aaronjb's Arima W830-DA Review - Page 2

Right - first update as I have all the info for that right now:

It seems that whoever assembled my machine (either Arima or Evesham) used some kind of thermal pad, rather than thermal paste - whatever it was had set hard and was partially voided at one end of the CPU.

So, I've now cleaned all that off and applied ArcticSilver 5 to the CPU as per the AS instructions:


(sorry for the bad pic, my camera has a lousy macro mode)

Now, on the subject of CPU drivers..

I spent all afternoon running benchmarks with the following procedure:

I created (well, ok, Jos created) an nLite XP Pro CD with all the XP bloat stripped out - it's a tiny CD image - then installed that and didn't install any drivers.

I created a Ghost image of that install so that I'd have a clean install to go back to between every test.

And what I can say is this (screenshots and accurate numbers to follow):

The CPU driver makes next to no difference for me - in fact, the Turion driver dropped my 3DMark scores by 30-50 points.

What made the biggest difference was the graphics drivers - the fastest were the standard Arima drivers (8x.xx series drivers) which get me nearly 10k in 3DMark. The slowest by some 700 points were the latest Xtreme-G MobileForce 91.3x drivers from TweaksRUs.

What's especially weird about that is that a colleague of mine who has an XPS M1710 (single 7900 GTX 512Mb) gets exactly the opposite result - best scores with the latest drivers.

Perhaps SLi optimisations, or perhaps Arima have done some other tweaking to the drivers..

And now...

Ok, so the 3DMark benchmarks I've run so far, ordered by fastest first

1) The Arima nForce platform drivers, Arima nVidia ForceWare 84.15 video drivers and Arima supplied AMD Athlon processor driver, stock clocks: 9947


2) Arima nForce platform drivers, Arima nVidia ForceWare video 84.15 drivers and the AMD supplied Turion processor driver, stock clocks: 9935


3) Arima nForce platform drivers, Xtreme-G Mobile ForceWare 84.56, Arima supplied Athlon processor driver, o/c 391MHz core & 520MHz mem: 9931


4) Arima nForce platform drivers, Xtreme-G Mobile ForceWare 84.56 and Arima supplied Athlon processor driver, stock clocks: 9804


5) nVidia nForce4 platform drivers, Xtreme-G Mobile ForceWare 91.37 and AMD Turion processor driver, stock clocks: 9220


6) Arima nForce platform drivers, Xtreme-G Mobile ForceWare 91.31 and Arima supplied Athlon processor driver, stock clocks: 9200



As I said in my previous post - between each benchmark I restored the ghost image which contained no drivers at all so as to avoid any driver contamination, then installed the platform driver (reboot), video driver (reboot) and CPU driver (reboot) in that order, each time, followed by 3DMark05, then another reboot and then ran the test.

The results are... interesting, if nothing else.

Damn, just no pleasing some folks

I need to get some additional pics, plus I've only done the CPU so far - I want to do the GPUs as well, then I can get a guide up for all three things

Oh yes - objective achieved!

My final (for now ) 3DMark05 benchmark is..

10123!



That was achieved using:

Arima nForce platform drivers
Arima nVidia ForceWare drivers (84.15 series)
AMD Athlon CPU driver (1.2.2.2)

GPUs are overclocked to 380/520 from 375/500
FSB is overclocked to 205MHz in SysTool, however SysTool reported my stock 200MHz FSB as 193MHz, so I think it's safe to say I'm actually pushing this right up to 212MHz, which makes an internal clock of 2.544GHz


Pretty happy with that

Ok, that's it for now - no more overclocking until I AS5 the GPUs, GPU RAM and SLi chipset!

But, the final score?

10178!

Oh yes..



Almost 214MHz FSB (based on the SysTool inaccuracy again), same GPU clocks, nothing else running but SysTool.

The laptop was sat on my NotePal cooler for this, and there's a fan by the PC on oscillate (for me as well as the PC) as it's 30C (that's 86F) in here right now - not really overclocking weather!

Well, 06 scores are a little disappointing so far - perhaps the newer drivers would favour 06..

But a non overclocked result on a full XP install with nothing removed - 3208

Kinda disappointing - far, far less than the Dell owners get with 7900GTX's in the XPS M1710..

Yep - and I think it's the drivers that are on the Arima CD.. 3DMark06 seems to hate them..

Switching to the 91.xx series drivers (which aren't so good for 05) produced scores up near 6000, and the latest 84.xx series drivers produces scores not far below that.

Currently running some more benchmarks, so I'll have some 06 benchmarks and updated 05's (with no overclocking - I've proved my point with 10178 for now ) to post, along with the VGA BIOS and system BIOS images.

Ok, and here's some 3DMark06 scores, plus some new 05 scores with no overclocking and some image quality options toggled (yeah, I was bored )

These were all run on the following setup:
Bare XP install created with nLite
nVidia nForce platform drivers 6.86
AMD processor driver 1.3.2.0
Xtreme-G MobileForce 84.56

3DMark05 @ 1024x768, noAA, Ansitropic off: 9823


3DMark05 @ 1920x1200, noAA, Ansitropic off: 7893


3DMark05 @ 1024x768, 4xAA, Ansitropic on max: 6488


3DMark06 @ default settings (trial copy): 5158



Now - an interesting point to note.. I was getting much higher 3DMark06 scores when I used the 91.31 or 91.37 drivers, however they seem to have an 'issue'.. I could only run 3DMark06 once before I had to reboot - failing to reboot would lead to a BSOD citing the fact that a driver had gone into an infinite loop - the driver being nv4_disp.dll.

Pretty sure it was the drivers and not heat, incidentally, as I could let everything cool right down and try a second time and still, blammo, lockup..


Now - BIOS images for the curious. Note, if you blow up your laptop, render it inoperable or manage to dismember your own limbs with these images it was not my fault

nVidia 7900GS 512Mb BIOS ver 5.71.22.26.17: http://dev.mind-design.co.uk/7900gs_...1.22.26.17.rom

I'd be interested to know what BIOS versions you guys see in NiBitor..

Main system BIOS by American Megatrends: http://dev.mind-design.co.uk/w830-da.rom

Ok, an update for all you folks wanting to overclock your m9700's..

I can categorically state that the lockdown isn't in the Alienware-supplied video drivers, as I downloaded the AW 84.74 drivers this afternoon and tried them on a fresh XP install - CoolBits enabled the OC options and I could happily overclock, though only 20Mhz or so Honestly, it's not worth the trouble, 20MHz nets you absolutely nothing frame-rate wise.