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9600M overclock settings in bootcamp. Who's done it and who has recommendations?

Anyone else have settings they like using? So far, I've been running 690/1070/1620 safely without glitches or fan control. My nvidia
display driver crashes and then recovers whenever I overclock using the performance tab, but gpu-z shows that the clock settings stick.
Weird, but it works still :)
 
Hoping to revive this thread a bit.. anyone do a thermal paste job on their unibodies? And how's peoples experience with laptopvideo2go's 250x series drivers?

I ordered some IC Diamond compound which should be better than as5 or ceramique, so i hope to post some good results in the future.

One man reported some great oc results on a thread i found after a lot of searching.. amazing 3dmark scores and an insane end result overclock (not sure if gaming stable)
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translat...819;topicseen#new&lp=fr_en&btnTrUrl=Translate

In the meantime I am running speeds of 625/800/1450 with all ultra in starcraft 2 (except shaders and shadows on High)
pretty satisfied..
 
Jottle said:
I searched, but didn't find anything too specific on here. Can anyone recommend some good overclock values for my 9600m in bootcamp using nvidia tools? Basically, I'm looking for a stable profile or some recommended settings you've been using to overclock your 9600 in bootcamp. Maybe upload a screenshot like the one below with your custom adjusted settings for memory, core, and shader clocks. I'd rather not play around with it if someone has found a fast/safe setting that increases performance.

capturelv.jpg
Click to expand...

Does Nvidia Tools also overclock the CPU? And what is the success rate for the Core i5/i7, with the 330M? Somewhat overclockable?
 
the latest version of nvidia ntune supprts cpu clocking as well with the unibody chipsets. 330m can be overclocked around 20% giving a significant performance boost in 3d games and rendering. please refer to the 330m threads if you need more information, as this is reserved to the discussion of the older 9600m gt.
 
Everyone can't overclock to the same numbers. For instance, my computer becomes pretty unstable when I increase the clock speed. That's why many people use fan control (lubbos) in addition to overclocking with ntune. I find that my mbp freezes up almost instantly if I overclock more than 15%. Yours may be different.
 
gabeomatic said:
the latest version of nvidia ntune supprts cpu clocking as well with the unibody chipsets. 330m can be overclocked around 20% giving a significant performance boost in 3d games and rendering. please refer to the 330m threads if you need more information, as this is reserved to the discussion of the older 9600m gt.
Click to expand...

This reminds me. Is there a way to make your overclock settings stay permanent when you restart your bootcamp partition? Every time I set my gpu to overclock in nvidia ntune, the program asks if I want to keep these settings as my default at startup/ I click yes, but the ntune settings always go back to default (non oc'd) after a restart of windows. Is there something I'm missing here? I've tried rivaturner and other overclockers, but I can't install them due to the fact that they used unsigned drivers and win 7 64bit doesn't let you use unsigned drivers :( Help appreciated!
 
Jottle, I think that the mac's settings are hardwired into the motherboard, and therefore it isn't yet possible. Have you tried atitool? And btw, what clocks are you currently running that are stable for you? And using Nvidias 250x series drivers?
 
Bad Company 2 on my 2.8 C2D was useless on 1440x900 on Low. Forget about even moving around.

OC'ed to 3.265GHz and 680/950/1650 on the 9600m and it's completely smooth on Medium on 1440x900.

I'm going to try driving my Cinemaview 24" in clamshell mode in 1920x1080 :D
 
gabeomatic said:
Jottle, I think that the mac's settings are hardwired into the motherboard, and therefore it isn't yet possible. Have you tried atitool? And btw, what clocks are you currently running that are stable for you? And using Nvidias 250x series drivers?
Click to expand...

I'll try ati tool. However, I would think that my overclock settings would stick even if I just restart windows and don't switch from my windows partition to mac and then back again. So I'm assuming you haven't been able to make the oc setting stick either gabe?

See post #26 for my oc numbers. The funny thing is that these numbers now don't work for me. My mbp crashes with glitches if I try to oc as high as I used to. Even a little bit will make my graphics driver crash and recover for some reason. So it's never really stable for me at this point. I'm using the nvidia notebook drivers: 257.21. These aren't the latest version though.
 
Nice clocks up above, what drivers are you using? I suggest keeping the mac open even when connecting to an external so it can keep cooler. Have you played the game for an extended amount of time to test stability? Post your 3dmark score for some additional info. I have the 2.8 as well and am interested. Had it oc'd to 3.2 but lately turned it down until my IC Diamond 7 thermal paste arrives.
 
gabeomatic said:
Nice clocks up above, what drivers are you using? I suggest keeping the mac open even when connecting to an external so it can keep cooler. Have you played the game for an extended amount of time to test stability? Post your 3dmark score for some additional info. I have the 2.8 as well and am interested. Had it oc'd to 3.2 but lately turned it down until my IC Diamond 7 thermal paste arrives.
Click to expand...

