Soldato
- Joined
- 6 Feb 2010
- Posts
- 14,594
Well, basically yesterday I swapped the monitors at my home with my parents', but found out that I had no DVI to VGA adapter, so I couldn't use my 5850 
And so for the first time ever, I used the onboard HD3000 of the i5 2500K since the motherboard has VGA port. I know HD3000 have very tiny gaming power, but out of curiousity I did a run on Left4Dead 2.
I know Left4Dead 2 is far some being a demanding game, but I thought it would be good representation for games that the more casual gamers play (the odds Counter-Strike, COD or other source games etc), rather than the AAA latest, badest FPS games that people play.
So start right away on 1680 res with no AA, effect at low, filtering at Trilinear, everything else at highest...and as expected, it was too much for the HD3000 and the frame rate was between the mid 10s ~ high 20s. Then I thought...could I overclock the HD3000? Would I get more performance if I did?
A few googles later, I found that there are already people attempted it, and to my surprise, people where saying they were able to overclock their HD3000 core clock to 1950MHz coming from the stock clock of 850MHz! So decided to quickly give it a go. Overclocking the HD3000 was easy, all I had to do was go into bios, and set the manual frequency of the iGPU to 1950MHz (130% overclock!). Opened Heaven Bench and ran in at 1280x720 0xAA dx9, and got average of 15fps and max 30fps. I didn't run Heaven for the result, but more about testing the stablity of the overclock, which no driver crash or PC freeze occured.
So I went back to try Left4Dead 2 again with same graphic settings as before, and frame rate went from what previously mentioned, to 30fps~60fps+! Dropped the res down to 1366, and the frame rate became constant 45fps~75fps.
I decided to give Guild Wars 2 a go as well. I use 1366 res, medium graphic settings, and NativeSampling, high-res texture disabled, and I managed pretty much a constant 28-32fps in the open field, and even in the LionArch town/city (which is known to be quite hard on graphic and CPU alike), the frame rate only dipped down to 20-22fps at the lowest.
So basically this got me thinking...for laptop owners that doesn't have dedicated gaming card nor a AMD APU, could they do the same with their HD3000 graphic and allowing them to do some casual gaming at 1366 res?
Bottomline is while the Intel HD graphic is never gonna be comparable to the AMD Trinity, but I have to say I'm still rather impressed with what the HD3000 is capable of, after a whopping 130% overclock! Anyway it's has been a fun experiment. Would like to hear what you guys think...
And so for the first time ever, I used the onboard HD3000 of the i5 2500K since the motherboard has VGA port. I know HD3000 have very tiny gaming power, but out of curiousity I did a run on Left4Dead 2.
I know Left4Dead 2 is far some being a demanding game, but I thought it would be good representation for games that the more casual gamers play (the odds Counter-Strike, COD or other source games etc), rather than the AAA latest, badest FPS games that people play.
So start right away on 1680 res with no AA, effect at low, filtering at Trilinear, everything else at highest...and as expected, it was too much for the HD3000 and the frame rate was between the mid 10s ~ high 20s. Then I thought...could I overclock the HD3000? Would I get more performance if I did?
A few googles later, I found that there are already people attempted it, and to my surprise, people where saying they were able to overclock their HD3000 core clock to 1950MHz coming from the stock clock of 850MHz! So decided to quickly give it a go. Overclocking the HD3000 was easy, all I had to do was go into bios, and set the manual frequency of the iGPU to 1950MHz (130% overclock!). Opened Heaven Bench and ran in at 1280x720 0xAA dx9, and got average of 15fps and max 30fps. I didn't run Heaven for the result, but more about testing the stablity of the overclock, which no driver crash or PC freeze occured.
So I went back to try Left4Dead 2 again with same graphic settings as before, and frame rate went from what previously mentioned, to 30fps~60fps+! Dropped the res down to 1366, and the frame rate became constant 45fps~75fps.
I decided to give Guild Wars 2 a go as well. I use 1366 res, medium graphic settings, and NativeSampling, high-res texture disabled, and I managed pretty much a constant 28-32fps in the open field, and even in the LionArch town/city (which is known to be quite hard on graphic and CPU alike), the frame rate only dipped down to 20-22fps at the lowest.
So basically this got me thinking...for laptop owners that doesn't have dedicated gaming card nor a AMD APU, could they do the same with their HD3000 graphic and allowing them to do some casual gaming at 1366 res?
Bottomline is while the Intel HD graphic is never gonna be comparable to the AMD Trinity, but I have to say I'm still rather impressed with what the HD3000 is capable of, after a whopping 130% overclock! Anyway it's has been a fun experiment. Would like to hear what you guys think...
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