It's time to give your machine a good clean out. How you go about this depends on your chassis, but essentially you need to fight your way down to the laptop motherboard, fans and cores. In the case of the Dell XPS Gen 2, this essentially means taking the whole machine apart – if you have a nice manufacturer, you should find the manual online somewhere to help you with this.
Be prepared for some serious unscrewing – you may even have to take your laptop screen off. The first things you'll probably have access to are the cooling fans. How many you have and how they are arranged is completely dependent on your chassis, but you need to clean them.
Compressed air is your friend here, although lots of blowing and dusting with a tissue can work too. You'll also need to give the radiator fans on the heat pipes a good seeing to as well – our test machine was just plain filthy. Give it a clean regardless.
The main thing you're searching for is the graphics core. It's not easy to access the actual silicon in our particular case, as the heatsink completely encases the GPU. Grab a star screwdriver, though, and you'll pop this baby open to reveal the embossed graphics processor complete with dodgy thermal pad that interfaces with the cooling unit.
Our heatspreader was okay, but it doesn't do as good a job as thermal paste, so carefully peel this off and then remove any residue left on the top of the GPU and the bottom of the heatsink.
Now you can add your thermal paste and reassemble the graphics unit. Piece the whole thing back together – carefully now, we don't want too many screws left over at the end – and you're ready to start squeezing some more frames out of your mobile kit.
Overclocking a laptop's graphics engine is identical to performing the same operation on a desktop, with the added fun that overheating will slow your entire machine. Even so, it's not too tricky, and if our testing is anything to go by, there are plenty of extra frames to be had – we garnered a 20 per cent improvement in WoW, and just less than that in 3DMark06.
Install RivaTuner and run it. Click on the Customise option under the Driver settings icon, hit System Settings and tick the Enable driver-level hardware overclocking checkbox. Now you can push the clocks up slowly (10MHz at a time) until you get a stable overclock that actually produces a performance increase. This is why we benchmarked the machine in the first place, so that we had a figure we could compare against.
With the XPS Gen 2, we managed to take the initial settings of a 450MHz Core and 1064MHz memory clock and go all the way to 530MHz and 1248MHz. Let us know if you manage better.
NVIDIA vs AMD
There have been substantial differences between ATI/AMD and Nvidia graphics cores over the years, but when it comes to unlocking your graphics engines in your laptop, it's surprisingly similar.
The only difference is where you get the driver updates from – owners of ATI Mobility Radeon graphics need to grab the INF update from driverheaven.net while owners of the green camp's engines should point their browsers at www.laptopvideo2go.com for the latest drivers and the accompanying INF file.
Unfortunately, those with Intel graphics engines aren't going to benefit from such driver upgrades as these are automatically updated with the chipset drivers (as the graphics core is part of the north bridge anyway).
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First published in PC Format, Issue 223
Now read Secrets of the extreme overclockers
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