My new computer.....laptops can NOW replace desktops for Railworks!

[GSkid]

So I'm typing you in safe mode on my laptop because it no longer boots into full windows 7 mode. It locks up towards the end. I thought it might need a system restore, but it seems the APU is on the fritz instead. It started powering up to a black screen with a blinking caps key light. I looked up the blink chart and a single blink duration means a CPU issue.

It took me an hour of turning the computer on and off before it let me boot. It locked up again and about another half hour of off/on allowed me to get it to boot and I chose safe mode cuz it will boot to completion . I've been backing up some files to a flash drive. I'm leaving my laptop on for awhile to avoid problems for now.

I did splash some water on it 2 months ago and it shut itself down. After a night with box fans blowing on it, it ran just fine up until tonight. Might be related but who knows?

Wasn't planning on getting a new laptop anytime soon, but this forced me to. I happen to pay the same budget price as my current laptop.....$600. Normally $750. I'm taking a bit of a hit with it's Intel HD Graphics 4600 GPU compared to my current laptop, but the 4th generation quad-core Intel® Core™ i7-4710HQ gets a mark score of 7962 compared to my current CPU's score of 1630...a huge difference!

I like the Turbo options... base speed of 2.5 GHz but can Turbo Boost up to 3.3 GHz (for 4 active cores), 3.4 GHz (for 2 active cores) and 3.5 GHz (for 1 active core).

HP Envy 15t

4th generation Intel® Core™ i7-4710HQ Processor (2.5GHz)
8GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
1TB 5400 rpm Hard Drive
Microsoft® Windows 8.1 (64-bit)
15.6-inch diagonal HD LED-backlit Display (1366x768)
Intel HD Graphics 4600
Beats Audio
Backlit Keyboard with Fingerprint Reader


I should get better frame rates despite the GPU downgrade. Can't wait to ride the rails on it!

[HankySpanky]

That looks like a pretty sweet machine for a great price. Keep us posted on its performance - I might just get one myself. I've always had good luck with HP products. My only concern would be the HD rpm speed. I have read that 7200 rpm makes a noticeable difference.

[GSkid]

I will post back with the performance results. It said it will ship in 10-15 business days (yikes ). I got it online from Costco's website. Not sure if that's a typical ship time for them since I normally shop in their stores.

Talk about coincidence...My mother called me the same day to tell me she killed her laptop by repeatedly beating it with her Directv remote in anger while arguing with someone on the phone after a few glasses of wine.

So I got her the new $199 HP Stream 11.6-inch laptop tonight. No hard drive....just a 32GB flash drive. Has an 7.5-watt 2.16GHz/2.58GHz Intel Celeron chip.....that's fan-less! It's weird hearing no hard drive or fan running. It's dead silent!

I'd really like to see how Railworks would run on it. It only has 2GB of RAM, expandable to 4GB.

[Chacal]

My mother called me the same day to tell me she killed her laptop by repeatedly beating it with her Directv remote in anger while arguing with someone on the phone after a few glasses of wine.

I'm afraid this isn't going to be covered by the warranty.
Actually, if you read the warranty this exact case is mentioned in the exclusions.

[HankySpanky]

Sounds like she was on the phone with Comcast.

[GSkid]

+++UPDATE+++

Okay....so I backed up my files while in Safe mode. I eventually got my laptop to boot up into full normal Win 7 mode. It took forever to load up. All programs seemed to work fine except for games. They all kept telling me they wouldn't run cuz my DirectX version was ancient. An old game of mine from around the year 2000 claimed I needed DirectX 7 or later to run. Clearly it's some kind of OS glitch or corruption.

I've read that laptops that get the black screen of death like I got is usually because of hot running GPUs that have eventually had a pin unseat because of the heating and cooling cycle of aging solder. Clogged cooling vents can also increase the chances of this happening. They suggest a solder re-flow where you heat up the solder by placing the motherboard in an oven at 385 degrees for 8 minutes or use a heat gun.

