- May 1, 2013
- 6,333
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Hello Everyone.
This is just a small helpful note for upgrading and overclocking your laptop.
First, for those who are thinking of overclocking your laptop's GPU, this is possible. Many might say that it is not, but it is often possible. The results can vary greatly however.
Using the tool MSI Afterburner 3.0.0 you are able to adjust the RAM and CPU clock of your laptop, even if it is not officially supported. You do not receive control over the voltage, which is best for a laptop, but control of the clock speeds is possible. I tested this on my laptop.
My GPU:
Nvidia GT 620m (GF117 28nm version)
Default Core Clock 625Mhz.
1GB DDR3 vRAM 64-bit. Memory clock 900Mhz.
After installing MSI Afterburner 3.0.0 I was successful in pushing the GPU up to these speeds.
My GPU:
Nvidia GT 620m (GF117 28nm version)
Default Core Clock 788Mhz. (26.1% increase)
1GB DDR3 vRAM 64-bit. Memory clock 1080Mhz. (20% increase)
With these settings I did a test using both settings with Bioshock Infinity. I opened the benchmarking utility, and ran it on the 3rd setting, which is Ultra-Settings DirectX 11. My laptop only supports 1366x768 resolutions, so that was the resolution used. My average FPS I checked after and found the following.
Stock: 15.85 FPS
Overclocked: 19.42
That means I got an increase in performance of 22.5%. That is quite an improvement!
In my laptop I also several months ago upgraded the CPU. My original CPU was an i5-3210m, and my current CPU is an i7-3632QM. I was lucky and my laptop accepted the upgrade. Some of you might be considering upgrading your laptop's actually hardware and that is more difficult. With mine I was lucky and decided to upgrade the CPU. Please know this can have varied results. Some laptops cannot be upgraded, and some which can do not respond well to it. In my laptop to maintain stability 100% of the time I had to actually limit the CPU usage to 99% in order to ensure that the CPU would not engage its turbo-speed. However I did want to test my gaming results with the different settings.
My i7-3632QM's max turbo speed is 3.2Ghz, and 2.9Ghz when all the CPU cores are active. While I have it reduced, the max speed is 2.178Ghz regardless of how many cores are active. I ran the test and got these results.
Stock GPU/Full speed CPU:13.39 FPS
Overclocked GPU/Full speed CPU: 13.34 FPS
As some may be surprised, my FPS went down with the CPU at full speed, and went down more with the GPU overclocked. This shows us an important fact about working with hardware inside of a laptop. As a result of the reduced space, heat builds up much more quickly in this system than a desktop computer. When the CPU is at full speed, it simply produces too much heat, and as a result the GPU is prevented from running at its full speed and pulls the gaming performance way down. By instead preventing the system from going into the Turbo speeds, heat is reduced and performance increases significantly.
So to bring this to a close, I am writing this mostly just to show people who are trying to find ways to improve their laptop that there are some things that you can possibly do. The CPU upgrade is one option for some people. You might need to limit the speed on it a little to make it work, but it is still faster. The tests I performed on my CPUs available show that even with the CPU limited, my i7 is nearly 60% faster than my old i5 CPU in multi-threaded tasks.
As for the GPU, some of you might be thinking that this isn't so significant that I got nearly 4FPS faster performance, because the FPS is still too low to be playable. However, I did those tests on Ultra settings using DirectX 11. Testing again, using the Medium-settings benchmark I manage 31.48. Low compared to other systems, but this game is now playable to me where it wasn't before.
I hope some one will find this helpful. If you would like to discuss this further, would like help trying to improve your own laptop, or have any questions please post below. Thanks for reading.
This is just a small helpful note for upgrading and overclocking your laptop.
First, for those who are thinking of overclocking your laptop's GPU, this is possible. Many might say that it is not, but it is often possible. The results can vary greatly however.
Using the tool MSI Afterburner 3.0.0 you are able to adjust the RAM and CPU clock of your laptop, even if it is not officially supported. You do not receive control over the voltage, which is best for a laptop, but control of the clock speeds is possible. I tested this on my laptop.
My GPU:
Nvidia GT 620m (GF117 28nm version)
Default Core Clock 625Mhz.
1GB DDR3 vRAM 64-bit. Memory clock 900Mhz.
After installing MSI Afterburner 3.0.0 I was successful in pushing the GPU up to these speeds.
My GPU:
Nvidia GT 620m (GF117 28nm version)
Default Core Clock 788Mhz. (26.1% increase)
1GB DDR3 vRAM 64-bit. Memory clock 1080Mhz. (20% increase)
With these settings I did a test using both settings with Bioshock Infinity. I opened the benchmarking utility, and ran it on the 3rd setting, which is Ultra-Settings DirectX 11. My laptop only supports 1366x768 resolutions, so that was the resolution used. My average FPS I checked after and found the following.
Stock: 15.85 FPS
Overclocked: 19.42
That means I got an increase in performance of 22.5%. That is quite an improvement!
In my laptop I also several months ago upgraded the CPU. My original CPU was an i5-3210m, and my current CPU is an i7-3632QM. I was lucky and my laptop accepted the upgrade. Some of you might be considering upgrading your laptop's actually hardware and that is more difficult. With mine I was lucky and decided to upgrade the CPU. Please know this can have varied results. Some laptops cannot be upgraded, and some which can do not respond well to it. In my laptop to maintain stability 100% of the time I had to actually limit the CPU usage to 99% in order to ensure that the CPU would not engage its turbo-speed. However I did want to test my gaming results with the different settings.
My i7-3632QM's max turbo speed is 3.2Ghz, and 2.9Ghz when all the CPU cores are active. While I have it reduced, the max speed is 2.178Ghz regardless of how many cores are active. I ran the test and got these results.
Stock GPU/Full speed CPU:13.39 FPS
Overclocked GPU/Full speed CPU: 13.34 FPS
As some may be surprised, my FPS went down with the CPU at full speed, and went down more with the GPU overclocked. This shows us an important fact about working with hardware inside of a laptop. As a result of the reduced space, heat builds up much more quickly in this system than a desktop computer. When the CPU is at full speed, it simply produces too much heat, and as a result the GPU is prevented from running at its full speed and pulls the gaming performance way down. By instead preventing the system from going into the Turbo speeds, heat is reduced and performance increases significantly.
So to bring this to a close, I am writing this mostly just to show people who are trying to find ways to improve their laptop that there are some things that you can possibly do. The CPU upgrade is one option for some people. You might need to limit the speed on it a little to make it work, but it is still faster. The tests I performed on my CPUs available show that even with the CPU limited, my i7 is nearly 60% faster than my old i5 CPU in multi-threaded tasks.
As for the GPU, some of you might be thinking that this isn't so significant that I got nearly 4FPS faster performance, because the FPS is still too low to be playable. However, I did those tests on Ultra settings using DirectX 11. Testing again, using the Medium-settings benchmark I manage 31.48. Low compared to other systems, but this game is now playable to me where it wasn't before.
I hope some one will find this helpful. If you would like to discuss this further, would like help trying to improve your own laptop, or have any questions please post below. Thanks for reading.
Honestly i am a little amazed at how far you managed to push the memory in your system. That must be some unusually high quality RAM modules that were put into your system.
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