Laptops and overclocking: Worth bothering?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bram Turismo
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Bram Turismo

Bram Turismo

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bramturismo
I was just browsing around on the internet when I spotted a mention of laptops and overclocking.

I understand it's risky business since it can potentially void your warranty and build up lots of heat. Is there anyone who has ever tried overclocking a laptop?

Reason I'm asking is that well... If it works, why not give it a shot? I'm not sure what kind of improvements I'm looking at, but I'd love a small improvement in gaming performance. For some odd reason, the frame rate drops quite monumentally between me running Crysis in my native resolution, 1368X766, and any lower resolution. Both running at the exact same graphical spec.

My ASUS laptop was bought in July so it's still a new laptop that has been handling everything I've thrown at it so far but I'll never say no to an extra 5 FPS when playing Crysis with such gorgeous graphics.

As far as heat is concerned, I'm running a Core i3 so it doesn't come close to heat producing and power consumption of an i7. The laptop doesn't feel even warm at any given spot other than the air coming out of the fan. May I at this point brag about ASUS' job on heat isolating this machine? It's brilliant!

Basically I'm only looking for some extra framerates in Crysis since everything else runs like a train on this nifty laptop. If overclocking doesn't even improve gaming performance than it's not needed to "over-stress" my laptop at all. Neither would it be worth the trouble if I'm looking at an only minor performance increase of 2-3 FPS :)
 
I would just stay away from overclocking. I would not overclock my laptop since it does what I need it to. Though the real question is, Does your laptop even have overclocking abilities in the BIOS?

I can't really give much information on overclocking since I'm not that experienced with it.
 
Its a Core i3, so even if you could overclock it (most laptops that do support overclocking are dedicated gaming laptops with the top of the line processors on the market), the performance benefits would most likely be negligible/bottlenecked.
 
Overclocking a laptop is bad in every situation.

Also Crysis is GPU limited in almost all cases so overclocking won't do squat. I guess you gotta just live with the fact that no, it's can't play Crysis.
 
Wanting to overclock it is the perfect sign that you should've bought a more powerful model. ;)
 
Sharky.
Wanting to overclock it is the perfect sign that you should've bought a more powerful model. ;)
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Well, not really in my case. I'm that person who is happy with what he has, yet always wants more. Offer me a hand and I'll take an arm. Should I buy an ASUS G-series next year the first I'd be looking at is building a desktop the following year. I'm just greedy I guess.

Casio: It does play Crysis quite nicely. I was just suspicious towards the framerate drop it experiences whenever cranking up the resolution even in the slightest bit. I play in my native resolution right now, and it's playable but as I said above; I'm never completely satisfied.

No overclocking it is then 👍
 
No matter what they market them as, even 'gaming' laptops are a bit of a scam.

cry-med.png


Even an Alienware 15x (The self proclaimed worlds most powerful 15" laptop) can't play Crysis at 1920x1080 on medium setting. Which any half decent PC would do with stride these days. Their just isn't enough space to remove the heat or power to drive a crazy video card.

Take the top of the line Mobility card from ATI at the moment, the Mobility Radeon HD 5870:

(5870 Mobility)
Core clock - 700mhz
Memory Clock - 1000mhz
1120GFLOPS processing power.

People are scamed into thinking that because it's a '5870', it must be equal to the desktop version. Well let's see:

(5870 Desktop)
Core Clock - 850Mhz
Memory Clock - 1200Mhz
2720 GFLOPS processing power.

So the desktop version is probably 3 times as good as the Mobility version, if you consider you can overclock it in 5 seconds unlike the mobile version. In fact, the 5870 Mobility compares closest to the performance of a lowly desktop 5750.

(5750 Desktop)
Core Clock: 700Mhz
Memory Clock: 1150Mhz
1008GFLOPS processing power.

Just something to remember when you're trying to use or purchase a laptop for gaming. That even the best mobile GPUs are only equivalent to mid range desktop cards at best.
 
Gaming was never my main priority when I bought this laptop as I was looking for both performance for tasking, running photoshop and Autodesk programs and having a mobile machine.

And I can't be bothered looking at 1900 resolution stats since my native resolution isn't even that big. I have always been puzzled why anyone would want to game in anything bigger than your native resolution.
 
Oh I was just on a GPU rant, not directed at anyone. :)

I knew a couple of people who went out and spent 2.5k on a 'gaming laptop', which has a 1 hour battery life if gaming so isn't very portable. Then you need to bring a mouse, so makes it less portable. If you get a 17" one it weighs for 4 tons, making it less portable. And it only runs games at a mid level at best. And you can never upgrade it. When for the equivalent money you could buy a PC close to top of the line. And hell, by a case with handles if you go to LAN parties a lot...
 
Bram Turismo
Gaming was never my main priority when I bought this laptop as I was looking for both performance for tasking, running photoshop and Autodesk programs and having a mobile machine.

And I can't be bothered looking at 1900 resolution stats since my native resolution isn't even that big. I have always been puzzled why anyone would want to game in anything bigger than your native resolution.
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I'd like to know how it is possible to game in anything bigger than your native resolution...


