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rylez
Journeyman III

Card shown on device manager is different to computer specs

My sons laptop is a ACER E5-553G-T3NF

AMD quad core processor A10-9600P with turbo core technology up to 3.3ghz
AMD Radeon R8 M445DX With 2GB Dedicated VRAM

16GB DDR4 Memory

Firstly in the device manager and on ATI Radeon setting it now comes up with R7 M340 and R5.  Instead of the R8 445DX supposedly in the machine.  My son has trouble playing games with this.  What would be the best setting to use on this, i have just read its a dual graphics combo

He is playing city skylines, where he says it lags a lot.  Gang beasts also suffers a lot of lag. 

Can anyone please help us with this.

Also he wants to overclock it using AMD overdrive.  It says it cannot recognize the processor or it isnt supported.  Is that because its a laptop?

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chinf
Adept I

The A10-9600P is an APU (CPU + integrated GPU) - the GPU here is "Radeon R5".

The laptop also has a discrete GPU fitted - "R7 M340"; this is somewhat faster than the R5, though not massively so.

Both GPUs can be combined (AMD calls this Dual Graphics, but it's also referred to as Crossfire) and this is the "R8 M445DX" reference; hopefully this explains the different model names you've seen. Only some games are able to make use of Crossfire/Dual Graphics though, and I'd expect most games will be using just the R7 M340 GPU.

I play Cities: Skylines too - it's a great game, but it has high hardware requirements, particularly on the CPU. Ordinarily C:S doesn't support Crossfire (Dual Graphics), though you can force it to run in DX9 mode where you can enable Crossfire. However, I doubt that would improve C:S performance, as with Dual Graphics some of the meagre 15W APU power budget (it is a laptop after all) has to serve the R5 GPU, leaving less for the CPU. With less power and all cores busy the CPU can't run as fast as it can, which is not good for a CPU-heavy game like C:S. Older games which are lighter on the CPU will benefit though.

Unfortunately if OverDrive doesn't give you the option to overclock, it's highly unlikely that you'll find any overclocking features in the laptop's BIOS - it's extremely rare to be able to overclock on laptops as they don't have the power or cooling headroom. There's not much you can do other than running on AC, ensuring the laptop is ventilated enough, checking that Windows power settings allows the CPU to run at 100% speed, and lowering the in-game graphics settings.

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