Nvidia Quadro fx 2700m_stall issues when gaming

[dreisler]

Hi everybody

I recently purchased a HP 8730w Elitebook (notebook) with the Nvidia Quadro fx 2700m graphics card. I mostly use it for CAD and rendering, but also occasional gaming. So far I've been playing Fallout 3, Bioshock and Crysis. All games run very smooth even on high settings but I get minor stalls every 10 seconds when moving my characters around. I'm not getting a drop in frames but my character movement stalls none the less. I've tried all graphic settings and nothing seems to help. The character movement also seems to look up for a few seconds sometimes, making me wander of in the same direction for a few seconds.

Of course Nvidia doesn't adress this problem on their homepage, so I'm running out of options

How can I solve this problem? Does anyone have similar gaming experience with the 2700m or 3700m?

Is it possible to use GeForce drivers with the Quadro series or should I look for another solution?

I'll really appreciate any help I can get

I'm running Vista 64-bit, 8 bg ram, 3,0 ghz core 2 duo extreme

 

[evongugg]

Quadros are not made for gaming. See this:

Workstation Cards and Their Mainstream Gaming Equivalents

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/FireGL-Quadro-Workstation,1995-2.html

 

[dreisler]

Thanks for the reply Evongugg,

I know it's not made for gaming, but from what I've heard some people have been able to get decent performance in gaming with some of the older quadro cards none the less.

I'll post a solution in the forum if I find one. As these cards get more common I'm sure there will be others trying to skip work and game a little. It's a shame that Nvidia doesn't adress this problem, since a lot of graphic professionals apparently have been trying to play games on their workstations from time to time.

 

[Guest]

PUT THIS IN YOUR MIND.....QUADRO IS GOOD FOR CAD, VIZUALIZATION AND DCC. FOR GAMING USED NVIDIA GEFORCE. SIMILARLY, YOU CANNOT A VIDEO CARD MADE FOR GAMING ON PROGRAMS LIKE 3D STUDIO MAX, MAXWELL RENDER, SKETCHUP AND OTHERS. YOU ARE WASTING YOUR QUADRO VIDEO CARD, THESE CARDS ARE NOT CHEAP, THEY ARE PROFESSIONAL VIDEO CARDS MEANT FOR 3D VIZUALIZATIONS. IF YOU CAN, BUILT ANOTHER PC DEDICATED FOR GAMING ONLY. I WONT USED MY PROFESSIONAL QUADRO PC FOR GAMING. NO..NO..NO..NO!

 

[Mousemonkey]

PUT THIS IN YOUR MIND.....QUADRO IS GOOD FOR CAD, VIZUALIZATION AND DCC. FOR GAMING USED NVIDIA GEFORCE. SIMILARLY, YOU CANNOT A VIDEO CARD MADE FOR GAMING ON PROGRAMS LIKE 3D STUDIO MAX, MAXWELL RENDER, SKETCHUP AND OTHERS. YOU ARE WASTING YOUR QUADRO VIDEO CARD, THESE CARDS ARE NOT CHEAP, THEY ARE PROFESSIONAL VIDEO CARDS MEANT FOR 3D VIZUALIZATIONS. IF YOU CAN, BUILT ANOTHER PC DEDICATED FOR GAMING ONLY. I WONT USED MY PROFESSIONAL QUADRO PC FOR GAMING. NO..NO..NO..NO!

Whats with the shouting?

 

[dreisler]

rsalarda,


THANK YOU ! for a very constructive piece of advice...... As stated in the replies before you this is not a post on what the quadro cards are build for. These cards are used almost exclusively by professionals. Most users know that they are not meant for gaming. That includes me. None the less a lot of people might play with these laptops in their spare time. The quadro cards have almost exactly the same architecture as the gforce cards, but the drivers are quite different. That can cause some problems but the quadros are still powerful cards that can run most games well.

Regarding the gaming issues on the hp 8730w this hasn't got anything to do with the Quadro cards. It turns out HP is having some problems with malfunctioning mainboards on the new elitebooks. This also results in the system freezing up and doing blue screens. This problem is apparently quite common and there's a big forum on hp's business support forum. Just type "hp 8730w freezing up" in google. I solved the problem by playing on battery power. The problem only occurs when the adaptor is plugged in. Don't ask me why. The seems to be fewer crashes in Vista 64-bit

 

[Lukas_55]

rsalarda,


THANK YOU ! for a very constructive piece of advice...... As stated in the replies before you this is not a post on what the quadro cards are build for. These cards are used almost exclusively by professionals. Most users know that they are not meant for gaming. That includes me. None the less a lot of people might play with these laptops in their spare time. The quadro cards have almost exactly the same architecture as the gforce cards, but the drivers are quite different. That can cause some problems but the quadros are still powerful cards that can run most games well.

Regarding the gaming issues on the hp 8730w this hasn't got anything to do with the Quadro cards. It turns out HP is having some problems with malfunctioning mainboards on the new elitebooks. This also results in the system freezing up and doing blue screens. This problem is apparently quite common and there's a big forum on hp's business support forum. Just type "hp 8730w freezing up" in google. I solved the problem by playing on battery power. The problem only occurs when the adaptor is plugged in. Don't ask me why. The seems to be fewer crashes in Vista 64-bit

If you are in mood for an experiment, you can try to install modified drivers. Yes, it´s not very viable solution, but if you want take a break for a day or two ... I can speak from experience that quadro 3700m works flawlessly with modified forceware 185.85.
For me it´s win win sitution. Powerful professional card can double as Geforce 9800 when I need it to (on weekends ). If you are interested, grab driver of your liking from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com forums along with modified .inf file. Extract drivers to location of your choice and replace the original .inf file with modified one. After that, everything as usual.

Note : I don´t see any post by rsalarda, so if he did offer the same piece of advice as i did, please excuse the repetition.

 

[monkeyman_95]

Did you end up trying this modified driver solution?

I have the same problem with mine as well. Things will be going well and then I get a game freeze or crash out of nowhere on my 8730w.

 

[GeoCAD]

I have the 1 gig nvidia quadro fx 3700m with the quad core and 4 gig's of RAM. I run Inventor, Autocad Electrical, Alias, Showcase and it is all great, until I get away from the Lappy, it freezes, it a 64 bit vista ultimate. I have the latest drivers and bios, reloaded vista once already and have found the following:

run VLC playing a song, in a loop, mutted, to keep this baby from freezing.

my System's guy told me to change the power settings to keep things from idleing (throthiln down) and to turn the screen saver off, nothig works.

I won't dare send it back to HP, because I can not survive w/o it for a day.

 

[Lukas_55]

I´m afraid you´ll have to send it back to HP, this problem is quite common for 8730w. My system suffered from the same ailment, random freezes when idle, unexpected shutdowns et cetera. I´vew tried everything, drivers, bios flashing and nothing had worked.

There is even dedicated thread at HP support forums, and general concensus is, that only viable solution is motherboard replacement. If you are interested, you can read all abou it here http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service...47626+1250940158763+28353475&threadId=1292169

 

[Guest]

Hi,

Well, no hard feelings guys but you missing the technical data.

"The FX 2700M is based on the G94 core and therefore similar to the GeForce 9700M GTS."

So Yes mate, you can use series 9 nvidia gforce drivers, it will bring out the gaming performance but you will get the CAD/CAM performance lowered.

Anyway quadro GPU is the same core as gforce but with tweaked driver options and some performance boosted but can be only more, not less in performance then it's gforce parallel.

I got some issue with this freezing thing. Check if the Task Manager is activated, because it will check for hardware update in precious time intervals and that can be the cause.

Neo