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Wow dude, gamecube and dreamcast? Your my hero!

Oh ya, there's a PSX hiding around here someplace too..

Right - a bit of news:

The Evesham allows me to install standard nVidia graphics drivers.. So I installed the TweaksRUs Xtreme-G Mobile 91.37 drivers and they allow me to overclock quite happily in the standard nVidia control panel..

I didn't crank the clocks up much - and sadly the Xtreme-G drivers appear to have lost me some 500 3DMark points! Either that or something else is fscked up in my XP Pro install, so I need to look at that again tomorrow.

However, it's 2am here now, and I'm going to be dead on my feet at work.. so I'm off to get some shuteye

I think its actualy only overclocking 1 card, not both. Try disabling 1 card, run 3dmark. Then over clock the 1 card, run 3dmark and see if it improves.

hey aaronjb - thanks for the great info on your machine...

I am a bit dissapointed with you 3dmark scores. I really expected them to be at least in the low 10,000's from the factory. Keep us updated as you work with it.

Hammerhead asked this, but I didn't see an answer. Did you get the TV tuner with yours?

Heads up everyone, I just got an email from an engineer at Alienware and they're insisting the Athlon drivers are the right drivers for this platform, not the turion drivers. I suspect it might have something to do with the SLI.

I'm hoping to talk to them on the phone tomorrow to clear this up, and of course I'll post the info I get here.

And aaronjb, I'm assuming since you are able to use the standard vid drivers from Nvidia, either your system or the card bios' are different than ours. Another Evesham customer posted the 256m vid card bios here, and it's the same as is on the AW cards, so I assume it's the system bios that checks the vid card drivers...

Dude, that sucks... I just finally got my crapy to run correctly

How can the original drivers be better when we are getting better scores off of 3dmark with the new drivers???

Hammerhead - we all wait to hear from you...

I don't know, but I'll pass along the information as soon as I get it.

I know marker01 was having issues on battery while gaming with the multiplyer jumping up and down. I wonder if it was doing the same thing with the Athlon drivers on there...

Right - first update as I have all the info for that right now:

It seems that whoever assembled my machine (either Arima or Evesham) used some kind of thermal pad, rather than thermal paste - whatever it was had set hard and was partially voided at one end of the CPU.

So, I've now cleaned all that off and applied ArcticSilver 5 to the CPU as per the AS instructions:


(sorry for the bad pic, my camera has a lousy macro mode)

Now, on the subject of CPU drivers..

I spent all afternoon running benchmarks with the following procedure:

I created (well, ok, Jos created) an nLite XP Pro CD with all the XP bloat stripped out - it's a tiny CD image - then installed that and didn't install any drivers.

I created a Ghost image of that install so that I'd have a clean install to go back to between every test.

And what I can say is this (screenshots and accurate numbers to follow):

The CPU driver makes next to no difference for me - in fact, the Turion driver dropped my 3DMark scores by 30-50 points.

What made the biggest difference was the graphics drivers - the fastest were the standard Arima drivers (8x.xx series drivers) which get me nearly 10k in 3DMark. The slowest by some 700 points were the latest Xtreme-G MobileForce 91.3x drivers from TweaksRUs.

What's especially weird about that is that a colleague of mine who has an XPS M1710 (single 7900 GTX 512Mb) gets exactly the opposite result - best scores with the latest drivers.

Perhaps SLi optimisations, or perhaps Arima have done some other tweaking to the drivers..

And now...

Ok, so the 3DMark benchmarks I've run so far, ordered by fastest first

1) The Arima nForce platform drivers, Arima nVidia ForceWare 84.15 video drivers and Arima supplied AMD Athlon processor driver, stock clocks: 9947


2) Arima nForce platform drivers, Arima nVidia ForceWare video 84.15 drivers and the AMD supplied Turion processor driver, stock clocks: 9935


3) Arima nForce platform drivers, Xtreme-G Mobile ForceWare 84.56, Arima supplied Athlon processor driver, o/c 391MHz core & 520MHz mem: 9931


4) Arima nForce platform drivers, Xtreme-G Mobile ForceWare 84.56 and Arima supplied Athlon processor driver, stock clocks: 9804


5) nVidia nForce4 platform drivers, Xtreme-G Mobile ForceWare 91.37 and AMD Turion processor driver, stock clocks: 9220


6) Arima nForce platform drivers, Xtreme-G Mobile ForceWare 91.31 and Arima supplied Athlon processor driver, stock clocks: 9200



As I said in my previous post - between each benchmark I restored the ghost image which contained no drivers at all so as to avoid any driver contamination, then installed the platform driver (reboot), video driver (reboot) and CPU driver (reboot) in that order, each time, followed by 3DMark05, then another reboot and then ran the test.

The results are... interesting, if nothing else.

So wheres the AS5 tutorial?
I thought you said you do one befour HH, if he didnt do one already.

My AS5 tutorial is now online here

The ones that I posted my best 3DMark with - 380/520 on the GPU (5MHz & 20MHz overclock) and an FSB of ~214MHz.

Not much of an overclock at all - in fact not really worth bothering with IMHO, the processor overclock was what made all the difference.

Maybe my cards are just borderline and the AW ones will be better..

Damn, just no pleasing some folks

I need to get some additional pics, plus I've only done the CPU so far - I want to do the GPUs as well, then I can get a guide up for all three things

How about some pleasing 06 scores?

Oh yes - objective achieved!

My final (for now ) 3DMark05 benchmark is..

10123!



That was achieved using:

Arima nForce platform drivers
Arima nVidia ForceWare drivers (84.15 series)
AMD Athlon CPU driver (1.2.2.2)

GPUs are overclocked to 380/520 from 375/500
FSB is overclocked to 205MHz in SysTool, however SysTool reported my stock 200MHz FSB as 193MHz, so I think it's safe to say I'm actually pushing this right up to 212MHz, which makes an internal clock of 2.544GHz


Pretty happy with that

Congratulations... Grrrr...!