HELLO EVERYONE, PLEASE HELP ME, SOMEONE, ANYONE!!!

Prateek

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Oct 6, 2003
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Hi Guys. I have a Dell Inspiron 8200 which I bought in March this year. It has a P4-M 1.8 GHz, 512Mb RAM, Mobility Radeon 9000 with 64Mb VRAM and a 40Gb IBM HDD. The chipset is the 845MP.

I want to overclock the CPU and get better performance out of it. I know that there would be absolutely no problems in trying to run the CPU at around 2.1 GHz. The current BIOS version is version A10 from Dell and as everyone knows there is no adjustment options in it.

The Radeon is overclocked thanks to Powerstrip and is doing 286.88 MHz for the GPU and 232.88 for the VRAM versus the default settings of 238.5 and 196.4 respectively. I have done some chassis mods to improve cooling within and it has helped a bit.

The PLL or CPU clock generator on the motherboard is the Cypress W320-4x and the W320 series is not supported by either CPUFSB or CPUCOOL. Dell have not posted any new video drivers since Feb and their last version A03 has started having issues with DX9 games, at least on my notebook.

Therefore I had to trick Windows XP to install the Radeon 9200 Pro driver from the ATI website, Catalyst 3.7, the self installer failing to initialise because of the Dell Mobility Radeon 9000 module that is in the system. I hope it is the right choice of driver and there are no issues with it as yet and performance is similar with better compatibility at least. I must admit that Powerplay has stopped functioning after the driver change even though the tab is still there in the ATI control panel.

This is the entire long story and now please help me achieve what I want. I am sure that it is not impossible by any means and I realy want to give it a shot. If the guys at Tom's Hardware can not do it, I wonder who could? So pleeeeese try and help me out. I think there is a way to trick Speedstep to go in the other direction but I do not know how. Need help here, pleeeeeese. Thanks a lot.
 
First thing....My recommendation...

Don't even waste your time on trying to tweak a notebook. It's not worth the effort. Get yourself a desktop and tweak that instead.

The hardware in notebooks is generally not as flexible as desktop hardware. The video, motherboard, ram, etc... have less tolerance for the stresses of overclocking/tweaking than do standard pc parts. In the end, you will most likely end up frying your cpu or gpu, then have to fork out big bucks to repair it.

Another aspect is the the problem that by overclocking/tweaking, you are doing much more and encountering more risks to get it, and getting less of an upgrade, than you would with a pc.

<font color=blue> Ok, so you have to put your "2 cents" in, but its value is only "A penny's worth". Who gets that extra penny? </font color=blue>
 

zible

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Jul 3, 2003
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That and notebooks are a pain in the hinekin to cool easily. It aint like you can stick a big huge heatsink on the cpu, add mem coolers to the vid, and fan on the chipset very easily, or at all.

I stick with the wyrm of groveling. Notebook != overclock