I downloaded the latest ones off nVidia's site and used 6.06 Tools.

On 1440x900 it was completely fine but I started get scared of the heat :p

On 1920x1080 it's playable on Low but it experience slowdowns when the Mortars started raining down. It was pretty unstable at 1920 and it was farting really hot air (put my hand in the arc of the BookArc).

I suggest sticking to 1440x900 Medium detail, textures and low shadows and effects with AA off and Aniostropic on 4. That should get you some silky results. I really didn't wanna push it too far so I didn't play for more than 30 minutes but my CPU temp was hovering around 88C when I quit the game if that helps.
 
Are you thinking of doing a thermal paste job? Im able to play sc2 on all ultra except shaders and shadows @High at around 35-40 fps which is more than enough for a rts. And this is with clocks of 625/800/1450

Have you checked out the link I posted above from a french oc forum. Some guy got insane oc's on his unibody 700+/900+/1650+ with some thermal paste. 3dmark06 score of 8700 (stock is 6000ish)


@Jottle, it seems as though for me too that some numbers dont hold up anymore. and I think evga precision is better than atitool because it may have stopped getting updated. (Ive stuck with ntune for now though) I used to have my core and shader around 650/1550 but have now dropped it back to 625/1450 which seems to hold up for prolonged gaming. I can only assume my mbp is either dusty inside now and the thermal paste is slowly wearing out. Will have to see and post results later this week ;]
 
gabeomatic said:
Are you thinking of doing a thermal paste job? Im able to play sc2 on all ultra except shaders and shadows @High at around 35-40 fps which is more than enough for a rts. And this is with clocks of 625/800/1450

Have you checked out the link I posted above from a french oc forum. Some guy got insane oc's on his unibody 700+/900+/1650+ with some thermal paste. 3dmark06 score of 8700 (stock is 6000ish)


@Jottle, it seems as though for me too that some numbers dont hold up anymore. and I think evga precision is better than atitool because it may have stopped getting updated. (Ive stuck with ntune for now though) I used to have my core and shader around 650/1550 but have now dropped it back to 625/1450 which seems to hold up for prolonged gaming. I can only assume my mbp is either dusty inside now and the thermal paste is slowly wearing out. Will have to see and post results later this week ;]
Click to expand...

Yeah. I haven't oc'd in awhile because I keep getting crashes when I push it too high. I'm sure it's not damaging anything, but I only run my external monitor at 1680x1050. At the higher resolution, you only get so much improvement when ocing. I see maybe 10-15 faster frame rate. I'd like to overclock to the higher values you saw on that forum, but I'm sure I'd have to redo the thermal paste and use a fan control software. Gabe, please post back if you do the thermal paste and have been OC results. I've never applied thermal paste and am worried I'd screw it up.
 
gabeomatic said:
the latest version of nvidia ntune supprts cpu clocking as well with the unibody chipsets. 330m can be overclocked around 20% giving a significant performance boost in 3d games and rendering. please refer to the 330m threads if you need more information, as this is reserved to the discussion of the older 9600m gt.
Click to expand...

Thank you. I was only more concerned about the ability to overclock the CPU.
 
gabeomatic said:
Are you thinking of doing a thermal paste job? Im able to play sc2 on all ultra except shaders and shadows @High at around 35-40 fps which is more than enough for a rts. And this is with clocks of 625/800/1450

Have you checked out the link I posted above from a french oc forum. Some guy got insane oc's on his unibody 700+/900+/1650+ with some thermal paste. 3dmark06 score of 8700 (stock is 6000ish)


@Jottle, it seems as though for me too that some numbers dont hold up anymore. and I think evga precision is better than atitool because it may have stopped getting updated. (Ive stuck with ntune for now though) I used to have my core and shader around 650/1550 but have now dropped it back to 625/1450 which seems to hold up for prolonged gaming. I can only assume my mbp is either dusty inside now and the thermal paste is slowly wearing out. Will have to see and post results later this week ;]
Click to expand...

As much as I love performance in games, I just don't like booting up into bootcamp when I need to use Adobe CS4 90% of the time I'm using the computer.

If I could OC in OSX which I know just isn't possible with an MBP that would be a different story and I would actually go out and grab some thermal paste.

