.02 vbios to have some extra voltage? I've asked before but you seem to have skipped over my posts. Maybe they were too long. If it's not too much trouble, could you also raise (or lower) the minimum clock limit so I can bring it down to like, 10 mhz? I like seeing what happens when I underclock stuff.

The limit is on your GPU, not your BIOS. Please provide your vBIOS instead. There's instructions over yonder . Just follow them until you're in DOS, then do "nvflash --save myvbios.rom" and toss that up here, along with any information you can (Series, amount of RAM, vendor (of the GPU, not your entire computer! This won't be "nVidia".), etc). Note that the forum doesn't accept .rom files. You'll need to zip it in order to upload it.

It's really in the BIOS. There's a modification on TechInferno over here that explains how to wire two M17x PSU's together in parallel to provide a total of 480 watts to the system. It actually does use the extra power. Note the special blue "signal" wire that identifies the PSU as an M17x adapter. I don't think you need to add support, but rather remove a check for that signal. This also means that it should be consistent across all InSyde BIOS's, so in theory you don't even need my specific laptop; any that is picky about which adapter to take a charge from should work. Probably. I hope. Alienware is owned by Dell. I have an older Dell laptop that refuses to use any charger but the one specifically made for it, even if it gives the exact same voltage and amperage. Upon boot with an incorrect charger it displays a BIOS screen that says something along the lines of "the connected AC adapter is not recognized. This laptop will not accept current from the AC adapter. Please connect the correct adapter and press F1 to continue." When you first attach a charger it gives a series of pulses or something that identifies its model, and the laptops use that to figure out if they "should" accept a charge from it. As it is, the M17x will boot up and run off the M18x adapter (meaning the specs are definitely correct), but it'll keep the CPU and GPU underclocked and won't allow it to charge the battery since it thinks it won't have sufficient power, even though it does. What can I do that'll help you? I don't want to physically ship my laptop to you, but I work with discrete electronics as a hobby and I'm decently sure I have all the tools needed to test things.

svl7: Just got word from another forum that the M17x R4 won't accept an M18x's charger (which proves an extra 70 watts over the standard AC adapter). I saw some screenshots of another InSyde BIOS that let you select the kind of adapter you have. Is there any chance you'd be able to unlock that feature or, better yet, set it to just take any adapter? The extra 70 watts would go a long way.. GamerBR: Can you measure the wattage coming out of your wall? If it's fluctuating like crazy while you're benchmarking, but only when overclocked, then it's likely being throttled. Try underclocking your CPU and see if that fixes it. If it does then it's your adapter that's the problem and you're in the same boat as me. If it's not, then it's probably something in your BIOS or vBIOS.

Andir: You can't. You need to flash from from DOS or things will go very, very wrong. It might be doable if your OS is 32-bit but I wouldn't tempt fate if I were you. Besides, if you need to flash your vbios chances are you're 64-bit in the first place.

There's a shiny mod over yonder that claims to pump 480 watts into the laptop. I figure as long as it'll take a charge off the M18x adapter it'll accept all 330 watts. Anyway, I have no reason to doubt this forum so far so I'll go ahead and order one when I get the chance and report back about how it goes. On another topic, I'm wondering how they fit two GPU's in an M17x in that mod..