Native res for an LCD is simply the number of pixels it has in each direction. You can turn the resolution down where more real pixels are used to represent the pixels of the image being displayed. That's where things get blocky looking.

You can't go the other way, making the real pixels "split" into multiple pixels to increase the resolution...
 
nick09
Does your laptop even have overclocking abilities in the BIOS?
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This.

I looked into overclocking my Dell right after I bought it and quickly found that the multiplier was locked in the BIOS, so I gave up on it.

I did, however, overclock the GPU a touch. Shortly thereafter I figured there was no point and reset it.
 
Sometimes there are software overclocking solutions. I know the Intel Atom based netbooks can be overclocked via software. Multipliers usually are locked though. Its usually just the Intel Extreme processors and the Black Edition AMDs that have an unlocked multiplier. FSB is where you'll usually adjust to get extra clock speed.
 
Eric.
I'd like to know how it is possible to game in anything bigger than your native resolution...
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Voodoo magic.

I remember on this forum years ago some guy forced his LCD res to higher than the native resolution (Obviously not literally but in the OS). And was telling everyone how much better and smoother it looked. He posted a picture showing everyone and it just looked like blurry crap, but he thought that looking at a squished-out, down-scaled picture was awesome. Each to their own...

Similar to those guys who force higher LCD refresh rates cause 5hz is worth blowing up your monitor for.
 
Hey Bram, how about you stop your hotmail and MSN sending out spam links first?! ;)
 
DQuaN
Hey Bram, how about you stop your hotmail and MSN sending out spam links first?! ;)
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Fill me in :confused:

Casio
Oh I was just on a GPU rant, not directed at anyone. :)

I knew a couple of people who went out and spent 2.5k on a 'gaming laptop', which has a 1 hour battery life if gaming so isn't very portable. Then you need to bring a mouse, so makes it less portable. If you get a 17" one it weighs for 4 tons, making it less portable. And it only runs games at a mid level at best. And you can never upgrade it. When for the equivalent money you could buy a PC close to top of the line. And hell, by a case with handles if you go to LAN parties a lot...
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Well when I was looking for a laptop I was looking for a machine that could handle everything since I do everything on it. I don't have room for a desktop and a screen where I live at school so I needed a laptop which could handle everything I do daily: web-access, Photoshop, AutoCAD, watching videos, using video editting software, listening to music, have storing space, playing games, etc. My screen is 16", I don't like anything bigger than that either ;)

I agree with you it's idiotic to go out and buy a Sager, Alienware or an ASUS G-series. But everytime I have a look at the price of a Radeon HD5870 I wonder whether building your own system really is cheaper... Not to mention people crossfire some of those incredibly expensive cards :crazy:
 
i over clocked my lap top to play gt4 on it and man it sucked i couldnt even use it for more that 40 minutes. laptops are for collage kids playing the sim. just get a desktop
 
Casio
Oh I was just on a GPU rant, not directed at anyone. :)

I knew a couple of people who went out and spent 2.5k on a 'gaming laptop', which has a 1 hour battery life if gaming so isn't very portable. Then you need to bring a mouse, so makes it less portable. If you get a 17" one it weighs for 4 tons, making it less portable. And it only runs games at a mid level at best. And you can never upgrade it. When for the equivalent money you could buy a PC close to top of the line. And hell, by a case with handles if you go to LAN parties a lot...
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This. I also can't stand people that want large screens on their laptops and pay a premium to get a 17" screen laptop, when for the different in price you could buy a 23" monitor for us at home with a laptop.
 
You guys are missing the most important factor of overclocking: temperature!

A laptop has a hard time cooling itself with stock frequencies and normal situations. Overclocking would significantly increase failures as temperatures will rise and I doubt most of the components are designed to handle the extra heat.

However, if you're looking at performance of a desktop to a laptop, it's hard to compare.

At $1,000 a desktop can beat a laptop without question. It will be more efficient and safer as the components will be able to cool better with bigger heatsinks and more airflow (highly recommend using 120mm fans or bigger).

The ATI 5870 is great card, but that is very high end card but if you need the performance, no laptop can match it at all.

For me, I would sacrifice the mobility of a laptop and put my money into a desktop and make some room. You'll get the performance you need and it's possible to save money and if you need portability for some things, get a smartphone!

Just my opinion.
 
I did look into overclocking my laptop, a HP business edition type.

There was nothing in the BIOS to do anything to change the core clock speed of the processer at all. After a couple of moment thought about actually overclocking the processer in a small, confined space, I disregared the topic any further as it would have been quite fruitless with the increase in temperature, lower life of the products and the fact the damn thing was already quite hot after 30 mins of standard use.

So...It can be possible with some, but more often than not, its just a e-peen excerise.
 
R34EVO9
i over clocked my lap top to play gt4 on it and man it sucked i couldnt even use it for more that 40 minutes. laptops are for collage kids playing the sim. just get a desktop
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