Ran 3DMark03 on my 7422GX

I have the same comp and with mark03 my scores were:

3DMarks 3,256
CPUmarks 837

My ATI card is overclocked at 425/239 with no artifacts.
If you ever wanna overclock your ATI I recommend "ATItools" it has a function that raises the Core and Memory untill it sees artifacts then lowers it to a safe overclocking level. Another thing to invest in is a 7,200 RPM hard driver. I'm ordering one soon and it makes everything run alot faster.

Well the card is a 9550, but it is really the exact same as a 9600. So its a underclocked 9600. It's default speed is just lower than a 9600, so you can over clock a 9550 by 30% but the 9600 might only overclock 15% because its set higher to begin with. As far as heat and card life, it shouldnt be a problem as long as your overclocking with a reasonable numbers. So like 500/300 will mess some stuff up, I'd say stay under 450/250 and you wont have any noticable heat increase or loss of life.

With the loss of speed when on battery, its so you dont use a ton of power on the graphics card. So assuming you wont be playing HL2 or Doom 3 on battery or something its not a problem. If you want to make it so it stays at full speed all the time Right click desktop -> properties ->settings -> advanced -> powerplay tab. Theres a check box to turn it on or off, and a setting button to put it where ever you want while on battery or AC.

With the artifact thing with ATItools usually its safe because it heats up as if you were playing a graphics intensive game, If you want you can up your numbers a little, that tool just gives you a good idea of how high you can go before you start running into problems.

Personal note: I leave the ATI card at default settings when on AC when I'm just surfing the net, writing in word or making a presentation. Then I open ATItools and load my "Gaming" profile I set up and play HL2.

It is actually a 9600 in the 7422 also. I don't know if it is a misprint on the box/specs, or they are renaming the MR9600. The mobility 9600 is the same default clock speeds (core and memory) in these machines (m6805 through 7405GX) as the 9550. They are both 300/200 "out of the box".

The reason some can OC higher is just the difference in the video cards production. Some people get a little better chips ect. It's just random, some people can do like 450/250 or more on the same card.

I'm not overclocking my CPU personally. You CAN overclock it if you want, but because its a laptop with not so great air flow you cant OC much and it really isnt worth it for the small amount you can OC.

It wouldn't have been Gateway, it would have been Arima. All the machines made in this series with the 9600 since inception are 300/200.

Assuming that the story about the MR9600 being a 350/200 part is true, could it be that Arima underclocked it to improve battery life?

That is probably the one that is more commonly referred to as MR9600 Pro by most ODMs. With the minimal difference PowerPlay makes in battery life (HUGE underclock), I doubt they dumped 50MHz core in the interest of a minute or two on battery life.

Well they didn't change motherboards. Same Arima part #s. And clocks are all the same. So the truth seems to be that there was a templating mistake with the box and such.

Do you have PowerPlay enabled in the advanced display tab?

Good chance PowerPlay was completely eliminating what ATItool was trying to do, and Doom didn't want to run on the underclocked processor. I am not sure how PowerPlay and ATITool play together. I have used it to find "safe" overclocks, but never used to actually do the overclcoking. I use radlinker for that. Disable PowerPlay (or set it for optimal performance on high battery) and give it another whirl.

With powerplay disabled I dont think it really helps battery life much for the insane underclocking it does. Might give you 5 min more of life?