*HP EliteBook 8740w Owners Lounge - PART 1*

[knight427]

You crashing problem might be video driver related. Do you have the latest driver installed? What if you try the official drivers from AMD?

I can't find anything on their website about Mobility FirePro at all. The shut down has only happened once so far, so it's hard to know where to look. I'm avoiding Sleep mode, but when I have more free time, I'll play with it as see if the shutdown is related to coming out of sleep.

I played my first game. I signed up for Steam a while back to get in on the free Portal giveaway. I just got it running today, looks great, but I don't think it is probably a very demanding game. I also have to frame of reference. The last game I played was KotOR2, which was just barely playable on lowest settings on my Sony. Regarding the game, I love it. FPP (first person puzzler) is defiantly for me!

[Aikimox]

Yeah I liked it as well. It can heat the cards pretty fast, so I wouldn't call it a less demanding. Have you measured your max temps?

[lostbuyer]

The Half-Life 2: Lost Coast tech demo is a fun little free game to do some graphics testing, although Portal may be updated to have much of the same fancy now.

A demo of anything new will probably offer a decent test, though.


Has anyone tried running Linux (any distro, but I'm primarily interested in Debian) on the 8740w yet? I know the open source ati drivers can't do much with the R800s yet (one advantage to the Dell's 7740), but I'll put up with fglrx until I can switch.

Actually, I had the same issue re: drivers - AMD's site pretends the thing doesn't exist, and it's not clear that HP offers a linux driver . . . I was gonna hope the latest fglrx supporting the HD 5870 would work . . .

[Aikimox]

Have you tried installing the Mobility Radeon 5000 drivers? It's the same physical card, As far as I know.

[knight427]

What do you guys recommend for monitoring temps? Do any of the programs keep a time history of temps beside reporting live temps? I'd like to look back over the data after gaming to see how fast they approached their max and how fast they cooled.

Also, I'm too much a novice to try the Radeon drivers. I know everyone says it's the same card, but even so, I don't want to be the tester for this...I'd be really screwed if it went bad.

[Aikimox]

Use GPU-Z (just pick the "show the highest reading" option for each sensor in the sensors' tab), or try HWMonitor, HWinfo32.

Don't mess with the drivers yet, wait for me

[Tyraxus]

I managed to get all four RAM slots filled as I'm now running 4x 2GB chips. How were the crashes caused? Is there any way I can test for them?

The systems shipped with the latest BIOS installed so I'm hoping I won't have any problems. But, if they do happen, the sooner the better.

[Aikimox]

Just do your normal activities: browse, play, watch, open buncha windows in parallel, copy large files, utilize the DVDROM, etc.

[lostbuyer]

Have you tried installing the Mobility Radeon 5000 drivers? It's the same physical card, As far as I know.

Oh, I plan to do all sorts of silly testing (and spend a lot of time fixing things in a plain terminal while I repeatedly break X), but I haven't made the purchase yet.

Probably going to by Monday, and just suck up whatever driver pain I have to take on Linux until R800 acceleration support makes it into RadeonHD. :-/

I had been resigned to using nvidia's proprietary drivers more or less permanently (acceptable performance with nouveau is a long way off), so having to wait a bit on open source drivers is a small price to pay for being able to have ATI graphics. And I think I'd rather have the better card and the wait than take the 7740 and have open source acceleration right now.

I'll post whatever results I get and any configuration backflips I end up using to get fglrx and compiz, etc. to play nice.


Oh, and one easy way to get an app to eat up ~4GB RAM is to download GIMP for Windows (the 32-bit version, actually - the experimental x64 compile has very aggressive swapping behavior even with a huge tile cache), set the tile cache to ~3.4GB, and open up 40-50 3200x2400 images. Just download a bunch of wallpapers. It'll chew up the memory and you can use the ridiculous number of windows to see how responsive the system is. [That said, that shouldn't stress it at all - but it's a good component of a multi-app test.]

[Aikimox]

Looking forward to your findings! Might join you as am interested in dual boot with Lucid Lynx. Still recovering after a painful experience with M17X (couldn't make SLI/CrossFireX work flawlessly in Ubuntu or any other distro)