09/09/09: Benchmarking the GTS250.

ITT: PCs.

So yesterday I acquired 3DMark06 for benchmarking purposes.

New Motherboard plus wireless for the Black Box.

If only I can afford a Core 2 Quad or Core 2 Extreme to complement this.

“Black Box” is the name of my gaming PC, smarties. Because every single hardware on it is black in color. Oh, but not the 80mm casing fan.

Internet Speed Caps – Nightmare.

Connection Speed Caps…

… is apparently the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

Zotac GTS250 1GB (standard edition)?

9800GTX+, is that you?

So yesterday I went to Lowyat with my father to get some stuff to put into my elder sister’s PC and saw this. I went there to buy a new PSU and a new graphics card due to the older ones being broken (I am sooo like feeling to commit a Hannibal Lecture on those housemates of hers who are sooo un-tech savvy that they have very little regard on not shutting down a PC on a task - by turning off the main power source and not the PC first).

Finally! An OS Upgrade!

Thanks to this guy who’s my course member (and also a comrade), I decided to make my laptop as a “scapegoat” to testing a Windows XP 64-Bit Edition that he obtained recently.

What’s more, his newly obtained software coincided with my plans to use a 64-bit OS to make use of my 64-bit ready CPU (it’s an AMD Turion 64×2 TL-58 clocking at 1.9GHz base speed) and also my 4 gigs of RAM, so I prepared the necessary stuff yesterday in a whim (backups etc, it’s not that hard – that guy has an array of softwares that can replace my missing ones, and my files were mostly music files and stuff that I obtained via IDM plus… err, some secret stuff not so important that I had to say it out here.

The installation works, however there were quite a bit of issues that bothers me.

First of all is the unavailability of hardware drivers for the MCP (the Motherboard Chipset module) and the VGA (it’s the display, d’oh). Secondly, that Windows XP has an HD Audio hardware conflict which worsened things for me (there’s no sound playing at all from my laptop at that time), and after much struggling I decided to wait for today and in the process, since too many things will limit my capability of basic things… I went straight ahead for another upgrade to Vista Ultimate 64-bit Edition, also from him. Things worked out well and I managed to make use of my wireless, and finished what was missing. With the chipset and VGA drivers obtained… everything is considered complete for me, and here I am; typing this very first blog post from this newly-upgraded laptop.

All in all, the day was all about “HAHAHAHA!! FINALLY I CAN FULLY UTILIZE MY 64-BIT CPU AND 4 GIGS WORTH OF RAM!!”

And blogging, as a certain someone once said, while waiting for a download to finish is a really good way to kill time… currently I’m getting my weekly supply of Toradora! and Index. Ami, as how I expected it to be, turned out to be way much better than how we know her at her first anime appearance. I’ll be dying to see RyuujiAmi in action…

All right, Shiro out.

YEAH! Overclocking COMPLETE!

And finally, as of 24th of May 2008, I managed to push my laptop to its limits (somehow by accident) by adjusting it’s FSB rate at 250MHz, thus making my CPU go up from the original 1.9 GHz up to 2.4 GHz (1900.6 MHz to 2375 GHz).

Yesterday I played a bit with my RAM timings, so all in all I managed to set it to have a setting of 5-4-4-12 from the stock 5-5-5-15.

Along with that, I managed to put the same overclock settings on my sister’s laptop (though her settings can’t go as far as mine). Her RAM was a bit slower though overall, though I adjusted the timings to be the same as my overclocked RAM, so now I’d say she’s experiencing better speeds (though I’ll have to load the settings manually for her) than her current stock settings.

Whew, so that makes a new set of current specs for my laptop (based after overclocking, as a reminder):

Model: Acer Aspire 4520
CPU: AMD Turion 64×2 Mobile Technology TL-58 2.4GHz
RAM: Corsair 4GB running at speeds of DDR2-832.5 (395.9Mhz), timings set at 5-4-4-12 (I can’t set the 1st 5 to 4, since it’s fixed.)
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 7000M / nForce 610M sharing 256MB RAM running at 522/524 MHz
HDD: 120GB
Operating System: Windows XP SP3

Ah! The joy of a successful overclock.

New RAM, final overclocking results and blah blah blah.

Whew, I’m beat. Went to the PC store in my place today to ask for prices of hardwares in my current plan to build a PC, and also had my laptop’s RAM upgraded from 1.5GB to 4GB. Neat! Though Windows XP can’t read it as 4GB.

And at home today I revised some new overclocking speeds for my laptop, though I decided to tone down some of the speeds due to the instability it caused. And, damn… looks like I need to do some sort of “magical modification” to my current laptop’s cooling system because the temperatures rose up to over 80 degrees Celsius as I was using the home’s PC monitor as a temporary test platform.

