Can U Say 15k?

Not bad, not bad at all.

I wonder what you'd get with bigger hard drives and using XP instead of Vista with all the fancy shmancy things off and the processes minimized as much as humanly possible. Probably an extra few hundred points I presume due to less graphic requirements for XP.

What is the build of your laptop and how much did it cost?

Very nice

Which drivers are you running?

oh, did i mention i hate your 8800's lol!!! nice job!

does not matter what size the hdd's are, they all spin at 5400 or 7200 rpms.. so changin the size will not affect the score.. the raid 0 setup must really help your score.. my 1730 scored a 13558 3d06 in XP using the 175.16 from laptopvideo2go. these drivers are fast... what video drivers are you using in vista???

@whiteashcm1, Dude, he said which drivers he is using....

I bet you could hit 17K. Now when I went from vista xp32 to vista 32, I took an 800 point hit. Going to Vista X64, took out a bit more. There is no question, that XP32 is by far the fastest.

I ran XP-32, before even trying to play with the cards when I first got the lappy, and hit 14.5K out of the box with dell's bloat on dell's performance driver with a 600/900 oc.

With XP, running the absolute minimum services and processes, (turn off explorer.exe after you launch proggies etc) enable PAE, get the latest updates, and the dual core fix (included in SP3). Oc the card as before, I see no reason why 17K is not possible.

I warn you though, the performance advantage in games will hardly be noticeable. I played Crysis on XP 32bit, Vista 32bit and Vista x64 systems and I must say that so far, although I only score 14K in 3DMark06, @ 642/950OC and at 3.0ghz on my CPU (X7900) undervolted to 1.3750V in Vista64, I get the best Crysis performance and the most stready frame rates in VistaX64 running the 64bit crysis.

Now this leads me to belive that for 64bit gaming, XP64 may be the best bet for games like Crysis.

Now for pure bench numbers, even though that may not translate to "improved" gaming performance for 64bit "instructed" games XP32 would certainly be the OS to use and would also be the fastest running the majoraty of todays games.

Seems like a lot of work just to see, but hey if you have the time. I think that our video cards are running at 1.05V and still run fairly cool. I hit 82C in crysis. I suspect that a slight volt mod, along with a greater OC, you could hit even greater numbers in vista 64, which is more impressive IMO then 17K in XP32. That's last years news. We're running Vista now. Who cares about XP. Hell, Windows 7 or whatever its called is comming soon.

I'm trying to find the thread, but some guy on another forum was able to volt mod his cards via the bios and pushed the OC to 700. So IMO that's the direction of research. I think that the limit is not heat, it's power that the cards are lacking. Nibitor and NvFlash will do the trick. This being my only work computer and me going away for a year out of the country on the 18th, I just don't want to risk it. However, I'm almoast certain that more power lies in giving the 8800s more volts. Maybe you could find the thread, I don't remember where it is.

I just volt modded my 8800s from the stock 1.0 to 1.1, and am running stable at 700mhz core/1000mhz mem. By having my CPU at 3.0ghz, volt modded down to 1.375 from 1.475.

Anyway, here is +1 to 8800s running at 700/1000!!!!!

Just to be safe, I dropped my clocks to 680/950 and have absolutly no issues at all. This is proof, that our cards need more voltage. When running at 1.0v I was only able to go up to 645/950 before getting errors and crashes. As soon as I gave them more voltage, I was able to run the cards at as high as 740 at 1.15 volts, but heat became a problem. I could solder an external heatsink, but what would be the point, this is a laptop. Basicaly I wasn't able to find a limit as to how high these cards could go. They took anything that was thrown at them. With proper cooling and maybe even a laptop cooler, one could go higher, but with stock cooling, I find that 700/1000 is the absolute limit. 1000 being the mem limit regardless and 700 being the GPU limit given the heat issue. Provided better cooling, these cards could run close to if not at 800mhz at 1.15 volts.

@abadee, 1.15v at 800 is something you may want to try with your AC duct, but I'm good with what I've got so far.

I'm running mine at 680/950 and the cards are taking it just fine with no errors in ati tool, not even the yellow dots you get before errors are seen. Nothing! This proves, that errors people are seeing with these cards are simply due to the cards running out of power.

Look at this post for more info on how I discovered that the voltage being fed to the 8800s via their BIOS' was not enough to power them beyond 645 or so.
http://www.notebookforums.com/thread217172-4.html

I get ~14.5K running on an X7900 in vistaX64!!!!! An X9000 as Abadee has and others would easily break above even 15200+ without any external cooling. The X7900 just can't run cool enough at 3.4ghz without throttling and the voltage reduction required to keep it from throttling is just too great to have it run stable; so I'm stuck at 3.0ghz at 1.3750 and the 8800s at 680/950 at 1.1v.

