I did everything you said except for having the increased RAM. Although, I ordered RAM from crucial and it should be arriving today ;) So, we'll see if that fixes the problem.

As an aside, I noticed while playing HL on my Alienware, that the CPU is pegged the entire time, but the game runs super fast.

At any rate, I'll know by tonight if the RAM is the culprit--let's hope.

Thanks for the response.

To avoid the problem that you seem to have ( Not 100% sure ) many have reformatted, and reinstalled windows to get all the Dell junk off the system, that may slow the computer down.  Also, some games do like 1 gb of memory as well, to run at their best.   Far Cry and Half Life are two of them that like more ram.  You can also, if you have not done so, is disable any running background programs, defrag the hard drive, use the disk clean-up program, turn off the anti virus program during game play if not on the internet and back on afterwards.  Turn off all the windows xp eye candy, wallpaper, and screen saver to see if any of these help....If you got the driver from nvidia's web site, I hope you got the inf file that should be included to make it work on the notebook system.  Seems you did, or it would not work. 

Cannot think of anything else at the moment.  Perhaps others will assist you later...Good luck

Good luck to you, and let us know if the new ram helps... :smileywink:

I have a 9300 with the 7200 rpm drive, 1gb RAM and the 6800 card, I played HL2 ~65fps with eye candy (determined by software) turned on, had no video problems at all, only MINOR thing was sound stuttering once in a while. I played WoW at high frame rates at 1920x1200 -- it was awesome. I did reformat and reinstall Windows though.

Im running HL2 at 1440 x 900 @ FSAA x4 and Anisotropic x16 with full detail and shadows without a single slowdown. I have the same setup except for 512mb more of ram.

Alright, I got my new RAM, which is one chip instead of two, meaning that I'm not getting my dual-channel throughput, but I think that I won't really notice the difference.

It seems that having at least 1G, or 1.25G in my case, does fix the problem. There is no longer any video lag as I'm playing the games. One caveat though, I cannot turn the resolution up all the way :( On my 17" screen I have 1900xwhatever and there is visbible slowdown. Although, I know that there are probably not any video cards out there that could handle that kind of rendering.

I was hoping that this card would slaughter my 9800Pro in my Alienware, but alas it seems that that are on fairly even footing. The one benefit of the 6800 is that it is a bit prettier in its rendering then the 9800PRo.

I was expecting to conquer the world, but instead I must co-exist peacefully with the other systems :) I guess that's still good considering that I running from a laptop.

Final performance:

Day of Defeat - 1600 x 1200 is fine most of the time with occasional slowdown depending upon the map

CS:Source - 1280x1024 was a bit choppy, I'm guessing like 20-30fps, but a little tweaking of the video card fixed that right up.

Message Edited by draas1 on 06-24-2005 05:21 AM

the regular 6800 is lame.... the 6800 ultra is a much better performing card !!!  the fill rate is much higher plus the video memory is faster as well.. clock speeds are higher too..... i have tried them both and wont touch a baseline 6800............

Man something is wrong with your setup, I seriously ran HL2 at the max resoultion the game supports and with eye candy turned on at like 65fps. I ran World of Warcraft at 1920x1200 with high frame rates. Something is defintely off with your system, run 3dmark05, I got 3900 with auto OC turned on. See what your score is.

To robucf:

I downloaded and ran the 3dmark05.

For default settings of system: 3382

For settings the same as you listed: 4209


I did notice that the CPU tests yielded about 1-2 fps! So I guess the CPU is now the real limiting factor on performance.

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@whiteashcm1 wrote:
the regular 6800 is lame.... the 6800 ultra is a much better performing card !!! the fill rate is much higher plus the video memory is faster as well.. clock speeds are higher too..... i have tried them both and wont touch a baseline 6800............

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Blame Dell... but nonetheless its still one of the best mobile chips out there, unless your a gaming freak who wants to squeeze out every fps possible the card if works amazing for the rest of us.