Here’s my current laptop at stock specifications(with upgrades if any):

Model: Acer Aspire 4520
CPU: AMD Turion 64×2 Mobile Technology TL-58 1.9GHz
RAM: Corsair 4GB (from the previous 1.5GB)
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 7000M / nForce 610M sharing 256MB RAM
HDD: 120GB, 112GB used (but I don’t intend to change the HDD yet, if I do then that means I will be using Vista)
Operating System: Windows XP SP3

Overclocked settings:

CPU: 2193.6 MHz from the base 1900.6 MHz (increase by 15.42%)
Graphics: 522/524 MHz from the base 350/0 (laugh all you want, but I got at least 49.14% increase over here)
RAM: 769.0 MHz from the basic stock 667.0 MHz. (Roughly, it translates into 365.6 MHz from the base 316.6 MHz, so that means a 15.44% increase.)

All in all I get around 26.67% increase in overall performance, though I don’t know what to increase next. XP

Oh yeah, I used NVIDIA nTune for this though.

Overclocking

Yeah, it says what I am going to say up there.

Having just known about the basics on how it is done, I tried whatever little luck I have on attempting to do some little overclocking on… my laptop. Geh, laugh at me because I’m still a newbie on this, but well at least it’s fun having to know that I can do it. Just started and using the most not preferable platform for it (yeah I know typical consumer laptops were not made for it), I tried over and over looking for the most stable configuration. For this, I crashed my laptop over and over (which is a… well, let’s just say a T_T) until I got it.

I’m using my laptop, an Acer Aspire 4520 with 1.5GB RAM after an upgrade, and 120GB HDD. CPU is AMD Turion 64×2 TL-58 running at 1.90GHz for this. The laptop runs Windows XP SP2, though I might consider performing an upgrade to Windows Vista to utilize the full power of my laptop’s CPU. But that also means upgrading the RAM and HDD too… since I am not happy with Vista’s performance on a 2GB RAM machine I used in one of the labs back in UTM KL.

I used NVidia’s NTune software for this… yeah I know OC-ing using a software is not as good as playing with the multiplier settings and voltages at the BIOS, since NTune only allows modifications to be done on the base system clock rather than the multipliers. As it is, since this is a laptop I can’t access the multiplier setting on my BIOS for sure, of course (apart from minor shared RAM amount changing for the graphics part of the laptop’s motherboard, which means I’ll be intending to upgrade my RAM further in order to have enough excess RAM to be fed to my GC, which is an integrated NVidia GeForce 7000M. Yeah I know I should get one with an 8-series GeForce planted in it, but I can’t since my financial resources are going to be concentrated on building a new PC).

My system base clock is 200MHz and the default (locked, I guess) multiplier for my CPU is 9.5, so do some maths on it and I’ll get 1,900MHz which is the default CPU clock speed of mine. Currently the maximum stable overclock speed I can gain by raising the system clock value is 2,200MHz, but I haven’t really confirmed whether my system failed because of the CPU or the GPU (which I currently overclocked along with the CPU). Maybe I’ll conduct a test later with my stock graphics card settings, and see whether my laptop crashes or not. Oh yeah, NTune will reset all of the overclocked settings back to its factory defaults after each restart (no matter if it’s a hard or cold reboot), so I don’t have to worry about facing problems if I make a mistake in overclocking. Just… I need to be careful not to frequently do it.

For the time being, I am currently running my laptop with the CPU speed of 2,193.7MHz, which means I gave around 15.45% of increase in the original CPU speed of 1,900.0MHz. As for my graphics, the original GPU clock for it is 350MHz (;_; so low…) and 0 for the memory clock (X_X Well, can’t expect much for a consumer laptop, can I?) so I increased them to 500/500. I’d love to push it further and there’s one instance I managed to put it to 700/1000 (NTune’s maximum limit for my laptop) but the hardware crashed as soon as I attempted to run a game. 500/500 is the maximum stable setting, as how I found that out.

Talking about temperatures, yeah my laptop’s idle temperature with the most minimal load possible is 54 degrees Celcius (or 129 degrees Fahrenheit or so I think), but on full load it rises up to a whooping 78 degrees Celcius (or 172 degrees Fahrenheit), which is not something I can be pleased with after looking at the very large temperature gap. In the first place my laptop’s cooling system seems to come with a heatpipe without a fan, which is… well.

Simply put, I should’ve started getting a new PC for the home already and test it to my heart’s content, though I should be careful not to overdo it, else I’ll get some serious lectures from my parents >_< by the way, though the high temperature rise upon load and unmodifiable multiplier and voltage puts me at a disadvantage in trying to achieve better clock speeds, getting to the current speed of approximately 2,200MHz (rounded up from the current 2,193.7MHz to the nearest tens) from the base 1,900 is already something I should be satisfied with for now, considering my limitations.

Oh, and I just learned that my CPU speed drops to more than half when I use power saving mode (yeah I’m too slow to realize it). Not that I feel much change in processing speeds, though I realize some programs do run slower. Apart from that, there’s nothing much.

I’ll be looking forward to creating my home’s new PC! If only I can convince my dad to look around for the necessary hardware though… and if he doesn’t suddenly turn to a “No”, which is my current source of worry. >_<