Happy Overclocking and 15K + 3dmark06 scores.

Good scores!!

I thought of V-Mod before, but for the little increae in performance vs. risk of fail GPU. I stay at stock voltage. I only OCing GPU using nTune @650/950 while gaming runnign CPU @3.4GHz.

KraxKill,

I think some of you got the M1730 by using Dell Complete Care or warranty exchange. The reason you got new lappy becasue of overheating or other malfunctions. And now, you guys are playing with the lappy and thinking of V-Mod? I think this is a great information to know, but it is little too extreme...

One point. If later on, your lappy fail again. Please do not cliam for warranty repair from Dell. OCing a little is understoodable, but V-mod is not recommendated. I remember reading some of your posting of how your old Dell lappy bringing you all the troubles in the owrld. Now, you got the new lappy and start messing around. Com'on guys. I am so tired of people claiming warranty exchange or getting free upgrade from Dell because they are the reasons why their lappies gone bad.

Thanks for all the good informations of how fast the M1730 can reach, but please take the responsibilty of the consequences. No one can stop what you like to do, but you are dealing with a expensive toy you got. No one else is responsible for it beside yourself, not Dell.

My old lappy was overheating at stock clocks that is why I got it replaced, as I was using it only as a workstation. Granted, I did when I first get that 1710 push it to the limit to see how fast it would go, but it wasn't long before I took the thing back to stock. It was a year, after running at stock clocks, that my 1710 broke and I got a replacement.

This 1730 is no different, and I have yet to burn or brake anything due to overclocking. I still got the stock clocks in the bios, so every time I reboot it goes back to stock. The CPU, I don't even run at 3.4 like most, and infact, by using a volt mod, I'm running it cooler then it would normaly be at 3.0ghz. Infact it runns cooler then it does stock at 2.8ghz so if anything dell should thank me for that.

I hardly play games anymore, and the only game, that I actualy set the clocks up to the above, is Crysis. I don't play anything else that demanding that would require anyhting else so for those games, such a HL2 etc, I just keep it all stock. But come on, for Crysis, you have to do a bit of overclocking. With the above, I run realy cool on my CPU and my GPU stays in the 80s. So for the few hours (if that) a week that I play Crysis, (mostly to show off the laptop) I don't mind risking frying my video card. My CPU stands no chance of being fried, as it's not even running as hot @3.0ghz as it would be running at 2.8ghz and the GPU is not much hotter then it gets stock and is much more stable at 1.1v at 685 then most people's 8800s are at 630/950 at 1.0 volt. Dell's 8800m are serverely hampered by running at 1.0v. The GPU, given the power and more importantly cooling, is capable of way over 750mhz.

IMO if anything brakes, it won't be becuase of the OC so I will fully take advantage of my warranty should anything go wrong given that 95% of the time, this laptop runs at stock values.

Nope, by undervolting, you are decreasing stability not performance so don't go too low, but the lower you go the cooler you run, and a little bit makes a huge difference. Run prime95 for a while at each step down in voltage, let the tests finish (I think there are 10?) and so un, until you get an error in prime. Then go up from that and your'e good. The incriments seem small, but they do a lot! If I had just a bit more cooling, I could run my scorching X7900 at 3.4 without throttling. That's how significant the changes are. Again, just make sure you don't go below what is stable. I would also as I did, run Prime95,HD tune, and Ati tool so that you draw the most power to test the CPU when your system uses the most. You don't want to be playing with google earth while writing a file and have the thing crash. Besides, if it can handle the above, what could stress it more? I was able to go from 1.4750 at 3.0ghz to 1.3750ghz running stable through the above test.

As far as overvolting the GPU, clearly the farther you go, the warmer she gets, but also the more stable it is at the higher clocks. Again, the temp is not an issue, just running aero and doing the regular tasks as the gpu is not even using the 1.1 volts it's being fed. However when it actualy needs the power, at 645+ in my case it can handle it.

Basicaly what I did, was give the CPU less, and give the GPU more.

Before upping the GPU voltage, I was getting artifacting and errors at anything over 650. With the volt mod, only heat is the barrier.

DOA is a different story, you get replacement or exchange. When you stress the hardware beyond factory spec, it will definitly shorten its life cycle. That will also make it not working properly. Claim warranty replacement or exchange for your personal experiment is not recommended.

You can be brave to do whatever you like to increase the performace such as putting a Supercharger in your car, but please do not go back to manufacture for warranty. You guys know the rules. Soon all the price on Complete Care will increase such as Automobile Insurance in California.