Dell :: Studio 1735's ATi 3650 Performance

I got myself a shiny 1735. I'm not a big gamer, but I wanted something that could play the odd game and specifically World of Warcraft. With this in mind (and the fact that I've never yet met an integrated graphics solution that didn't suck so hard that Dyson wanted to patent it), I went with the ATi Radeon Mobility HD 3650 gfx upgrade. I've never been a fan of ATi so it wouldn't have been my first choice of card, but given that it's about the same choice as the vegetarian "option" in restaurants (ie, take it, or go hungry) I figured it was worth a punt.

Got WoW installed and played about with settings. To cut a long story short, it looks absolutely gorgeous and will happily fling the game about with all the settings ramped up to max at 1920x1200. But.

WoW seems to run... I'm struggling for the exact word, but it's "choppy". When you're running / flying, the terrain isn't smooth, it kinda jerks past in quick bursts. It doesn't feel like the card is struggling per sé, it's like the sort of thing that you'd expect to be fixed in a driver update.

I grabbed the latest Catalyst drivers from ATi (8.8). They appear to install fine, along with the control centre which is missing from the stock Dell install, but it doesn't actually appear to update the drivers from 8.4. Presumably this is down to it being a laptop adapter rather than a discrete ATi card, but I've not as yet come up with a workaround to make it install though I'm sure it's possible. Anyway.

I took a closer look at the graphics card. The stock 3650 from ATi runs at 600MHz core, 500MHz RAM. yet the adapter supplied by Dell appears to be underclocked, the memory is the same speed but the core is running at just 450MHz.

Experimenting with ATiTool, I can reclock the card to run at ATi stock speeds of 600/500. At this speed it runs rock solid stable under extended load, with no discernable thermal issues that I can immediately make out. Overclocking it much past this almost immediately crashes the laptop so I can't recommend taking it much out of spec, for the sake of a couple of MHz it's just not worth the risk / hassle, but at 600 core it's solid. I can only assume that Dell have underclocked it to improve battery life, I can't see any other reason for such a large crippling.

Clocking the card 'properly' and switching off Full Screen Glow in WoW has gone a long way towards rectifying the choppiness, but I can see that it's still not "right". I've not yet played with other resolutions or tried any other games so I don't know if I'm just asking too much in terms of graphics RAM or if it's specifically a WoW issue but I'm going to carry on fiddling with it. Short of persevering with hacking the Catalyst 8.8 drivers though, I'm not entirely sure where else I can go with this. In the grand scheme of things it's not a huge issue, it's just irritating that my shiny new toy isn't quite the beast I was expecting when I bought it.