Laptop benching

[batboy]

I'm quite sure it's been discussed many times, but a quick search didn't turn up much about laptop/notebook benchmarking. I have a couple laptops that are 5 or 6 years old and the first bench I ran on the slower one netted a gold hardware cup on GPUPI for CPU - 1B. Only one other guy benched this same mobile CPU and I beat him by well over 10 minutes... LOL. I should be able to pick up a bunch of points for the team.

The first thing I realized was drivers tend to be waaaay outdated on lappies. So, this is a good first step, update drivers (especially graphics). Then optimize the OS a little. I don't want to get carried away on this laptop since I use it for traveling. Besides, almost nobody has benched this one, so even a crappy score will get hardware points.

What are some other things that are unique to benching laptops?

 

[Johan45]

Limited cooling is a big thing so not easy to push far if you want to keep it in one piece. Finding software for OC can be a challenge they're out there just a matter of if they work or not. Throttle stop helps for Intel and maybe SetFSB if the PLL chip will communicate

 

[batboy]

Got 2 gold hardware cups and a silver so far this morning. The day is still young.

I wasn't even going to attempt OC on my personal laptop. But, the one that my father gave to me might be a good one to try torturing, since it's an i7 2670QM. Looks like some salesman talked my Dad into getting a laptop way better than he needed. I had not even booted it since I brought it home last winter. But, it fired right up (not sure the battery is much good though). I read somewhere that the Intel XTU will sometimes work on laptops to allow overclocking. That sounds like a stretch, but who knows? If not, I might try the generic software OC (as you know they are hit and miss).

 

[Sentential]

I'm quite sure it's been discussed many times, but a quick search didn't turn up much about laptop/notebook benchmarking. I have a couple laptops that are 5 or 6 years old and the first bench I ran on the slower one netted a gold hardware cup on GPUPI for CPU - 1B. Only one other guy benched this same mobile CPU and I beat him by well over 10 minutes... LOL. I should be able to pick up a bunch of points for the team.

The first thing I realized was drivers tend to be waaaay outdated on lappies. So, this is a good first step, update drivers (especially graphics). Then optimize the OS a little. I don't want to get carried away on this laptop since I use it for traveling. Besides, almost nobody has benched this one, so even a crappy score will get hardware points.

What are some other things that are unique to benching laptops?

It can be done but it is pretty tricky, newer HK chips are unlocked older ones not so much. If you are going to benchmark it look at buying a riser card. Most wireless cards have either a PCMCI slot or a 1X slot reserved for the wireless card and convert it to a full PCI-E 16X riser. I know it's semi cheating but hey you'll definitely get to the top easily with that.

 

[batboy]

I'll have to look into that PCIe riser card thing. But, I can't find any slots like you mentioned. This has integrated wifi. I know very little about laptops. Here is a link to the specs, the only data ports I see are USB and the LAN port.

http://support.toshiba.com/support/staticContentDetail?contentId=3168723&isFromTOCLink=false

One thing I'm finding out on a long benchmark is there is a lot of heat being exhausted. I slipped some plastic spacers under the laptop to allow air circulation underneath and have a small desk fan blowing toward the laptop mainly to provide a fresh source of air and to blow the warm exhaust air away to prevent it from being pulled into the intake again.

 

[Sentential]

I'll have to look into that PCIe riser card thing. But, I can't find any slots like you mentioned. This has integrated wifi. I know very little about laptops. Here is a link to the specs, the only data ports I see are USB and the LAN port.

http://support.toshiba.com/support/staticContentDetail?contentId=3168723&isFromTOCLink=false

One thing I'm finding out on a long benchmark is there is a lot of heat being exhausted. I slipped some plastic spacers under the laptop to allow air circulation underneath and have a small desk fan blowing toward the laptop mainly to provide a fresh source of air and to blow the warm exhaust air away to prevent it from being pulled into the intake again.

See the link below:

EDIT:
https://www.amazon.com/Laptop-External-PCI-Graphics-Card/dp/B00Q4VMLF6

 

[batboy]

Oh, I see, you're trying to make open it up and get my hands dirty.