I think it's good to know that the 2.8C2D isn't completely useless when it comes to gaming though, provided that you OC it :)
 
Do you really feel the need to use windows when using photoshop? Although it uses the gpu, I doubt its as intensive as running a game.. Also, games were just MADE to be ran on the windows platform, therefore even without an oc you might notice a 15-20% improvement via bootcamp due to better software and hardware optimization. Macs should run photoshop fine in osx.

PS my thermal paste should be coming in later today.. I cant wait to get started. At this point, I am sure that there may be some dust buildup in my unibody as well b/c the clocks i used to game at all day (Just cause2, bad company2, mw2, crysis for testing, assassins creed 2) ran without any hiccups. But over time, i noticed that my mbp would heat up more quickly than before. Maybe because its summer, etc. But I will see for sure when I open up my unibody today.
 
gabeomatic said:
Do you really feel the need to use windows when using photoshop? Although it uses the gpu, I doubt its as intensive as running a game.. Also, games were just MADE to be ran on the windows platform, therefore even without an oc you might notice a 15-20% improvement via bootcamp due to better software and hardware optimization. Macs should run photoshop fine in osx.

PS my thermal paste should be coming in later today.. I cant wait to get started. At this point, I am sure that there may be some dust buildup in my unibody as well b/c the clocks i used to game at all day (Just cause2, bad company2, mw2, crysis for testing, assassins creed 2) ran without any hiccups. But over time, i noticed that my mbp would heat up more quickly than before. Maybe because its summer, etc. But I will see for sure when I open up my unibody today.
Click to expand...

heh I may have worded that wrong

I meant that I'm not keen on using BootCamp because 90% of the time I'm on my computer I need to be in OSX using Adobe CS4. The only time I would ever use Bootcamp is to muck around with Bad Company 2 here and there and some other PC games.

That's why I was so glad when SC2 + Steam finally came out for OSX, I just hate going through the bootup of bootcamp. Less hassles = happier me.
 
Sorry to not report back in a while, but I hope to inform some of you who may be having trouble with the overclocking process in general.

Anyway, finally put some IC diamond in my unibody last week and can report some great results. This paste has a much higher viscosity than as5 compound but it ultimately leads to better performance as well. With this paste, you MUST use the dot & squish method for best results as it is extremely difficult to spread the paste around evenly on the chips themselves. Also an important thing to note was that after prolonged use of the mbp for over a year I was fairly surprised to see that a huge blob of dust was covering one of my fans, severely degrading airflow. The process wasn't too difficult, but I had to go through it slowly to make sure i didn't mess up any of the delicate connections to the motherboard while taking apart the laptop (iFixit's guide is great)

In the end, my laptop doesn't ever idle over 50C even while surfing and doing daily duties. My 9600 is now sitting at 650/930/1550 with room to grow (tested the shader to 1700, core to 700+ and mem950+), but its 100% gaming stable and even sufficiently faster than a 9700m gt. The temp can get to the mid 80's but that is perfectly fine. Also, I can oc the cpu from 2.8 to 3.192/3.265 easily, but gaming doesn't really require that.

Need to do some final driver testing, but it seems as though if the 250x series don't benefit a slightly outdated card as the 9600m, but with new games coming out it may change. What are other people's experiences with the drivers? I'd be happy to know

Finally.. might head into the realm of undervolting if I have time.
 
gabeomatic said:
In the end, my laptop doesn't ever idle over 50C even while surfing and doing daily duties. My 9600 is now sitting at 650/930/1550 with room to grow (tested the shader to 1700, core to 700+ and mem950+), but its 100% gaming stable and even sufficiently faster than a 9700m gt. The temp can get to the mid 80's but that is perfectly fine. Also, I can oc the cpu from 2.8 to 3.192/3.265 easily, but gaming doesn't really require that.
Click to expand...

This is great news gabe. A couple questions:

Do you use fan control software (lubbos) when you oc in windows?

How easy is it to redo the the paste on the cpu? is there a video guide somewhere you can link to that shows the method you mentioned for applying the IC diamond paste?

Can you post a link to where you purchased the paste? Or a vendor?

Thanks!
 
Got you covered
http://www.svc.com/icd7.html 6.99 free same day shipping

http://innovationcooling.com/applicationinstructions.htm

finally visit http://www.ifixit.com/Browse/MacBook_Pro_15" and choose your unibody model, then pick Heatsink and it will give you a detailed teardown.

