Dell 5150 Overclocking Results

[LSudlow]

I've had many questions about overclocking the Inspiron 5150's video card and, since I don't usually overclock, thought I should do a bit of research to find out what can really be done. My 5150 has the 3.06GHz (non-hyperthreading) P4 and the 64MB version of the FX Go5200. I'm running the A38 BIOS and nVidia driver version 71.84.

I used 3DMark03 as my primary test at all clock speeds, but also ran 3DMark01 and 3DMark05 just to confirm they would complete without hanging. All clock speeds are recorded as core/memory, as in 200/400.

I started with 200/400 and recorded a score of 1300.

Upping the clocks 10% to 220/440, I recorded a 12.2% improved score of 1458.

Upping the clocks an additional 2.3% to 225/450, I hit the point of diminishing returns. The score improved only 0.7% to 1468.

225 seems to be the fastest stable core speed. In all tests, I never experienced a hang at that core speed, but did experience hangs with greater frequency the farther I went above 225. A core clock of 250 hangs almost immediately when running any of the 3DMark tests.

However, I was able to push the memory clock an additional 50MHz to 500 and complete all tests at 225/500 with no problems. My 3DMark03 score was an excellent (for this machine) 1546. Although all tests completed, my system fan was running at full speed the entire time and made me nervous enough that I clocked back down immediately afterwards.

CONCLUSION: The 5150 is very sensitive to heat and it's cooling fans MUST be frequently cleaned with a blast of compressed air or something similar just to maintain normal operation. Any overclocking at all will almost certainly make matters worse. However, if you feel you must overclock, it looks like 220/440 might be relatively safe, and does give a nice performance boost without too much excess heat. Moving to 225/450 pushes the core clock close to the edge with little additional increase in performance, but may be acceptable for the hard-core among you. 225/500 is far too hot for everyday use and will probably shorten the life of the Go5200 if used for more than brief tests.

[®®®]

That's some interesting results for the 5150/60 community. :)

[Guest sykozylot]

for me i usually go at 236/452 and it's stable. i only overlock when gaming though.

[LSudlow]

I'll give it a try when I get a chance. I was trying to keep the memory clock at twice the speed of the core and only tried stretching the memory after I started seeing problems (when the combination went above 225/450). I should have tried stretching the core as well. If 225/500 is posssible, it makes sense that 236/450 (or 452) would be possible too.

Thanks! :)

[Guest Impaled]

I have the same computer and was wonder how you did all that in bios cause i dont know how to do it. the only thing i did was upgrade the video driver to 81.98.

[LSudlow]

It's done in the nvidia Control Panel, not the BIOS. In the inf, find the coolbits line and change it from 1 to 3. Reinstall and you will find the Overclocking page in the nvidia Control Panel.

[Guest Guest]

ok i got the overclock page now wats the best setting like wat should the top slider be on and wat should the bottom slider be on

[®®®]

It's all stated in the first post :)

[Guest mew905]

funny... I easily achieve a stable 244 core, 477 mem. 245 core and it starts random lockups, same with 478 and over for mem.

I even have the CPU massively underclocked (to save the heat and hence "matrix lag", I put a tutorial on www.4peeps.com on how to stop the matrix lag, if you have that problem)

My computer is an inspiron 5150 w/ P4M 2.8GHz, 512MB RAM, 60GB HDD (5400RPM), and the GeForce vid card, also 64 meg. Right now these are my clocks:

Processor: 908 MHz

Video core: 244 MHz

Video mem: 477 MHz

Thats right, the processor IS in megahertz, and it is accurate :)

[Guest Guest]

forgot to mention the processor speed does nothing to my gaming. I play NFS Most wanted at an easy 20 FPS at those clocks

[LSudlow]

Interesting solution to the matrix problem... I'll check it out. Thanks!

One word of caution regarding overclocked graphics on the 5150 - The Go5200 sits right on top of the chip that tells the machine whether it's plugged into an AC outlet or not. It's easy to overheat that chip so the 5150 fails to recognize A/C power. If the chip becomes permanently damaged, a motherboard replacement is the only fix that I know of.