 

[Tír na nÓg]

If you opeb it, replace the cpu and gpu TIM with liquid metal (I know you have some spare! ). You'll drop temps by 15/20c.

 

[batboy]

Yeah! Wait, is this peer pressure my mom told me about? I took all the easy panels off the underside and I found the RAM and the hard drive, but I don't see anything else without taking the case apart.

I guess if you have a score that ties, like I'm tied with first place, but they give you second place, not sure why. Give us both first place, we both made the same score. I need one more point to get the gold HW cup.

What's this "ReadyBoost" thing? You use a flash drive to speed things up? Does it work?

 

[Sentential]

Yeah! Wait, is this peer pressure my mom told me about? I took all the easy panels off the underside and I found the RAM and the hard drive, but I don't see anything else without taking the case apart.

I guess if you have a score that ties, like I'm tied with first place, but they give you second place, not sure why. Give us both first place, we both made the same score. I need one more point to get the gold HW cup.

What's this "ReadyBoost" thing? You use a flash drive to speed things up? Does it work?

It was a feature of Windows Vista and yes it did work but not nearly as well as Optane does now. Your wireless card is under the keyboard maybe?

 

[batboy]

The turbo boost won't stay at high speed, it bounces up and down all the time, even under load. There is a way in the BIOS to lock it in the low speed mode or letting it run dynamic. Wish there was a way to lock turbo wide open. I supposed I better check temps to make sure it's not thermal throttling.

I need one more point in Cinebench R15 and I can't get it. I've been optimizing Windows 7 a little here and there. I didn't see anyway to change RAM timings in the BIOS. I've ran this bech 5 times in a row and have got the same score each time. The one time it was different was the first time which was one point lower. Weird.

 

[Tír na nÓg]

Liquid metal...

 

[knoober]

Likely you will have to take the entire case apart to get to the wifi card. You will recognize it by the wires leading from the antenna reflector (a big sheet of Tinfoil behind the screen more or less). The biggest issue with taking apart a laptop is losing the screws, but I will admit it can be tedious. Usually the most important stuff is under the keyboard

 

[Johan45]

The turbo boost won't stay at high speed, it bounces up and down all the time, even under load. There is a way in the BIOS to lock it in the low speed mode or letting it run dynamic. Wish there was a way to lock turbo wide open. I supposed I better check temps to make sure it's not thermal throttling.

I need one more point in Cinebench R15 and I can't get it. I've been optimizing Windows 7 a little here and there. I didn't see anyway to change RAM timings in the BIOS. I've ran this bech 5 times in a row and have got the same score each time. The one time it was different was the first time which was one point lower. Weird.

Try this https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-throttlestop/
Also disable UAC and set the priority to Realtime then end explorer.exe betweent thos you should be able to get one or more points

 

[batboy]

I did check temps and they were better than I figured. The CPU was definitely not thermal throttling. Not sure why turbo acts so erratic.

Thanks Johan, I'll try your suggestions later tonight, right now I'm in the midst of benching Geekbench 3. Looks like I have a gold in the single core and silver in the multi.

I believe so far today I won 4 gold hardware cups and 4 silver hardware cups on my old laptop.

 

[batboy]

I've switched over to the other laptop now, it has an i7 2670QM that runs at 2.2 with a turbo boost of 3.1 GHz. I've only ran a couple benchmarks, but it seems way slow compared to others that have subbed. I did the usual optimizations, it's Windows 7 64 bit, but it seems trashed or something.

I tried using XTU and was able to enable a high performance power plan using XTU > Advanced Tuning > settings > advanced settings > active power plan (it can also be done somewhere within Windows, but Microsoft buries it and it's hard to find. Anyway, with it on high performance, the CPU clock speed now stays at about 2.5 GHz. Before it was constantly dropping down to less than 1 GHz when it was at idle.

XTU has the normal overclocking settings "grayed out", but there are two settings that can be changed: Turbo Boost Short Power Max (56.250w default) and Turbo Boost Power Max (45.000w). What it does, I don't know. Most people use it to undervolt their laptops from what I've seen while googling. I'm clueless here, will increasing the power allow it to stay in turbo boost longer?

EDIT: I gained a point when I bumped the watts up a notch. Two bumps and I was back to the same score as the default settings. Anything higher just decreases the score.

