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Overclocking a S360, ok?

post #1 of 10
4/16/05 at 8:58am
Thread Starter 
Well, Ive over clocked lot's of computers in my life. But they have always been full fledged desktops, with nice air cooling, or water cooling units. This is my first notebook, and I overclocked it already. I am running it at 428 and 216, or something around that. It increased my benchmark by 500, and it runs games like Farcry, at medium very well. No artifacts or anything like that. My question is, since these 9700's dont have fans (At least in my laptop), is this going to kill the card? I assume that after heavy gaming I'd see something that would be an indication of a heat problem... But yet it seems to be running fine.. Although at the exhaust vent... It gets pretty damn warm...

Who all overclocks there 9700s? Any problems?
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post #2 of 10
4/16/05 at 10:56am
There are fans in this chassis. You can hear the Graphics fan fire up in intensive games.

Bottom line on overclocking is you're risking total meldown. And on the S360 the 9700 is soldered onto the motherboard...not an easy or inexpensive repair.
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post #3 of 10
4/16/05 at 1:14pm
I agree with Craig. Just because you *can* overclock doesn't mean you *should* over clock. The only indication that you *shouldn't* overclock is when you start seeing artifacts, which may become permanent if you keep screwing around.

But seriously... you're risking totally frying a system that wasn't designed to be overclocked or be a dedicated gaming laptop. Is +10% frames worth frying $1900?
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post #4 of 10
4/16/05 at 3:27pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by kent1146
I agree with Craig. Just because you *can* overclock doesn't mean you *should* over clock. The only indication that you *shouldn't* overclock is when you start seeing artifacts, which may become permanent if you keep screwing around.

But seriously... you're risking totally frying a system that wasn't designed to be overclocked or be a dedicated gaming laptop. Is +10% frames worth frying $1900?

Honestly, it picked up quite a bit when playing games like farcry. I'm not really looking to do a massive OC either, it's just that that I'd like to run the card at the manufactured specifications, and not the notebook lowered version. Even if my overclock over stock, isn't higher than the original manifactured clock, would you guys still think it's to risky? I dont want to fry it, I was just very impressed with how it ran last night.
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post #5 of 10
4/16/05 at 3:39pm
It's up to you, but I would say no.

I OC'ed an Asus M6BNE that I used to own, which ran a Radeon 9700 64MB and was underclocked. I clocked it to ATI default speeds, and I saw many artifacts and crashes. The individual notebook manufacturers determine GPU clock speed, memory clock speed, and memory quality. So if the notebook manufacturer intended the notebok memory to run at 200Mhz, they will use notebook memory spec'ed to 200Mhz, even if Ati says they can run up to 250Mhz.

Long story short, Craig and i don't recommend, but there's nothing stopping you. Do it at your own risk.
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post #6 of 10
4/16/05 at 9:25pm
If you have a way to monitor the temp of your vid chip and processor and system in general, you should be pretty safe. Dont go nuts though, because while the m11 core is fairly standard, sony picks the memory chips to use with it, which may be rated much slower than what ATI reccomends.

If you are careful and it is stable and cool you should be fairly safe.
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post #7 of 10
4/17/05 at 12:15am
but what we're all forgetting is that most people are thinking of the Sager/Alienware clones with all kinds of air ducting for overclocking. The S360 has a VERY small chassis with VERY little air ducting to keep this chip cool.

I'm not saying your nuts to overclock...I just think you're taking a big (as Kent stated, $1900) risk. And I'm a big overclocker (see my Aurora review) but to pour more heat on the S360 could be detrimental to the integrity of the entire machine.

and remember, overclocking/overheating damage is not always noticeable off the bat...you may be doing damage but over a long period of time and won't know until its too late.

*public service warning out*
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post #8 of 10
4/17/05 at 6:05am
Thread Starter 
You guys have made me see the light. The laptop is perfectly fast enough as it is. And under normal settings, and playing games like HL2 it seems to get warm enough, that putting additional strain seems like a bad mistake. Let me ask you guys, when you do some heavy gaming, does the exhaust vent get pretty damn hot? I put my hand there and it gets some damn warm air pumping through it, and the plastic right there gets very warm.
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post #9 of 10
4/17/05 at 10:32am
Oh yea....mine gets very hot in CS:Source.
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post #10 of 10
4/17/05 at 7:56pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Craig
Oh yea....mine gets very hot in CS:Source.

Yeah, thats what I figured. I was playing HL2 for abount three hours last night. I found on the steampowered.com forums ways to disable some of the stuff that loads, and get rid of the main loading menus, still takes a little bit of time to load the game, but not its barable.

How awesome is that for what we paid we have laptops that can play games like Doom 3, HL2, CSS, etc. I'm so damn happy I went with this laptop.
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