Those two games you mentioned aren't likely to produce artifiacts. Artifacts are very easy to notice: you see polygons popping every now and then.
You won't gain any benefit from overclocking with those 2 games though, a stock 7900 can run them smoothly.
I personnaly use Rivatuner for o/clocking.

See, I have a problem running Fable even overclocked. DMC4 runs well even on stock settings. Overclocking to the settings I mentioned increases frames by about 10, which helps during the forest area. However in Fable, in towns, I get about 25 fps even overclocked. I'm not even at the highest settings. I'm running it at 1280 x 720 with all graphic details one notch below max. I swear it was running faster in XP. That's why I've been asking around if a better processor would benefit Vista and gaming in Vista. Any tips?

Would Half Life 2 show artifacts? Better yet, Half Life 2 Lost Coast?

The best way to find out is trying them. HL2 never produced artifacts for me, whatever o/c settings I used. I'm very surprised Fable runs this slow at such a low resolution. THis game is 3-4 years old.
What I would recommend is o/c using Rivatuner 2.10. I don't see why you wouldn't be able to run you 7900gs at least at 500/700.
You won't gain a lot from upgrading your CPU, perhaps 10-15 %.
Vista is known to run games slower in Dx9. There are more background processes and such.

Pretty much any game will show artifacts if you push your card far enough. The frequency you have to set your card to in order to produce artifacts will differ slightly depending on the game however.

Okay, I'm getting annoyed now. I overclocked the 7900 GS to 465/650 and there was distortion for a sec and then the screen just froze. After a short while, everything was normal. I tried out Fable and just standing there in a pathway, staring at some scared traders, I was getting about 15 fps in fraps. It wasn't just fraps either, the game was noticeably choppy. I had the same settings I mentioned above.

The game ran at an average of 40 fps in XP with all settings maxed and my card was running at stock settings. This is ridiculous. I just installed the latest direct x and it did nothing. Now I know this can't just be Vista because DMC4 runs just fine and it was just released a couple months ago. Would disabling visual themes and desktop composition in compatibility mode help?

Are you sure your overclock didn't trigger an event? It sounds as if you may have pushed it too far and the card throttled down to Low-3D settings. Make sure you are using the right clocks with rivatuner or another program. Now if you are sure your card was running in 3D mode then you can just ignore this.

That could be it, I don't know. Thing is, after using Diskeeper, frames shot up to 40 in the same area. Funny since I used both the basic Vista defrag and Auslogics defrag numerous times before hand and they only helped a little. You could be right though because my clocks reverted to stock after rebooting and the card may have corrected itself.

I still have the same problem though in towns and stuff and no amount of overclocking will work. I think my videocard is doing all it can possibly do. I believe the problem is my processor. Vista simply requires more resources and playing an older game not optimized for it will result in more CPU usage. The biggest reason I came to that conclusion is an article I read on some site. They tested the core 2 duo against the core duo and testing them with visual settings set to max in several games they said that their average videocard was preventing the games from achieving higher frames. Couldn't the opposite be true here? Could the weaker processor simply be holding my graphics card back?

Hey thanks for all those tips. I am a 9400 owner. Can you please tell me am I able to upgrade my hard drive beyond 100gb? I hear so many different opinions I don't know who to believe.

Thanks
Mark
theilluminator@gmail.com

Yes, you can.

zzpulp,

Is there anything special i have to do or do i just install a 500 gb hard drive? any tweaks i need to perform? am i able to go to unlimited hard drive space>? thanks, mark

I can't even find a 500GB notebook HDD. But if you've managed to find one, and it's the same form factor and interface, you just slap it right in.

Very informative thread. I have a couple of questions as I am looking to upgrade my E1705, though it's well out of warranty.

How much of an improvement I'd see in encoding/decoding H.264 if I replace my T2300 @1.66GHz with T7200 or T7400 ? Do I need to worry about any extra heat? I think they are all within the same heat envelope (34W).

I don't really use my laptop for encoding these days as I have a quad core desktop, but I can find these T7x00s on Ebay for < $150 and getting tempted. Can these processors play newer Blu-Ray titles with 40+Mbps? That could be a good use. My T2300 stutters for any 1080p content even @8-10Mbps.

Thanks.

I'm sorry....I don't really know the answers of those questions off the top of my head. I imagine the T7200 would be a very noticeable upgrade with respect to encoding time. Just look in my signature to see an example encoding time for Barbershop. Anyway, I forgot to say I was actually cleaning up my sig getting ready to move to the 8 series so just refer to my next post under "Mini Comparison" if you want to see that example encoding time. I will soon add a M6300 comparison to that same list.

zzpulp old signature ID 65536
6 and 7 series interesting facts:
6800 Series

Few Driver Fixes

Bootable recovery

Nvidia Delta Clock

Mini Bench

Dell Rom's

GPU Lock

9300 to XPS2 hacked BIOS


Edit: Add link

Reading thread > me