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OVERCLOCKYOUR LAPTOP

ISSUE 223

FEB 2009

Revealed! How to improve your laptop performance by over 20% for free!

Issue 223 Feb 2009 £5.99 Outside UK & ROI £6.49

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AT FOR A

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LLAR

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Tweak Left4Dead

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AMAZING FREE DVD INSIDE!PERFORMANCE GEAR & GAMING

ISSUE 223 I’D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR

58 games 117 apps Turn to page 118

PCF223.cover 1 18/12/08 12:56:10 pm

52 February 2009

discover that most of the time it’s actually running far slower than the specifi cation allows for.

Actually unlocking the true potential of your graphics is easier than you think. Essentially it simply means updating an INF fi le then taking a few precautions before overclocking the graphics engine. Actually doing this is pretty much identical to overclocking a desktop graphics card, but with the added fun that your graphics cooling is probably shared with your processor.

A good place to start with sorting out laptop cooling is to give your machine a good clean. It’s amazing what a difference dust makes to performance. We’d also recommend grabbing a laptop cooling stand. Replacing the default fans with more powerful ones is worth considering too. Alternatively, you can grab your drill, and start making your laptop chassis a lot friendlier to airfl ow. We’d go for the laptop stand for starters, though. ¤ Alan Dexter

Gaming notebooks are brilliant. Unfortunately they don’t always work – at least not as well as they should.

Sometimes you’ll get a game that won’t play ball, or the performance will be woeful (and it really shouldn’t be). Worry not though, there’s a solution – wrestling back control of your graphics drivers.

You see, while NVIDIA and AMD update their drivers on a regular basis, laptop manufacturers don’t, and they make their machines in a way that these generic graphics drivers don’t work either. The reason, in a word, is heat.

As far as notebook designers are concerned, if you were left to your own devices, you’d unsettle the fi ne balancing act that the system integrator had spent so long getting right – the balance between speed, temperature, aesthetics and battery life. In fact, if you were to examine the actual clockspeeds of your graphics hardware, you’d

Overclock your notebookUnchain yourself from your laptop’s lousy graphics drivers for a performance boost, with only a little tinkering…

PCF223.overclocking 52 17/12/08 1:07:43 pm

NVIDIA vs AMD

February 2009 53

Improve your laptop’s graphicsWe’ve started here by benchmarking our laptop using the latest available drivers from Dell, which in the case of the XPS Gen 2 date back to the heady days of 2005 – when the world was a much simpler place (1). To be fair, these are fairly stable drivers, and most games do work, although the performance on newer games is a little unpredictable. You obviously don’t need to benchmark your own mobile wonder at this point, but it does give you something to compare your overclocks against later on.

Once you’ve done that you should download the latest drivers for your particular graphics core along with the modifi ed INF fi le from the appropriate site – see the separate Nvidia vs AMD box above for the specifi cs on this (2). Once you’ve got them on your hard drive, unpack the drivers to a cunningly titled directory and then overwrite the original INF fi le that’s included in the reference drivers with the modifi ed fi le you retrieved separately, before running the driver setup utility (3). Instead of getting the usual message that there are no compatible drivers for your particular mobile hardware, you should just fl y through the whole process without a problem and be rewarded with up-to-date drivers. This alone should sort out any incompatibility problems you’ve been experiencing, and may even reward you with more frames per second (4). This is just the beginning though. The real tinkering is just around the corner.

There have been substantial differences between ATI/AMD and NVIDIA graphics cores over the years, but when it comes to unlocking your graphics engines in your laptop, it’s surprisingly similar. The only difference is where you get the driver updates from – owners of ATI Mobility Radeon graphics need to grab the INF update from driverheaven.net (http://tinyurl/2939y7) while owners of the green camp’s engines should point their browsers at www.laptopvideo2go.com for the latest drivers and the accompanying INF fi le.

Unfortunately, those with Intel graphics engines aren’t going to benefi t from such driver upgrades as these are automatically updated with the chipset drivers (as the graphics core is part of the north bridge anyway).

Overclocking your notebook

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1

Unpack the lot and bung the modifi ed INF fi le in with the reference drivers, then install

Modifi ed INF fi les tweak GPU reference drivers for hardware specifi c compatibility and performance

Now get gaming – you may already see a compatibility or performance boost

Grab the latest drivers for your specifi c graphics hardware fi rst

Get the reference drivers and a modifi ed INF fi le for your GPU

PCF223.overclocking 53 17/12/08 1:07:47 pm

54 February 2009

Turning it up a notchYou could start overclocking your laptop graphics straight away, but your chances of being successful are low. There is some good news though – installing the default drivers will enable you to run temperature-sensing software, such as the wonderful HWMonitor (free to download from www.cpuid.com). To check how hot your graphics chip gets, leave this on in the background and run a game for 15 minutes or so – hey, it’s work. Once you’ve fi nished, pop back out to the desktop and take a look at the Max value for your graphics card (5). Unless you regularly clean your machine, you’ll probably be surprised at how hot the graphics core gets.