Anyway - that was great detective work on your part! Thanks again!

:)

[Guest Guest]

thx, I got my lappy back in 2004... I've had matrix lag ever since December of 04 (or immediately after rebooting and realizing later that dell never sent the proper drivers for speedstep). It wasnt until a month ago that I found a way to fix it. I used I8kfanGUI and monitored the CPU temp on my second monitor while playing NFSU2. I noted that during each matrix spike, my CPU hit a temp of 72 degrees and clocked down (the matrix lag effect) to reduce the temperature. My guess is either they didnt include a driver that tells it to clock down at a higher temp... or the offsets on the sensors werent set properly. Either way, my solution will work, but ONLY if it is a heat problem. if you still get matrix lag after my solution (my GF said it's still happening, but I have yet to experience it now) then it is not a heat problem, and in that case, I dont know how to fix. It IS speedstep though :)

I did have a screenshot from I8kfanGUI showing the clock downs at 72 degrees... but then I decided to format again.

Also take note that when you clock it down this low, you will very very rarely ever see the fan turn on. my vid card is overclocked to the extreme, and even then the fan never turns on.

Please do me a favour, anyone experiencing the matrix lag problem, let them know about my solution. It annoyed me for a year and a half, I dont want others to suffer from it as well.

[LSudlow]

We certainly will. It's great information. Thanks again!

:)

[mew905]

haha, I found the pic, turns out I backed it up with everything else. This shows the matrix lag and temperature relationship. This was taken during Need for Speed Underground 2 gameplay. It does not show the GPU temp. As you can see, the blue line was at about 50% during gameplay, and the 3rd matrix spike is when I closed the game (you can tell by the load dropoff). This is about when I decided to try to fix it with my method :)

Also, I get about 240 minutes on battery now. about 160 while gaming, hows THAT for battery life extension? :) (take note I used to get about 140 minutes battery while text editing, and a mere 60 minutes for games)

Edited May 14, 2006 by mew905

[daonesteven]

haha, I found the pic, turns out I backed it up with everything else. This shows the matrix lag and temperature relationship. This was taken during Need for Speed Underground 2 gameplay. It does not show the GPU temp. As you can see, the blue line was at about 50% during gameplay, and the 3rd matrix spike is when I closed the game (you can tell by the load dropoff). This is about when I decided to try to fix it with my method :)

Also, I get about 240 minutes on battery now. about 160 while gaming, hows THAT for battery life extension? :) (take note I used to get about 140 minutes battery while text editing, and a mere 60 minutes for games)

mew you dont know how many times ive installed that fan control program and ended up uninstalling it because it kept on giving me error messages about how certain fans aren't working and certain temperatures are undetectable, blah blah. If I play games, is that program a must? And if it is, it would be really nice to know what settings you put everything on so that you dont get any error messages ><, thanks :P

[mew905]

I uninstalled it after the discovery because I also had a problem with the error messages. I just wanted to see if it actually was the heat causing matrix lag.

[Guest Fresh Mike]

Hi!

Well i'm new here, but i found some interesting tips here. First of all, I have also an Inspiron 5150 3,2 HT with a 32MB Go5200 Videocard. I did install two programs. One of them is Speedswitch 1.4 and the other is i8kfangui30beta2. I also disabled the Speedsteep in the bios. Now i have whird readings in this programs. SpeedSwitch tells me that i have my laptop running at 800Mhz. So does say Windows. But i8kfangui tells that my machine is running at 1.6 MHz. Any ideas??? In this combination is doesn't matter if U have Speedsteep enabled or disabled. It gives the save efect if i8kfangui is right. Well my question is also, how many states has the P4M ? Just two, 3.2 and 1,6 ???? That's really s***ty! Well thanks for any replies.