 

[Johan45]

I haven't done much with laptops batboy but I think Woomack is likely the best source he OCs everything that comes through his work it seems

 

[batboy]

Sentential is a laptop guy and has provided a little guidance (thanks). This Toshiba laptop with i7 2670QM processor was a nice unit in it's day and is better than my personal laptop (better than my wife's laptop too). It appears to be a popular setup, because a lot of people have benched it. So, I won't be able to scoop up a bunch of gold and silver cups like I did with my other one.

This thing is running pretty warm. Once I started using XTU to bump up the watts and to force it to stop speed stepping at idle, that seemed to help a fair bit. After monitoring temps and CPU utilization, and boost frequency, it appears the turbo boost is dependent on temp. CPU temp easily jumps into the 80s during heavy benching with max spikes occasionally hitting 89 degrees C. Initially, the boost kicks in and I see CPU clock speeds mostly in the 2.45 to 2.75 range with brief spikes to 2.9 GHz. Supposedly, the max turbo boost on this processor is 3.1, so it looks like high temps are causing the low bench scores and preventing max turbo boost. Toward the end of the bench run when everything is hot, the boost is barely working as CPU freq. hovers around 2.2 to 2.4 GHz.

So, guess I'll open up this case and see what's up. I'm guessing it's possibly filled with dust and the original TIM is probably dried out and ineffective. The CPU cooler is removable, right? I'm a guy that has built his own desktop computers for two decades, but has never opened up a laptop. I guess it's time I learned. So, cover me, I'm going in.

 

[Johan45]

Typically in a laptop once you have it open enough which is usually a bit ( 30 minutes) work then you'll find a heatpipe which joins CPU and GPU if equipped and ending in a grille with a fan behind it. Most that I have opened this is where the blockage is. Hair and dust pulled through the bottom of the laptop. Particularly bad when young girls are involved who love to sit the laptop on their bed.

 

[Sentential]

Sentential is a laptop guy and has provided a little guidance (thanks). This Toshiba laptop with i7 2670QM processor was a nice unit in it's day and is better than my personal laptop (better than my wife's laptop too). It appears to be a popular setup, because a lot of people have benched it. So, I won't be able to scoop up a bunch of gold and silver cups like I did with my other one.

This thing is running pretty warm. Once I started using XTU to bump up the watts and to force it to stop speed stepping at idle, that seemed to help a fair bit. After monitoring temps and CPU utilization, and boost frequency, it appears the turbo boost is dependent on temp. CPU temp easily jumps into the 80s during heavy benching with max spikes occasionally hitting 89 degrees C. Initially, the boost kicks in and I see CPU clock speeds mostly in the 2.45 to 2.75 range with brief spikes to 2.9 GHz. Supposedly, the max turbo boost on this processor is 3.1, so it looks like high temps are causing the low bench scores and preventing max turbo boost. Toward the end of the bench run when everything is hot, the boost is barely working as CPU freq. hovers around 2.2 to 2.4 GHz.

So, guess I'll open up this case and see what's up. I'm guessing it's possibly filled with dust and the original TIM is probably dried out and ineffective. The CPU cooler is removable, right? I'm a guy that has built his own desktop computers for two decades, but has never opened up a laptop. I guess it's time I learned. So, cover me, I'm going in.

Anytime man; honestly 80C seems about right with the stock paste and normally they use the old gum style thermal pads not paste. Once I get some extra money together I'm going to try my hand at true laptop benchmarking but I'm not quite there yet. In my mind my planned setup will be to sacrifice the wireless card or maybe the SSDs and run jumpers from them to run CrossfireX on a pair of Vegas. Can't overclock the CPU sadly so the best I can hope for is getting a set of HyperX Impacts and go from there.

EDIT: For the record Batboy for any laptop that *does* have thunderbolt this is what you buy to make it work
eGPU Box of choice: https://www.amazon.com/Sonnet-Break...07289382&sr=8-1&keywords=sonnet+breakaway+box
TB3 to TB1/2 Adapter: https://www.amazon.com/Apple-MMEL2A...=apple+thunderbolt+3+to+thunderbolt+2+adapter