Monthly Archives: December 2008

More Duplo for Kaylee…

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Well it’s Christmas and my daughter has receive some more Duplo. I found this large barrel with 215 pieces. They are mostly standard Duplo Bricks 2 x 4 in various colors.

I start seeing some evolution in her handling of the Duplo bricks. We are way past the stage where she comes in and destroys everything. She is building them up in stacks and adding more and more pieces. The way she pushes the new blocks onto the others, shows how her dexterity is improving. Right, I know, I’m a parent and I see these new movements for the first time in my child, so I’m impressed đŸ™‚

She also got a Duplo franchized “Thomas the Train” set, now we just need to get her some train tracks and she should be off…

Sager 9262 & NVIDIA Quadro FX3700m & NVIDIA Linux Binary Driver performance issue.

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Okay, this is probably not only effective for the Sager 9262 and the Quadro FX3700m, but this is the only platform that I have right now where I can identify and reproduce the problem. I hope some other Sager 9262 and/or 9800M GTX users using Linux can also validate this issue.

The problem stems from the feature PowerMizer which allows the graphic card to scale it’s performance. The Quadro FX3700M (1024MB) (550MHz/799MHz) that shipped in my Sager 9262 last week has four Performance Levels with scaling NV Clock and Memory Clock.

  • 0 200MHz & 100MHz
  • 1 275MHz & 301MHz
  • 2 383MHz & 301MHz
  • 3 550MHz & 799MHz

Unfortunately with the latest 177.82 or 180.11 (Beta) Linux (x86-64) Binary Drivers, I cannot get the card running above Performance Level 1. Actually I’m using a script found at the nvnews forums to artificially keep the graphic card running at Higher Performance. There are also multiple posts in the Phoronix forums about this issue.

Here is a screenshot of my nvidia-settings and the performance level of the FX3700m while running OpenGL benchmarks. As you see it’s stuck at Performance Level 1.

So right now, due to the nvidia binary drivers NOT supporting the PowerMizer feature, I’m able to only use less than 50% of the performance of my graphic card. This is a very expensive setback for someone that invested in an expensive nvidia 9800M GTX or FX3700M graphic card.

I’m lucky that I’m not rendering on this laptop, and that I can wait for nvidia to get their act together and supply proper PowerMizer drivers.

Erik

Sager 9262 arrived.

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Sager 9262The Sager 9262 arrived in the office, I will pick it up later today to give it a go and test that the hardware is in good condition and the screen does not show dead pixels.

It only took XoticPC and Sager 9 days to purchase the laptop, make the wire transfer, build to specs, test and validate the screen and send  the laptop by UPs from the United States to Switzerland.

And the first CD-ROM I booted on this brand new system is the memtest+ 2.10 tool. I’m very impressed by the speed of the main Memory.

L1 Cache : 32K 39806 MB/s
L2 Cache : 6144K 18472 MB/s
L3 Cache : none
Memory : 8190M 3632 MB/s

In comparison my D900K is running at 1440 MB/s for it’s main memory.