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Dell nVidia 6800 drivers are crap! Problems playing DVD's at low power.

post #1 of 10
3/26/05 at 2:33am
Thread Starter 
I noticed on my 8300 that if I unplugged my notebook and set the power options to max battery/lowest power that DVD's would not play smoothly. Tried several different players including nVidia's sucky player and nothing fixed it. This wouldn't bode well for watching movies on a plane, now would it?

Know what fixed it? These here modified ForceWare drivers:
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1002

Now DVD's play smoothly at low power, like glass I tell you.

Dell's drivers must not support the DVD play back feature in the cards, so the CPU takes over the work.

Next I will rerun 3dMark and see what kind of difference these drivers make there.

If anyone thinks they know of better drivers, please post. I didn't do much searching. Tried the latest ones but didn't mod the .inf file correctly or something and they wouldn't install.

BTW, the absolute best DVD player is Media Player Classic. It's trim, works great and is free.

Another BTW, I hadn't heard anyone saying much about this, but the sound on the 9300 is fricken awesome. It's the loudes and most full sounding I've ever heard on a laptop.
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post #2 of 10
3/26/05 at 2:49am
K-lite codec pack has a ton of codecs and media player classic.
http://home.hccnet.nl/h.edskes/mirror.htm (if you search for it you will come across fake verisons that require you to pay )
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post #3 of 10
3/26/05 at 2:53am
That's good to know, sonic. Do you know if there's any way to verify that the hardware mpeg decoder is being used?
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post #4 of 10
3/26/05 at 2:57am
Thread Starter 
Thanks, Gork (the real one), I need a fresh codec install. I'm sure that includes DivX, XVid and related items.

Whoa, using the drivers I posted about above, my 3DMark05 score using stock speeds jumped from 2960 to 3322. That's a 12% increase. Dell, where did you get those drivers?

Double whoa, using CoolBits on those drivers and selecting optimzed speeds, 389/787 was selected and a 3DMark05 score of 4539 was obtained:
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=711736 is that good? Can I run Tetris at high resofulutions? Before the test the gpu was idling at 50c, during the test it went up to 62c. Supposedly the throttle tempature is 97c. I guess that's not the only factor. I'm not going to be cranking it any higher. Probably will only run it at the stock speed.
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post #5 of 10
3/26/05 at 3:55am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by dellbert
That's good to know, sonic. Do you know if there's any way to verify that the hardware mpeg decoder is being used?
Other than the low power test I don't know. You can probably look at the cpu usage. If it's high, then it's not being used. I'm guessing about this. Is it the hardware mpeg decoder that would be used for DVD playback?
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post #6 of 10
3/26/05 at 6:57am
sonice those drivers u used although a bit old there modded already to support to go card? none of this downloading and changing the infs?
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post #7 of 10
3/26/05 at 1:43pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by simonhipsey
sonice those drivers u used although a bit old there modded already to support to go card? none of this downloading and changing the infs?
correct, the modder added the support for mobile cards. It says so right on the information page I linked above.
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post #8 of 10
3/26/05 at 1:52pm
wow..4500 using coolbits! Using "optimized speeds"? Does that mean at safe overclocking speeds? Or I wonder if that is max. Anyway it's nice to know the card can be pushed a little.. with that kind of score were coming close to the 6800 ultra where it looks like there in the low 5000 range. Way cool!!!
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post #9 of 10
3/26/05 at 2:06pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by sonicwind
I noticed on my 8300 that if I unplugged my notebook and set the power options to max battery/lowest power that DVD's would not play smoothly. Tried several different players including nVidia's sucky player and nothing fixed it. This wouldn't bode well for watching movies on a plane, now would it?

Know what fixed it? These here modified ForceWare drivers:
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1002

Now DVD's play smoothly at low power, like glass I tell you.

Dell's drivers must not support the DVD play back feature in the cards, so the CPU takes over the work.

Next I will rerun 3dMark and see what kind of difference these drivers make there.

If anyone thinks they know of better drivers, please post. I didn't do much searching. Tried the latest ones but didn't mod the .inf file correctly or something and they wouldn't install.

BTW, the absolute best DVD player is Media Player Classic. It's trim, works great and is free.

Another BTW, I hadn't heard anyone saying much about this, but the sound on the 9300 is fricken awesome. It's the loudes and most full sounding I've ever heard on a laptop.
Sonic, I see you used the 75.9x drivers; the 76.10 drivers work great on my XPS Gen 2. I got them here: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/
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post #10 of 10
3/26/05 at 2:21pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by trioxin
wow..4500 using coolbits! Using "optimized speeds"? Does that mean at safe overclocking speeds? Or I wonder if that is max. Anyway it's nice to know the card can be pushed a little.. with that kind of score were coming close to the 6800 ultra where it looks like there in the low 5000 range. Way cool!!!
I think it means safe overclocking speeds. Playing UT2k4 for 15 minutes and running 3dmark at these speeds only raised the cpu temp 10c which is still 30c below the throttle threshold. I saw 0 artifacts as well, so there may be significant room for more.

I just ran 3dMark03: 10494
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k1=8049051

Another funny thing I noticed (from the "my program knows how to run your computer better than you do department") If you force all your power settings to max performance, but unplug your computer apparently nVidia throttles the gpu anyway because using the exact same settings but unplugged I got a 3DMark03 score of 8248.

I'm still waiting on someone to find or create a direct fan control utility for the gpu fan. So far it has never come on high, nor has the cpu fan for that matter. I bet gpu overclock speeds could improve if we started off the tests with the fans on high from the git go.
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