8970 is still 2000 points higher than what i had, and the only difference i know of is you're using windows 7 and you have faster hard drives. what resolution are you running it at?

nevermind i see you overclocked the graphics card. i dont think overclocking would do me good as i sometimes get artifacts without being overclocked (might be catalyst a.i. or something i dont know)

1024x768

I got just shy of 28,000 on 3DMark2001 SE which roasted my old score of 21,000. I am going to wait and see if I can break into the top 10 on this site before I submit it and that will only take 100 or so points so expect it soon. That was with NO cooling techniques and the core temps well over 100 at the start of the test, covers still attached, room for more overclocking etc... Wish me luck on hitting 30,000 but I know I won't hit what some of the laptops here have.

One thing that is concerning me is in PassMark 7.0 I got 2700 for 'cpu->integer math' when I first bought this laptop. Well a month or two ago I got 1100 but barely. Now I'm scoring about 380! WTF?? Other scores have dropped too, but many have improved greatly like GFX & Optical drive performance. I downgraded my bios back to the version that came on it but that did nothing.

Meh oh well, I probably broke it with my warranty-shredding habits. Guess that means it's time to upgrade to a new laptop!!! Yay! Anyone out there want a heavily abused, hacked up QuadLappy? I think it's time to get a Quad Extreme or wait on the i7 LapScorcher.

lol good luck on hitting 30k.

i think this laptop will do fine as a laptop for years to come, but if i ever want a real gaming beast i will get a desktop (probably build it myself).

nevermind what i wrote here lol

ever make it past 30k or past 9000 in 3dmarks?

one small discrepancy I noticed. Vista goes up to 5.9, and he has 3 7.0's. Are those 7.0's from the Win7 benchmark? If so, then I think a windows7 benchmark should be separated to keep vista and 7 scores from affecting each other. (a 7.0 on vista is impossible without tweaking the registry... whereas win7 goes up to 7.9 naturally).

Jason

The admins are working to include/separate W7 benchmarks results. It is still on hold due to the fact that W7 is not yet official. I have a bunch of benchmarks waiting in the side

cheers ...

question to NickWelder. How you overclocked Intel Core 2 QuadCore Q9000 in HP dv7-2040US - 2GHz --- 2246MHz, and did you check for artifacts your video card after overclocked?

yea, how'd you OC the q9000... is the bios unlocked, or did you hack the mobo, or what?

A couple hacks I am working on have led me to keep the system operating stable at higher clock speeds. First hack involved adjusting the CPU multiplier to run at 8.5x. This worked until the BIOS promptly knocked it down again, and again, and again. I read through the Intel developer papers and found how this can be achieved. I attempted to hack the BIOS and set the FSB Clock via BCLK[1:0], but I was unable to get this working properly. I then attempted to force Dynamic Acceleration across all cores via the BIOS. Also a failure. I was able to hack up something very promising involving both a hacked BIOS and modified Linux kernel working in sync. Basically the BIOS no longer dismisses unauthorized dynamic acceleration. The hacked 2.6 Linux Kernel is constantly updating the CPU multiplier and forcing two cores to run idle 99.9% of the time. It seems voltage must be consistent across all 4 cores, even if two are "shut down" so no "stepping down" half the cores and that is something I am looking into.further. Intel doesn't seem to allow a way around this so it is either two overclocked & two off, or all normal, or all underclocked. Useful for many applications though.

@NickWelder, sorry I've been busting my hump on a business project that had me travelling quite a bit and am just now getting back to reading web forums such as this.

To answer your question, I have both a Macbook Pro Al and a Dell Inspiron 1520 completely tricked-out. Both notebooks were serving my needs very well for work and gaming, but would start to bog down when I'd need to run Eclipse plus any number more than two VM's, regardless of the CPU speed. I had looked at the Dell Precision M6400 when quad-core became available, but at nearly $7K for a quad-core 8GB model, the price, IMHO, was unreasonable. So I waited...

Then, when Intel released the Q9000/9100, I knew that more reasonably priced notebooks would follow and the Friday Fry's ad eventually bore fruit. I checked out several HP and Toshiba models, but they either only had one HD, crappy integrated graphics, or a really low-rez LCD. As it turns out, the dv7-2040us was actually an accident: I had gone to purchase another HP model, but it was out of stock. I had picked out the dv7 model with a Q9000 and Nvidia 9600GT graphics. However, it was out of stock when I arrived (Fry's must have only had 2 of them as I got there around 8:30 a.m.) So the salesman convinced me to check out the dv7-2040us. After a bit of in-store research, I realized it was a much better buy: better graphics, two drives (I had thought they were raided, but oh well), and an LED backlit panel. Plus it was $500 *less* than the advertised model. So I snatched it up along with a pair of 500gb Seagate drives. I haven't looked back since. It handles all of my work and play needs flawlessly. The only thing I haven't been able to do yet is hook it up to the 60" plasma/surround in the den via HDMI and see how that looks running WoW.

If I had a single complaint, it would be that the unit doesn't support either dual-link DVI or Displayport, so it can't run a 30" monitor at 2560x1920. If it did, I'd buy a docking station and ditch my desktop completely. Not giving up my Apple Cinema Display tho...

Indexed!