Overclocking Performance - Games
The 3DMark results were certainly interesting, and they showed a couple of things. First, extremely CPU intensive applications may not benefit beyond the Bin-3 overclock setting. Second and more pertinent to our actual gaming tests is that the 3DMark results indicate there's a good chance we will be GPU limited in many gaming benchmarks. Of course, the only way to really find out how games will perform at the various settings is to benchmark those games. All tests were run without antialiasing except where indicated. As the XPS M1710 (and most other new laptops) features a widescreen LCD, we restricted our test resolutions to widescreen settings.
As expected, at the higher quality settings and particularly at the native 1920x1200 resolution, increasing CPU performance does virtually nothing for gaming performance. Battlefield 2 shows the best performance scaling from overclocking, but only without antialiasing. Considering you can average over 60 frames per second even with 4xAA, we don't see any reason to disable it on this particular notebook. In those instances where we do see a slight separation among the various processor speeds, Bin-3 and Bin-4 usually end up as the highest performing settings, although Quake 4 without antialiasing seems to favor Bin-2 at lower resolutions for whatever reason. Given the margin of error and the tightly clustered scores on these benchmarks, however, it is doubtful you would actually notice the difference in performance when playing games. For gaming purposes, users should probably just stick with the stock CPU setting as anything more won't really help much. Still, there doesn't appear to be any harm in running up to a Bin-3 setting other than slightly higher noise levels from the system fans.
The 3DMark results were certainly interesting, and they showed a couple of things. First, extremely CPU intensive applications may not benefit beyond the Bin-3 overclock setting. Second and more pertinent to our actual gaming tests is that the 3DMark results indicate there's a good chance we will be GPU limited in many gaming benchmarks. Of course, the only way to really find out how games will perform at the various settings is to benchmark those games. All tests were run without antialiasing except where indicated. As the XPS M1710 (and most other new laptops) features a widescreen LCD, we restricted our test resolutions to widescreen settings.
As expected, at the higher quality settings and particularly at the native 1920x1200 resolution, increasing CPU performance does virtually nothing for gaming performance. Battlefield 2 shows the best performance scaling from overclocking, but only without antialiasing. Considering you can average over 60 frames per second even with 4xAA, we don't see any reason to disable it on this particular notebook. In those instances where we do see a slight separation among the various processor speeds, Bin-3 and Bin-4 usually end up as the highest performing settings, although Quake 4 without antialiasing seems to favor Bin-2 at lower resolutions for whatever reason. Given the margin of error and the tightly clustered scores on these benchmarks, however, it is doubtful you would actually notice the difference in performance when playing games. For gaming purposes, users should probably just stick with the stock CPU setting as anything more won't really help much. Still, there doesn't appear to be any harm in running up to a Bin-3 setting other than slightly higher noise levels from the system fans.
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Gary Key - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
It is a typo on the chart. The numbers reflected are the total score, not the individual break out on FPS.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
Fixed. SupCom is a generated score from the perftest map (with an edited benchmark script). Sorry about that.yacoub - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
what?Article says:
"We weren't able to run our latest gaming benchmarks (S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Supreme Commander) on all of the laptops, so performance results for those games won't be included here."
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
The XPS M1710 OC scaling charts included SupCom and STALKER results. Just not the other laptops (although I might be able to run the benchmarks on a couple laptops still).yacoub - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
I gave up on waiting for laptops to reach reasonable prices. Ordered a nice c2d setup to replace my aging A64 rig and did it for under $425. CPU, RAM, and Mobo. My 7900GT is still enough for now, but when the 8800GTS 640MB hits $350 without rebates I'll probably scoop one of those up too. So still under $800 for a full system upgrade.And since I can remote in to my home machine from work and my work machine from home, I really have little need for a laptop, though I do have a company-provided laptop for travel if I really needed to use it. On that flash games (tower defense, etc) are enough to keep me entertained if I'm that desperate to sit in a hotel room(?!). Most likely an mp3 player or a book is all I need in-flight and I'll be out doing things (business or tourist related) when I'm traveling so uber high-end gaming laptops at exorbitant prices just don't really have a use for me, or I'd imagine for most folks.
Ender17 - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
The graphs would be a lot easier to read if they were labeled with the actual CPU speed instead of Bin 1, Bin 2...redbone75 - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
Agreed. Just as easy to put 2.33 - 3.16 as it is to do Bin-0 - Bin-5. Actually, you save a character :)JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
Given that the clock speeds are more of a request than an actual result, I didn't want to use those. I couldn't actually see if throttling was occurring during the game benchmarks, but the scores seem to indicate that the CPU was throttling at the Bin-4 and Bin-5 results on some games.The names I used came from discussions with Dell, where they referred to the clock speeds as "Bin + 3", but I used a plus sign instead. Given that the scores are all pretty close on many benchmarks, I didn't think too much about it.
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