Hey all, I have a laptop and I was wondering if I could get some specific advice. 50 FPS CPU bound in warpgate, 20 FPS GPU in heavy battles, with stutters. Dell XPS L502X (LAPTOP) i7-2630QM @2.00 GHz 6GB RAM GeForce GT525M I know this setup will never be perfect, simply because no laptop will ever be. However, I am not in the financial position to buy a new PC. Therefore, I was looking at some cheap upgrades to make gaming less painful. My main problem is the FPS stuttering in the heat of the battle. I want to hear your opinion on the impact of the following upgrades and your advice whether it would be worth it: - extra RAM - Solid state drive
It's almost definitely caused by either the piss-poor 525M in general or the processor overheating and throttling itself down. You can disable Speedstep to prevent throttling, but keep a wary eye on your temperatures if you do so. More RAM won't likely make all that much of a difference in my opinion. An SSD will only really improve load times.
Dude, you got a Dell! Sorry, I couldn't resist. Not much you can do other than what the Appl3 suggests, OC will not fix your stutter. If someone wants to buy a laptop for gaming, they need to consider systems like: ASUS G75VW MSI GT70 Dragon Lenovo Y400 & Y500
afaik disabling speedstep will lock the core into low frequency mode on laptops so it will not have the desired effect. There are tools to stop the cpu from throttling down but most are very advanced & can cause serious damage if configured incorrectly so I'm not even going to mention them. I strongly recommend not to use those unless you know what you are doing Please also keep in mind that If your laptop is downclocking because of heat problems it means it HAS TO, or your cpu/chipset won't live very long. These features are implemented for good reason. Granted, the threshold is a bit on the safe side but you rather want to be safe then sorry. Regarding OP's question, I also don't think those upgrades would yield the desired result. Extra ram or an SSD might reduce the stuttering if it is caused by accessing your swapfile on your HDD too often but it probably won't make a difference. Since you are GPU bound in big fights (normally it is the other way around) I would upgrade the gfx card, but this might introduce even more overheating issues if that was the cause in the first place. If I had to choose one of your suggestions it would be the SSD, simply to speed up loadtimes and general responsiveness; it will have very limited effect on framerate.
Thanks for the honest reply. My temps are generally running high without any modifications already so I am not taking the risk. I hypothesized the FPS stuttering would become less with more RAM, but I wasn't sure. I can live with longer load times. Given the replies I shall not upgrade this laptop but I will directly buy a completely new set-up when I have the money around. Guess that will take a while, but not as long if I had also invested in negligible upgrades.
Well, I actually gave it some more thought. If your laptop has a PCI-Express slot, you can get an external pcie expansion case. I don't know what performance you will get, but it will give you a avenue to a higher end video card. Some options: http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=Products http://www.netstor.com.tw/_03/03_02.php?OTc You can also do this with mini-pcie, just search in google and good luck.