Mike

[mew905]

to my knowledge, the processor does only have 2 states, 1.6 and max (mine in particular is 2.8) However Windows proves to be highly inaccurate with its processor speed calculation, especially when run without speedstep on. Only real way to figure out how fast it is running is by realtime calculation, though that feature in I8KFanGui causes the program to crash for me. I've actually had my processor running at <300MHz (realtime calculated O.o), which was pretty insane. Although gaming performance was hit hard, I got something around 8-10 hours of battery (it was a while back so I cant remember, I used SpeedSwitchXP to get it that low)

If battery life isn't an issue and heat has never bothered you or the laptop, running it at full performance is not an issue, and is actually preferred by many. My laptop serves as a desktop replacement, but I run it at 908MHz (according to windows, 1.6GHz realtime) just in case it needs to go on battery, and it gets very warm to the touch at full performance (it still does, just not as bad, and mostly up by the LCD at full brightness, which is understandable)

[Guest Fresh Mike]

Hi again!

Well that strange. When I change in i8kfan to RealTimeSpeed Calculation and I have Speedstep on, the program says my machine is running alway on max (3.2GHz). But i know that not true. At the moment a have a temperature of 52C and the fan is running with 2591 RPM. Windows tells me that i have now 1.6 and I think that's real. How could U have running the CPU with about 300Mhz when the P4M has only two stages? My goal is to have my CPU to the lowest possible frequency, cause i need a long battery life. How can i do this? When I tried SpeedSwitch it didn't help cause i had also a CPU state of 1,6 Ghz.

Greetings Mike

[mew905]

Try my speedswitch XP trick. It's in this forum listed under "Inspiron 5150 quick tweak". Doubles the battery life at the very least.

[Guest Mike]

Hi all, I saw Speedswitch 1.5 has been released...

greeatings Mike

[rwm32]

Speedswitch takes advantage of XP's stop clock throttling to slow the CPU down below its SpeedStep threshold and thus extend battery life. With Speedswitch on Max Battery, when you've been running on battery for a while, a clock of 300MHz is perfectly possible.

It's also worth noting that XP will use stop clock throttling if it detects a heat event. If you're interested in this stuff, follow up using the links on the Speedswitch page of the i8kfangui site.

Edited July 5, 2006 by rwm32

[Guest Guest]

just wanted to ask you, in terms of fixing the matrix lag, my processor is a 3.2ghz and u mentioned that u'd bring it down to 1.6ghz. Wouldn't that affect gaming quality seriously while it actually does take down the issue of matrix lag?

I had matrix lag before, and i managed to simulate it using bink video playing. So what i did was burn a cd with the bink video player as well as a video and told them that as long as this video does NOT play smoothly, i will not pay for the repairs, coz i've sent in my laptop countless of times with no avail.

Turns out they managed to surprise me by solving that issue O_O but then again from what ur saying it might happen if i OVEROVER clock my system >_> which i do quite often. Funny thing is that this problem occured from day 1 that i got the laptop lol

[mew905]

no, underclocking actually does not affect gaming, at least using the method I mentioned. Of course underclocking normally will reduce the performance, which is why most people overclock. However the I5150 has a little... efficiency problem. Come on, if it can run at 1.6GHz, double battery life, and reduce heat, while not impacting performance AT ALL... then obviously it doesn't need to run at 2.8GHz (or 3.2 in your case).

I still get 20fps in NFS Most Wanted when it runs at 1.6GHz, which is equal to what I get when running at 2.8.

You can also solve matrix lag by simply ripping apart the laptop, and applying new, better thermal grease on the heatsink. I chose my method as it is guaranteed not to void the warranty, and should also extend the life of the processor.

MY matrix lag problem only starts after formatting the harddrive after being sent to me brand new from the factory, which is why I think it's a driver problem. some people dont have the matrix lag problem, others (like yourself) get it immediately. Like I said, the I5150 isnt really an ideal laptop.

[Guest HaMsTeYr]

hmmm abit hard to believe really that it doesn't affect performance.. all i do is GPU overclocking for increased performance in games like Battlefield 2 using e.g. RivaTuner.

So basically ur saying that it doesn't affect performance and helps everything else? the win win sounds pretty difficult to be true.

As for me, i'm planning to sell this laptop off soon on an auction site perhaps coz i need to have a decent laptop in the coming years... although this is only 2 years old. I'm also a heavy gamer at that so i'm looking for a good laptop to get to replace this. As my first laptop from dell, it certainly has destroyed my image of them.