Oh No! Another ‘Tweak Laptop for Gaming’ Article

Needs tweakingYou could easily find a few million articles around various topics like “laptop tweaks for gaming,” “tweaking your laptop for gaming” and so on online. Sure, it’s fun to tinker with your machine–disable a few Windows services, hack your drivers, add some more RAM and a faster hard drive etc–but sadly none of these measures will prepare your old Dell from 2001 for Crysis 2 (unless you upgrade everything but the casing, there’s probably enough room inside it to house a decent rig).

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with adding some more RAM or a new drive – preferably an SSD – but any improvements in games that you gain by tweaking a few Windows settings on a modern laptop round up to about zero.

There used to be some merit to the “hacking your drivers” part, but there isn’t much to “hack” in the drivers you get from AMD or Nvidia anymore, other than making sure you are using the latest ones; they are unlocked and optimized right out of the box. Not long ago you had to resort to your laptop manufacturer for the latest drivers for your specific model, which usually there weren’t any aside from the ones that came with your laptop, so you had to modify the standard drivers to work with laptops. However, things have generally improved and now both AMD and Nvidia ship laptop-ready drivers in their regular driver releases.

Upgrading CPU and/or GPU is often impossible or at least extremely difficult in a laptop, so what can you actually do to improve your laptop’s gaming performance? Actually there is one thing.

Overclocking the GPU

[Disclaimer: Overclock at your own risk.]

Unless you are unfortunate enough to have a laptop where the GPU clocks are locked in the BIOS, it’s easy to overclock mobile GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD/ATI. How much they can be overclocked varies a great deal. Some high-end graphics cards that already have their clock frequencies turned up to the limits of what the chip can handle may have a more limited overclocking potential than a mid-range card.

Take the cheap Acer 4820TG for example (Radeon 5650M), which eaisly went from 650MHz to 950MHz on the memory – a quite noticable 30% increase. That’s a tweak! But overclocking results will be different from case to case. A high-end GPU can of course also be overclocked; generally speaking, you should be able to increase both video RAM and core clocks on just about any GPU with at least 10%.

Then there’s also the question of how much your power supply can handle. Just like with desktop graphics cards, their laptop counterparts will use more power when you start tuning the clocks. Even if the GPU is capable of higher clocks, the power brick might not be able to keep up. It’s a trial-and-error procedure.

The Tools

amd clockGone are the days when you had to tinker with the motherboard – all overclocking is done via software these days. There are easy-to-use tools for both Nvidia and AMD GPUs. For AMD/ATI Radeon, the AMD GPU Clock Tool is a straightforward solution. Just type in the clocks you want and click on ‘set clocks’.

Nvidia users can try out Nvidia Inspector, which comes with simple sliders that let you adjust the core clock, shader and memory frequencies, as well as voltages.

The safest option is to increase the clocks in small increments and run a few tests before moving on.

Jesper Berg
Jesper Berg

Gaming hardware enthusiast since the 80286 era.

1 Comment
  1. Looks like an average HTPC would fit snugly inside that VCR-looking thing up there. Then it just might run Crysis 2 😉

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