Saturday, April 25, 2009

4520 Overclock Success!


The overclocking process [what?] was many months long, but the end result was worth it. While carefully trying to distribute the clock, memory, avoiding blue screen of deaths and making my RAMs smell like they just got back from Hell, I finally found a stable and operational settings. With the addition of the 4GB RAM, now I am able to multitask with up to 58 processes without lag inclusive of 12 big applications e.g. Photoshop, medium and heavy games, Office, 3DS MAX Studio and other accessory apps. If these statements are not enough to describe it, let these snapshots show how successful the overclocking is;

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, one of my heaviest game in my drive. A snapshot before overclock with settings I can play SMOOTHLY without noticeable lag. Mostly all are Off and Low.

This if after overclock, with most settings at Medium and no noticeable lag (until the big explosions and big army comes in anyway...)

At a glance the draw distance is noticeable better, with fog in the distance and logic light source/shadow to complement the seamlessly large battlefield even after everything on the map is destroyed. Imagine this kind of raw power applied to Microsoft Word.

On the ground level the level of details can be seen even more, down to the insignia on the soldier's uniform to the facial expression. Woot!

These are the overclocked settings via NVIDIA settings, basically;
CPU HT Bus: 200MHz
Motherboard HT Bus: 200MHz
GPU Core Clock: 450MHz
GPU Memory Clock: 150MHz


I can go overboard but I'm playing safe. I'm not sure what is the true potential of this Acer 4520, so I better keep it that way as I don't want to strain it too much.




But all those overclocking did not come without a cost. The heat jumped from 55° to 73° during maximum use, so the thing can get hot during peak hours but not during low times like when you're stuck in the library doing assignments while listening to songs in Xion. I can't fix this since there is virtually no way to access the laptop's fan settings to increase it as mentioned in this older post.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, may i know where did you get the nvidia tool for overclocking? Thanks

Ham said...

here is the link;

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

enjoy :)

Ham said...

and here is the exact driver that allowed the overclocking. may vary depending on ur pc's model

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_system_tools_6.02.html