Alienware m14x problems

[acowinspace]

Specs

 

i7 2650qm or maybe a 2640qm

6 gig of ram

gtx 555m 1.5gb

running at 1920x1080 on a 42inch tv on hdmi

 

My frame rates are all over the place i have 60fps on most games running at high and about 25fps minimum but the thing is i have lag spikes all the time

ive tried fixing it before and ive only had temp fixes

but now i have more fps running at ultra then i would on low this might sound wierd but its true while only losing 25fps average on low

but the lag spikes become unbearable

on low the lag spikes are unnoticeable

recently i had problems with temperature so i bought a cooling pad and it worked miracles but again the lag spikes became really bad

 

 

This i really infuriating :down:

 

any help would be huge Thanks :laugh:

[acowinspace]

also if this helps the only game ive played where this dosent happen is minecraft

[hoofhearted4]

inb4 "buying an Alienware was your problem"

 

but in all seriousness. what games are these spikes occuring in? what is going on onscreen when they happen? lots of action? lots of NPCs, particles, going in and out of a world, fast travel etc. also how long into the game before they start happening? 5 minutes, 30 minutes, and hour or more? and how long do they last? are they just dips of a second or two? do they last multiple seconds? tied to the second question, do they dips stop, when action on screen changes? do you play with mods?

 

the laptop isnt bad. but its not the best either. it might not be able to handle games with a lot going on on screen, or new games at high settings. plus youre using an external monitor, that eats up performance as well. depending on whats going on it could be your VRAM getting capped, or your GPU just not being able to handle something going on.

Edited April 16, 2015 by hoofhearted4

[billyro]

I had an Alienware m14x and all my lag was due to it overheating or a lot of things being rendered on the screen at once. Since you've already got a cooling pad, there isn't much else you can do in that regard (maybe prop it up some more so more air gets in?). Alienwares are good at rendering small scenes at high framerates, so if you've got heaps of grass or people or detailed trees, the framerate will drop noticeably.

[Vagrant0]

Frankly surprised you're even getting 60 frames at that resolution from an Laptop gtx55x series connected to a tv.

 

That said, Using Minecraft as a benchmark is unreliable at best, outright lying in your face at worst. Minecraft is poorly coded, optimized, and is highly dependent on how your installation of Java is even setup. It also suffers greatly from randomness in loading/display behavior solely by the way it loads and keeps active chunks. Meanwhile also having it's "high" end linked to as complex as the world around you currently is.

 

I would suggest looking into some other benchmark tools in order to get a good idea of what your system is having trouble with. With a laptop it can be a large number of factors that can cause inconsistent framerates, including but not limited to... Heating issues, I/O issues, Memory issues, poor optimization, or expecting to get a consistant 30+ framerate on what is currently considered lower-end hardware. I'm trying not to sound like a hardware snob, or take the usual Alienware = crap stance, but the gtx 550 line is a few years old at this point in time, with the compact version they used for laptops being considerably worse than the desktop version due to having to be made smaller and down-tuned in order to compensate for the heat and power limitations. You shouldn't expect to get more than 30 frames on anything made within the last 2-4 years outside of mobile and retro-esque games. Meaning that your best option might really be to just look into ways to cap the framerate to ~30-35 fps so that there isn't as much of an obvious jump between low and high load.

 

There is a reason why even current gen console games are capped to 30fps. Because the hardware in a PS4 or XBOne cannot handle the demands that higher framerates require, and they know it, so they intentionally design the software to have the framerates low but stable.