I may still need to do that, but a full fresh factory install from a backup seems to have fixed it for the most part. I did get a blue screen of death during the OS updates, but that's it so far. I ran Railworks briefly with no problems. We'll see how it goes.

A HUGE heat-related tip to laptop users..... In your Windows power plan, set it to Balanced mode and set the maximum CPU usage cap to about 90%-95%. It brings down the temperature while barely taking a noticeable hit in performance. Could make all the difference!

AS FOR MY NEW i7-4710HQ LAPTOP? .... It arrives on Friday. I'm gonna keep it and I'll have 2 laptops now I guess. I don't trust my current one, so I'll have a backup option. Can't wait to compare them both in Railworks! I'll post the results here hopefully on Saturday.

[GSkid]

Well so far it seems.... my new laptop plays Railworks SLOWER than my other laptop. It appears the GPU is used far more than the CPU in Railworks. Which tends to imply that my original assessment was correct.... the GPU matters more to Railworks than the CPU.... at least it seems on laptops. Maybe Turbo Core isn't kicking in like it should...who knows?!?

I can be thankful my older laptop with the better GPU still works, although it seems to be prone to lockups now when it tries to wake up from sleep mode and sometimes when cold booting. I'm sure my new laptop would kill my old one in video editing and encoding.


EDIT: The HDMI port stopped working. Displayed on my TV for awhile and then just suddenly stopped. The computer detects the TV hooked up, it just won't let you display with it.Tried my old laptop's HDMI port to see if it's the cable or the TV.... nope... so the new laptop is going in for warranty repair or replacement I suppose .

[BoostedFridge]

Use the faulty HDMI port as a reason to switch models. What does the next laptop up the line have for a GPU?

[GSkid]

Well the problem with that is, Costco's lowest priced laptop that has a dedicated discrete GPU card (a 2GB Nvidia GT840M) is $999 on sale.....$400 more than this one. They don't offer custom builds like HP direct does. I'm on a budget and this was an emergency purchase. I don't want a new desktop anytime soon cuz I value mobility over power at this point in my life.

A big reason I got the laptop from Costco besides their yearly cash rewards program, is the fact that they extend the warranty for an extra year past HP's at NO extra cost. HP charges $150 minimum for their extended warranty. Also... I got a backlit keyboard included that HP charges $30 for.

Although my framerates are lower on my new i7 laptop compared to my older AMD one in TS2015 & Trainz 12 (haven't tried RUN 8 yet), the framerates in some other games (like Far Cry 2 and Boarderlands 2) has gotten better and/or more stable (little to no frame hiccups). I've not played the game "L.A. Noire" yet on my AMD laptop, but on my i7 laptop the game gives me a multi-threaded option in the graphics settings to boost performance. AMD doesn't multithread but my i7 has 8 threads available to work with.

So while the GPU isn't quite as robust as my AMD's, this i7 stomps it in all other ways. It's just a beast... mobile CPU wise. So I imagine some games will run better on the better GPU or the better CPU depending on the game's code priorities. I'll just play Railworks on the AMD laptop for now.

Now to get my HDMI port fixed.

[GSkid]

OK...

##### Update & Conclusion #####

Well I sent back the laptop with the quad-core Intel i7-4710HQ (2.5GHz base/3.5GHz turbo) w/ Intel HD 4600 graphics. The HDMI port was bad, but more importantly the frame rates in Railworks were bad. Much worse than my dual-core AMD A6-4400M (2.7GHz base/3.2GHz turbo) w/ 1GB Radeon HD 7670M discrete GPU card it was replacing despite the quad-core Intel chip being a much better CPU

My new laptop is now a dual-core Intel i7-4510U (2GHz base/3.1GHz turbo) w/ 4GB GeForce GTX 850M. It says on intel's website on the spec sheet for the i7-4510U that the max turbo speed is 3.1GHz....but on the Windows 8.1 PC Info page it lists a max turbo speed of 2.6GHz. Not sure why the discrepancy nor have I confirmed which number is correct. While the i7-4710HQ is a 47W part and the A6-4400M is 35W part...... the i7-4510U is only a 15W part. Coming right out of playing Railworks, the CPU temp showed only 61C. Have to see what the in-game temp is, but I'm sure it's pretty close to that temp. Cool running no doubt. The GTX 850M is a 45W part.

