Hardware advice, over clocking.

[Surfer11May]

Does over clocking help game performance if the memory is 1333 (limited by mother board)?

 

On another subject, I have read that there is no benefit to having a m4 SSD

with a SATA II system. Others have said they get SATA III performance out

of the m4 SSD with a RAID controller set to RAID in bios and SSD installed

as non RAID. I have Intel® Mobile Express Chipset SATA RAID controller.

 

Who is right?

 

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-820QM, 1.73-3.06

Video Card: nVidia GeForce GTX 280M 1,024MB

Windows 7 Home P 64-bit, 6 GB RAM, INTEL SSD SA2CW

[RitualBlack]

The only things you could do really do to improve game performance (besides hardware upgrades) is to overclock your cpu/gpu which isn't the most practical thing to do with laptops as they can't usually get rid of heat. The added heat generated from a worthwhile overclock would probably just cause heat stuttering and if you were to overclock to a stable temp the fans would just make a lot more noise, not to mention you may only gain 1-5 fps depending on the game. There is no way that a laptop could remain stable with a high enough overclock to make a game play on high instead of medium or ultra instead of high unless you are going to remove the chassis and use alternative cooling methods :tongue: . The cpu you have is also more than good enough to handle games, and the graphics card should be able to handle most modern games on at least medium settings if not high.

[Erik005]

It is unlikely that you can overclock your cpu, the option to change the baseclock is probably not even in the bios.

 

An ssd will improve laptop performance even with sataII but not in fps, the ssd will speed up loading times and pretty much everything in windows but not fps.

[Surfer11May]

Thanks, I think there was an option to overclock this computer when it was purchased, could be wrong.

Has large copper heat sinks. But for just 5 fps - not worth it.

 

Just for my understanding then, overclocking cpu/gpu for increased fps is not affected by mother board

bus speeds. Is that right?

 

Any thoughts on the SATA part of the question? Would like shorter load times. Some say that my RAID

controller will handle the m4 SSD. Already have the v4 SSD.

[Dan3345]

I believe you are correct in saying that overclocking will not increase in bus speeds. Those are transfer of data and they are relatively fixed.

 

Overclocking will affect power delivery, and if you're board is not capable of deliver the right voltage and when, the caps could blow.

 

As for the SSD, they should almost always be set to ACHI. RAID is not designed for SSD's and currently is in the process of being rewritten to support them. SSD's use systems like TRIM to minimize needless writes and clean NAND drives that are not being used to their full potential. I believe a controller set to RAID with an SSD in it could have problems or be blocked from using some of its basic maintenance features. As to your question pertaining to speed, I would set the controller back to ACHI, and then see how much space is left on the SSD. If the SSD has 128 GB's on it how much of its capacity is free space? SSD's tend to get slower as space is occupied. I would think as long as you're SSD's controller is set to ACHI, its space is not being wasted, and you are using the full capacity of SATA 2 you should be fine on load times. But heres the trick. As long as you are on SATA 2 I don't think its possible to see speeds similar to SATA 3 even with an SSD.

 

Hope I helped

[Surfer11May]

Thanks, I have seen several threads that agree with your comments above.

 

My v4 SSD is installed as non RAID on BIOS RAID setting now because my original system was installed on a RAID 0. The mirror backup would not restore to a non raid environment and did not want to loose some software on the old system with a reinstall.

 

Intell has a tool box that takes care of the maintenance that Windows 7 is not able to when in RAID mode. It is on a schedule so I do not have to bother with it.

 

Disk management shows 111.79 GB for the SSD.

Have a C: Windows partition with 19.5 GB free and F: Games with 34.3 GB free. My load time as Skyrim startup is 14 seconds. Not bad I suppose but cutting it in half would be nice.

 

That one thread that said the m4 would perform at full speed on a SATA II system set to RAID in BIOS may not be correct as it is the only one with that point of view. Had my hopes up though.

 

Thanks.

[MotoSxorpio]

Does over clocking help game performance if the memory is 1333 (limited by mother board)?

 

If the board does not support memory above 1333, you can only OC to get the full speed. Not recommended as OCing the RAM would include raising anything to do with FSB frequency...which is pretty much everything. (unless you own a 990fx or similar, and multipliers are unlocked...)

 

Try not to use 8x AA or SSAA...keep it around 4x AA and use only game settings until you find a happy spot.

Hard drive performance hasn't limited me except for loading times in between cells etc...for this I went for stripe Raid, separate from the system disk.