I don't use lubbos in windows, but i ramp up my smc fan control to the max before restarting in windows to keep it as cool as possible. Remember, it is always easier to keep something cool than cool something down which has overheated already (default bios fan control will ramp up the speed ONLY after you hit 85c or w.e, but we are trying to prevent the chipset to even get to that upper 80 degree/90 range in the first place)

A good and udeful program to look into is bootChamp for mac, which lets you boot directly into windows with the click of a button and not have to hold the option button at the beginning of the restart.

Finally, don't be surprised if you open your mbp up one day and the gpu looks like this
dsc01313op1.jpg
(not my pic, but was similar to how mine looked after 1.5 years of usage.

Good luck
 
accidently posted this in the wrong post

UPDATE: After replacing my thermal paste and fiddling some more, I went to the realm of undervolting to try and conserve as much heat as possible. I was amazed to see that my 2.8 could operate at 3.192 with even a couple notches down from the default voltage, showing that it is way too high for that specific frequency (with my card). I ended up staying at a default frequency of 2.8 but was able to undervolt my t9600 from 1.162 vcore stock to a cool 1.050 vcore =] ( even tested it @ 1.037 but decided to bump it up for stability. with these settings cpu NEVER goes above 85ish even with heavy benchmarking. These heat savings even have allowed me to run my 9600m gt at 700/972/1600 (1650 would glitch for me) I dont have 3dmark06 anymore (feel its outdated) but have used numerous oc tools and made sure it is gaming stable. In the end, most games are more gpu dependant.
 
Gave another go on W7 Pro 64bit because I wanted to play Mass Effect 2

Overclocked to 680/950/1650 and upped my CPU to 3ghz.

Playing Mass Effect 2 at 1440x900 at max settings, 3(max) cinematic lights, spherical lighting on and 16x anisotropic filtering with silky smooth fps with no slowdowns.

I tried running it on 1920x1080 and while it's smooth in some areas (like Normandy) it's choppier in others but still playable. AF is default and cinematic lights should be at 2 though.


GPU fan runs at 75-80 degrees
CPU fans run about 69-75

Was playing for about 1.5hr before I started seeing some skips but they went away eventually
 
Here are my results:

Overclocked mid-2009 unibody (2.66 GHz, 9600M GT) mbp on Win7 64-bit:

GPU to 710/1150/1500 (core/mem/shader),
CPU to 3 GHz.

Checked stability with ATItool artifact scanner.

Reached:
3Dmark06: 7925 (up from 5063)
3Dmark Vantage P (GPU only): 2285 (up from 1192)
Geekbench 64-bit: 4550

Compared results with this list: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

I use Lubbos Fan Control, fans on maximum, then RightMark CPU to tweak CPU voltages to make sure it runs at 1.16V at 10x at 301 Mhz clock (3.0 GHz), using only the normal 10x step (particularly important to disable IDA 10x step which can up the voltage beyond 1.16V to 1.25V but then you can set its voltage lower too).

Temps while gaming (laptop lifted, moderate room temperature around 23C):
CPU max around 83C (usually around 80C)
GPU max around 80C (usually around 77C)
Gaming on October evening, open window, outside temp around 16C, helps keep temps even lower. It's worth mentioning that the rise in temperature of both CPU and GPU is gradual and in correlation to the temperature of the internals, so you will not see an immediate rise of components' temps up to around 80C, they will be around, say, 68C the first 5 minutes into a game and reach maximum only about 15-20 minutes later, so with good heat dissipation surface/cool room there is a lot of room for improvement, particularly at clocking CPU even higher.

Currently I'm using 285.38 beta driver, but got similar benchmarking and temps results also with 280.26 and 275.x.

I play BFBC2 all high, 16xAF, noAA, 1280x800 (plays fine also at 1440x900), nvidia control panel setting all high (no AF optimizations, no trilinar optimizations, high quality AF, no lod bias, clamp on), around 30 fps, didn't use fraps though. Of course if I lower effects, detail and shadows i get considerably smoother performance (say 60fps). Might check what fraps would reveal.

To conclude, these mid-09 unibodies are damn fine machines to tweak.
 
I am running Windows 7 64bit on the same machine and I can't get RMClock to even run (edit, nevermind, got it working but need to actually set it up). I did have some mild success at 2.8ghz but I'd occasionally run into lock ups. I think my issue is related to my RAM though. I can undervolt the hell out of it at 2.66ghz in OSX with no issues but even on stock volts I can barely hit 2.8 without issues.

I am running 725/975/1650 which is very stable as long as I stay at stock CPU clock.
 
Last edited:
Swapped 1066mhz RAM back in (was running 1333mhz) and running 3ghz completely stable so far. Took GPU memory back to 1050mhz and got 79xx in 3DMark 06. Looks like my issues were memory related before.
 
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