The Test...

I ran Railworks in all cases at 1360x768 (the native res of both laptops) with 8GB system RAM. Dynamic (TSX) Lighting ON, dynamic clouds OFF. All sliders on MAX with 8x MSAA and Anisotropic x8. Nothing checked off on the 3rd graphics page. I used 9 routes for this test.... Garmisch-Munich, Horseshoe Curve, Marias Pass, Pacific Surfliner, NY-New Haven, Donner Pass, Sherman Hill, Cajon Pass and Stevens Pass. I took BOTH in-cab and outside frame rate counts and averaged them. Then I averaged them over the 9 routes.

Conclusion...

Wow! My average frame rate across those 9 routes under the same conditions was 16fps on the AMD laptop. On my new Intel laptop the average was 45fps. That is a whopping 181% increase in frame rate. And on Cajon Pass under those graphics settings on the Intel I got 69fps in-cab, but still got a somewhat liveable 19fps when cranked up to 3x3 SSAA.

It's my opinion that clearly Railworks is improved more with a GPU upgrade than a CPU upgrade. Needless to say.... laptops can run Railworks very well! I am a very happy camper and can't wait to see the frame rates in my other games!


FanRailer has a quad-core i7-4710HQ w/ a 2GB GDDR5 GTX 860M. So his laptop is even better!

[BoostedFridge]

That is fantastic! I'm really glad it was worth doing the switch!

[GSkid]

Yeah and it confirmed that Stevens Pass still reins supreme as the frame rate killer even with the new card. It's just a lot more playable now.

[BoostedFridge]

How much of an gps gain did you see on Stevens? That's the route that would be driving any hardware upgrade for me.

[GSkid]

In Delta yard (which is object heavy) my rate was (TSX-ON) 7fps before and is now about 18fps. Got about 3-4fps on the Intel HD 4600 if I remember correctly. I used to play it with TSX-OFF on my AMD to get a decent frame rate. On Cajon Pass with TSX-OFF I get about 125fps now.

I know Stevens Pass has a lot of trees and objects, but so do Marias, Donner, Surfliner and other routes. But they fare better. Either way....it's clearly the USA route you use as a benchmark to separate the men from the boys when it comes to GPU chips. At 18fps it's certainly humbled even my new card.

Clearly routes like Stevens Pass brought my frame rate average down a lot over 9 routes averaged. I got decent rates before on some of the routes.

I've yet to try the Nvidia game profile for the sim. Maybe I can get it running faster and/or make it look better. I'll tinker with those settings at some point. For now I'm just enjoying the improvement.

[peterhayes]

Gskid

It's my opinion that clearly Railworks is improved more with a GPU upgrade than a CPU upgrade. Needless to say.... laptops can run Railworks very well! I

Actually you also improved your cpu at the same time (TS2015 runs much better with a balanced cpu (RAM,mobo) to gpu).
AMD and Intel work differently when it comes to computing code eg Instructions per Cycle and that means that although an Intel cpu has a "lower" GHz speed than a comparable AMD processor it will still outperform the AMD unit.
Usually in gaming an AMD processor at say 3.2GHZ will perform the same as an Intel processor @ 2.4GHz. (not always FSX certainly)

AMD are excellent business processors (higher end newer cpus are starting to catch up gaming wise) but Intel with the easy overclock methods and better memory management are usually the better choice for sims. You get what you pay for.

pH