ATI Radeon HD 3200 Performance

toothman · Oct 5, 2008, 02:55 PM

Recently I've bought a new HP laptop because my old Lenovo broke (motherboard fried twice in 6 months, second time was out of warranty).

Specs:
AMD Turion X2 64 Dual Core 2.0 GHz
Radeon HD 3200 graphics card, 256 MB dedicated video memory, up to 1405 MB shared video memory
3 GB RAM
250 GB HDD, 5400 RPM
Vista Home

You would think with a machine like this, I would get more than an average of 25-35 FPS on World of Warcraft with all the graphic settings on minimum. My old laptop had a T7500 Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB ram, nVidia quadro NVS140m and I was averaging 45-60 FPS with medium settings.

I have tried putting the power themes on high performance, I have tried updating the latest video drivers, I have tried updating to the latest directX10, I even downloaded the AMD Fusion for Gaming Beta software. None of which had any effect whatsoever. I really rather not resort to using the AMD Overdrive tools to overclock my GPU and CPU to squeeze more performance out of a 4-year-old outdated game. So if anyone could help me out I would greatly appreciate it.

P.S. This is an HP laptop, and HP is notorious for locking up 99% of their BIOS which prevents me from turning off Cool N' Quiet for my AMD processor. I was told that putting the power theme on High Performance would turn off CnQ automatically so this shouldn't be the problem.

**kris23** · Oct 5, 2008, 07:13 PM

one very important piece of advice to you, the HD3200 is a GPU thats integrated to the chipset so OCing is not recommended.

dmso12 · Oct 10, 2008, 01:45 AM

I'm afraid you did not buy a gaming laptop. I have nearly the same one as you (hp 6735b) and its performance with most fps / 3d-intensive games has been choppy. older games and thinking people's games run fine. I would suggest maxing out memory if you can, but don't expect high end performance.

I'm told that the performance stems from the efficient processor and the integrated video. I bought this laptop to be used at both home and work for work purposes, and I model protein structures - that's where I noticed the performance difference to my older hp nc8230.

good luck