T60p Increase Gaming Performance

[Thinkpads4Life]

Hi! Still a bit of a newbie as I've said in previous postings. Anyways, I'm looking into improve my CPU & GPU performance by upgrading them to get a bit better performance when playing intensive 3D games such as Minecraft. I know I've said this before. I'm just trying to get max performance out of it in regards to gaming. It is plenty fast when I'm not gaming. But I just want to see if I can make games completely lag-free.

Sorry in advance if this is a repetitive question...

[Qing Dao]

What are the specifications of your T60p? What CPU? What memory? Screen resolution?

For the CPU, as long as you have any Core 2 Duo, it should be "good enough." For the memory, you need to have 4GB in there to max it out. Screen resolution is a big issue too. The higher the resolution, the harder the video card needs to work. You can run at a non-native resolution, but I think it looks horrible and would never do that.

Without a doubt performance is bottlenecked by the GPU. There are several steps you can take to improve its performance. You can complete steps 1-5 in any order you want before moving on to step 6.

1. Go to AMD's website and download their little driver tool that gets that finds and installs the latest drivers for your video card.

2. Go here: http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/13 ... preview-1/ and download GPUTool.

3. Look for and download TPFanControl V0.62 and install it on your computer.

4. Replace the thermal paste in your laptop. Open it up, remove the heatsink, clean the old thermal paste off and put in some new good stuff. There are many good ones out there, you can figure out yourself which one you want to buy. Make sure to clean the dust out of the fan and heatsink before putting it back in. I wash mine in the sink with just water, blow as much water off of it as I can, and then let it sit to dry for a few hours. Better yet, if you want you can but a heatsink from a T61p which cools better than the one from a T60p.

5. (Optional) Do this after steps 3 and 4. Search for and download Throttlestop 6.00. Then search for and download Prime 95 (P95). These will help in GPU overclocking by reducing the heat output of the CPU. Open up TPFanControl and set it to maximum fan speed. Open up Prime 95. It will ask you what test you want to run. Select the one that says it stresses the CPU the most and run it. Your computer should not have any problems. Now open up Throttlestop. It looks complicated, but just do what I say here and it should be easy. Don't worry about making a mistake and locking up your computer. You can't hurt anything and a restart will bring it back to normal. Just don't click on the button that says "Save" until we have finished step 5. Select the box that says "Set Multiplier." The setting for the multiplier and voltage should show the default maximums. Now click on the button in the lower right hand corner that says "Turn On." Now run Prime 95. Again, it should run without any issues. Now we get to the fun stuff. Now, while running Prime 95, click once on the down arrow next to the voltage. It should continue to run perfectly fine. Let if go for a few minutes. Then hit the button again and let Prime 95 continue to run for a bit. Repeat the procedure until Prime 95 stops and reports that there was an error in calculating. At this point, in Throttlestop click once on the up arrow next to the voltage and run Prime 95 for as long as you want. Sometimes instead of Prime 95 reporting an error, the computer will freeze or restart. This is normal. Just pick up where you left off, but after you restart, make sure the voltage in Throttlestop is one tick mark above where it was before. If you eventually get another error, increase the voltage another tick mark and let Prime 95 work for a while. Some people think the ultimate test is to let Prime 95 run error-free overnight, but half an hour has been good enough for me. If your computer is perfectly stable at the new voltage, you can hit the save button so that you don't need to remember the voltage to set it at each time you want to run Throttlestop.

6. After completing steps 1-4 and regardless of if you did step 5 or not, open TPFanControl and set it to maximum fan speed. Now open up GPUTool. This software is very simple to use. It should show you the stock clockspeeds of both your GPU and your video card's memory. Click on "Find Max" for your GPU core. It will run for a while. If it seems to have found a maximum but the program keeps testing and testing, just stop the test. Remember the maximum stable clockspeed it reached. Now set the GPU speed back to the stock speed. Click on "Find Max" for the memory. It will go through the same procedure. After you have both maximum values for the GPU and Memory, set both of them and click on "Apply." Now click on the button that says "Test for Stability." If this at any point gets any errors, manually lower the GPU and Memory values by one tick. Keep doing this until it reports no errors for a good 15 minutes. You can run it longer if you wish for peace of mind, but it should be good enough at this point.

7. Congrats! Your T60p is at optimal performance! When you want to play a game, set your TPFanControl, GPUTool, and possibly Throttlestop settings. If you encounter any issues such as an error saying that the video driver crashed, your computer freezes up in a game, or there are graphical glitches, lower the GPU speeds a tiny bit.

I hope this helped. If this alone wasn't good enough to increase performance to desired levels, get a T61p motherboard that has a Nvidia GPU marked "950" on it to swap into your T60. Then you can run the above steps with the new computer for even more gains. I game regularly on my T500 with ATI HD 3650m. I run the GPU and Memory both overclocked over 30%. I don't even need to undervolt my processor and can leave my fan under BIOS control, but like that the GPU reaches 82 degrees after an hour or so of gaming.

[pkiff]

For the memory, you need to have 4GB in there to max it out.

I think that although you can install 4GB memory in a T60/T60p, that the operating system can normally only "address" 3GB. This is true even if you run a proper 64-bit operating system. Supposedly, you can see a very small performance increase if you put in two identical ("matching") 2GB memory modules because then you can take advantage of "Symmetric dual-channel memory mode." But even then, I don't think you are actually using the extra 1GB, you are just taking advantage of the fact that you have two matching memory modules, and the only way to reach the max memory of the machine and to have matching memory modules is to install 2x2GB. Apparently some people have run performance tests to verify if you will see any real difference with this dual-channel mode.

For more details see:
T60/T61/p memory limitations -- the definitive answer [pics]
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=49703

Phil.

[Thinkpads4Life]

The machine's specs are as follows...

CPU: Intel Core Duo t2500
GPU: ATI Mobility FireGL v5200
Memory: 3GB DDR2. Speed is indicated as unknown by OS.
Screen Resolution: 1400x1050
Screen Size: 14 inches

[ThinkPadophile]

Read this link, which addresses the very question you're asking. One finding was that Windows 7 64-bit gave noticeably improved graphics performance versus Windows 7 32 bit (at least, for the application the OP was running). Most on this forum would claim (rightly) that a 32-bit OS is optimum on the T60 line due to its hardware-constrained 3GB of addressable memory. However, I've had Windows 7 64-bit running on my T60p for several years without a problem.

[Thinkpads4Life]

All these tools would be good for a WINDOWS user. But I am not a WINDOWS user. I am a LINUX user. Is there linux versions of these programs that I can use?