Amilo D 1840 Benchmark Scores

I've recently bought an Amilo D with 3.2GHz P4 and 128MB Mobility Radeon from dabs but so far have not managed to achieve the same scores under benchmark as some others. I can only seem to get 8650 3D Marks out of the box.

This only increases by about 500 marks, to around 8700, when I install the latest Omega drivers. I record the default core and clock speeds as being 351 and 202 as expected. I have been able to overclock to 397 / 243 (off the top of my head) without any trouble, but still only get around 9650 3D Marks!!!

This all seems a little strange when others are getting 9200 out of the box and acheiving overclocked scores of 10000 for exactly the same system, and other laptops with the same GPU seem to consistently exceed the 9000 mark!

Has anyone else with this system had similar experiences? What could be causing it to underperform? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Ken Chatfield.

Yep, it seems like I've got the same spec as you, bar a slightly faster processor.

What core / memory speeds are you reaching in order to get results of 10450 and 10850 on your system?

As for my own mysteriously low benchmark scores I remain confused: I've tried formatting and installing from scratch now on two separate occasions, once using the recovery CD supplied with the system (Windows XP Home) and once using my own personal copy of Windows XP Professional - that is to say I installed the operating system, the drivers, DX9 and 3DMark and nothing else! However, in neither instance did I experience any real increase in my 3DMark scores.

I've also tried tinkering with the options in the ATI Control Panel, including changing the preferences for anisotropic filter and Anti Aliasing to 'performance' from their default 'application preference' value as suggested, but to no avail!

What is slightly puzzling is how replacing the standard ATI drivers supplied on the Fujitsu-Siemens drivers CD with the latest Omega drivers results in very little improvement when compared to the results of other Amilo owners. I am now getting a score of around 8730 consistently whatever driver I use (that is on a clean install).

It is interesting to read the account you gave of your experiences with your replacement Amilo scoring 300 points higher than your original system. It seems that the benchmark results are quite erratic, even on my system, (if I sneeze, it occasionally falls to 7000), but I still fail to see how apparently identical hardware can perform so differently, with a gap of nearly 1000 3DMarks between my system and yours.

It was suggested to me elsewhere that the PowerPlay settings of the card might be responsible. However, I've tried turning this off as well and it has made absolutely no difference!

I'm not sure I'll have much luck moaning at Fujitsu about low benchmark results. Perhaps I should try carrying my system around in a carry case in sleep mode for a while in the hopes of getting a replacement?

I appreciate the advice, hedelein.

Ken.
( Still incredibly confused... )

I'm currently using RadLinker to overclock my Radeon, available from http://www28.brinkster.com/chrisww1942/. ATI Tool and PowerStrip are two of the other most common tools. However, I prefer RadLinker as it doesn't sit in your system tray all of the time eating up resources and allows you to configure different clock settings for individual applications: particularly useful when testing the stability of a particular configuration in a single application such as 3DMark! It is also now available as part of the Omega driver set, which you can download from omegacorner.com.

As for clock speeds, the defaults are 351.00 for the core and 202.50 for memory, I believe. I've managed to clock mine to 391.50 / 243.00 without any problems [other than those with my darned 3DMark scores!!!] (I ran a 2 hour loop on 3DMark without any artefacting or overheating). These changes themselves resulted in an increase of 1000 3DMarks for me in 3DMark2001. I'm not sure how close to the limits these overclocked speeds are - I've heard of people going far further, particularly with the core speed, up to almost 450 - but I'm a little wary of pushing the card to the extreme in case the heat produced wreaks either the card itself or the other components in the system. Simply casually surfing the net, I've encountered far too many tales of sorrow and despair from laptop owners who have overclocked too far!

As for overclocking the processor, it probably isn't such a good idea in a laptop. Firstly, I don't think a 3.0/3.2 GHz P4 can be pushed very much higher and secondly, bearing in mind these are desktop processors anyway, the performance / cost (in heat) ratio isn't likely to be too high!

Hope that helps,

Ken.