It’s time to give your machine a good clean out. How you go about this depends on your chassis, but essentially you need to fi ght your way down to the laptop motherboard, fans and cores. In the case of the Dell XPS Gen 2, this essentially means taking the whole machine apart – if you have a nice manufacturer, you should fi nd the manual online somewhere to help you with this. Be prepared for some serious unscrewing – you may even have to take your laptop screen off (6). The fi rst things you’ll probably have access to are the cooling fans (7). How many you have and how they are arranged is completely dependent on your chassis, but you need to clean them. Compressed air is your friend here, although lots of blowing and dusting with a tissue can work too. You’ll also need to give the radiator fans on the heat pipes a good seeing to as well – our test machine was just plain fi lthy (8). Give it a clean regardless.

The main thing you’re searching for is the graphics core, which can be seen here, packaged in a block of purest metal

(9). It’s not easy to access the actual silicon in this particular case, as the heatsink completely encases the GPU (10). Grab a star screwdriver though and you’ll pop this baby open to reveal the embossed graphics processor complete with dodgy thermal pad that interfaces with the cooling unit. This heatspreader is okay, but it doesn’t do as good a job as thermal paste, so carefully peel this off and then remove any residue left on the top of the GPU and the bottom of the heatsink (11). Now you can add your thermal paste and reassemble the graphics unit (12). Piece the whole thing back together – carefully now, we don’t want too many screws left over at the end – and you’re ready to start squeezing some more frames out of your mobile kit (13).

Overclocking a laptop’s graphics engine is identical to performing the same operation on a desktop, with the added fun that overheating will slow your entire machine. Even so, it’s not too tricky, and if our testing is anything to go by, there are plenty of extra frames to be had – we garnered a 20 per cent improvement in WoW, and just less than that in 3DMark06.

Install RivaTuner and run it. Click on the Customise option under the Driver settings icon, hit System Settings and tick the Enable driver-level hardware overclocking checkbox. Now you can push the clocks up slowly (10MHz at a time) until you get a stable overclock that actually produces a performance increase. This is why we benchmarked the machine in the fi rst place, so that we had a fi gure we could compare against. With the XPS Gen 2, we managed to take the initial settings of a 450MHz Core and 1064MHz memory clock and go all the way to 530MHz and 1248MHz. Let us know if you manage better.

5

7 6

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Use temperature sensing software such as HWMonitor to check how hot things are getting

Those cooling fans can get real fi lthy: treat them to some compressed air for a new shine

Radiator fans aren’t averse to a good clean either – take a gander at these dirty blighters

Getting hardcore: you may need to entirely disassemble your laptop to get at its innards

PCF223.overclocking 54 17/12/08 1:08:1 pm

February 2009 55

Technical analysisWe’ll freely admit that this machine is getting a little long in the tooth now, but that’s one of the reasons that this system tweakery works so well – it can breathe new life into an old machine. This Gen 2 Dell XPS is still capable enough for everything but the most cutting-edge games. After unlocking the drivers we witnessed a notable improvement in all the games, but it’s the overclocking performance that really impressed – going from just over 20fps in WoW to nearly 30fps is an impressive result, and when used on a cooling tray, it didn’t run any hotter.

3DMark06 INDEX: BIGGER IS BETTER

DEFAULT (450/1106) 2,416

DRIVER UPDATE 2,478

OC1 (475/1106)

OC2 (486/1148) 2,639

OC3 (500/1200) 2,715

OC4 (520/1248) 2,795

OC5 (530/1248) 2,836

Industry standard graphics index

4,0001,000 2,000 3,000 5,000

WOW FRAMES PER SECOND: BIGGER IS BETTER

DEFAULT (450/1106) 21

DRIVER UPDATE 23

OC1 (475/1106) 25

OC2 (486/1148) 26

OC3 (500/1200) 27

OC4 (520/1248) 28

OC5 (530/1248) 29

Real world gaming

4010 20 30 50

910

11

12

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The hallowed graphics core, sunk in an envelope of ash-grey protective metal

Time to get screwing: case everything back up like it was in the beginning

Cracking open this baby reveals the GPU, complete with dodgy thermal pad. Tear this off

Apply some thermal paste for better contact with the heatsink, improving overall conduction

You’re ready to start the overclocking process. Fire up RivaTuner for some incremental fi ddling

PCF223.overclocking 55 17/12/08 1:08:18 pm