But that isn't my point. I'm on battery. Here I am, sitting in my living room on my couch watching the Science Channel, wondering if any of my auctions sold or if any of my friends are logged in. So I launch it, it loads up, and I'm in the middle of Stormwind. 10fps. All kinds of people running around and such, not so great. I alt tab and launch the Catalyst Control Center (yeah I got it to work, and the latest drivers...). The core is clocked at 110MHz because I'm on balanced battery mode. With a predicted 3 hour 18 minutes remaining. What?...
Scott at Gadling remarked that he couldn't get any ATI driver package to install, that he had to rely on Windows Update for a working one. I used ATI's legacy driver package for Vista 64 bit. It said something about support for x1250 chipsets. The x1270 is simply a derivative of the x1250, and it even recognizes it as x1270 and installs perfectly. Well it recognizes a device ID of 791f with a vendor ID of 1002 (which is the x1270). Catalyst works perfectly and even detects the correct clock speeds. It has support for Powerplay as well, so it can scale the graphics performance with the Windows battery mode (which mine is doing, it scales to something higher on high performance mode). So if you'd like to have Catalyst, even though it really doesn't seem to have changed the performance at all, give the legacy driver package a try.
I like not having to worry about this thing dying half way through a post. And actually being able to type without my fingers cramping.
Brad, it is an absolute joy to have found your blog and I religiously await the updates that you make.
ReplyDeleteI use NHC (Notebook Hardware Control) to change the GPU frequency. 109Mhz at Battery Mode and 300MHz when plugged in. I have always found Catalyst Control Center a bit of a heavyweight.
As an aside...over at Hardforums.com they are discussing the batteries options available for the LT3103u and apparently the Acer AO751h are the same. This gives us an option of 3, 6, or even 9 cell. Sweet!!!
Thank you very much!
ReplyDeleteI've never even heard of NHC, but I just gave it a try with no luck. It installs perfectly, but when I launch it says it cannot load the NHC driver. Perhaps it's because I'm running 64 bit Windows 7? I'll have to tinker with it more, but it sounds very promising. Yes, Catalyst is very heavy, I am going to uninstall it later actually.
As for the batteries, that's good news for other people, but this 6-cell is perfect for me. The size and capacity are spot on. A 9-cell seems like it would make the notebook too uncomfortable to handle and carry for that extra juice.
Thanks for reading! I'll be sure to update if I can get NHC working.