FPS Drop in CS and other Games..

[jerryxinjie]

You realize this thread is three years old right?

Yeah, It is also an old problem with 600m. My case is even worse, my 600m sometime can not boot up. I bought 3 laptops from DELL, all died within 2 years.

 

[azhad]

The Old A06 BIOS is still available at:

http://www.bay-wolf.com/flashbios.htm . (bottom of the page)

Make sure you read earlier posts in this thread as some people have problems with A06. If your laptop originally came with A06 or an earlier one, it should be ok. If not, refer the earlier posts to see whether it will work. Best of luck.

 

[rifft]

A couple of solutions.

So the infamous 600m with all the wonderful overheating, throttling and boot up problems. How did Dell keep this line going for as long as it did?

Anyway, enough ranting here are a couple of things that I've figured out within the last year, dealing with this piece of wonderful garbage.

I have the newer Dothan core, and reverting to the older BIOS worked. However, on boot up it complains about being unable to update the micro-instructions, or some such thing and presents you with an option to enter setup or continue, if you press continue (F1) for me, Win XP boots up without a problem.*

* When I say without a problem I mean as unproblematic as this laptop gets anyway.

With the A06 BIOS all the games seem to work just fine, no FPS drops, the system runs a little hot, but it's stable and all is well.

For all those who claim that cleaning the fans, replacing the thermal paste etc. helps. You are all simply wrong. I've replace the paste twice before I've downgraded and though both times (first generic paste, then Arctic Silver 5) the temperature improved, it was not enough to prevent throttling.

This little exercise took me a while to figure out, but as the laptop aged, it began to have the infamous power up problems. Today, I think I've found the culprit. I think it's the Broadcom modem, I think it may be sensitive to pressure and thermal changes and that over time it becomes damaged. Today I simply removed and it seems to have fixed my power up issuse.** It seems that if it malfunctions it can prevent the computer from actually booting up.

** When I say simply, I mean I had to take the laptop apart, remove the card and reassemble the laptop. This can be done using the tech manuals from the Dell site.

The last issue that I've heard of was the Gigabit ethernet card no longer working. For this I have no answers, possibly the downgraded BIOS does not have support for the BCM570x chipset and so you must survive without it, for those with the ethernet controllers you will probably be fine. Alternatively mine simply stopped working, which I accept as a very real possibility given the build quality of this laptop.

I hope this proves to be of some use to someone who is trying to get some use out of an overpriced and under developed laptop.

Cheers