Everex XT5000T Support thread

I just bought this beauty March 31st and am starting to go through her, but suffice to say I'm *super* impressed at what you get for the price in this package. I'll be updating this with pics and links as I get more familiar with this sucker but here's where we'll start.


UPDATE:

If you want to repartition, use GPartEd LiveCD to clear out the 4GB resource partition. It's free, fast and verified working on this laptop.

AVAILABLE UPGRADES:

I'm going to post items here that either I or someone else here has tested and verified. Please PM me with anything I should add, there's no guarantee I'll see what happens in the thread as it grows

Memory: Adata DDR2 667 $54 from NewEgg. Just received my 2GB of this last night (though it was $3 less per stick when I ordered it) and it works great. Dual channel enabled, definitely improved the "zippy" factor of this lappy.

Backpack: The SecurePack Notebook Backpack is really nice, quite fashionable, and also secure because it can't be opened while you're wearing it. It also has plenty of interior space and a couple of velcro backed bags that stick to the inside of the pack. Best deal is at Ritz Camera, $50.99 with $6.95 shipping and no tax!!!!

Software for your XT5000T

Windows XP 32 bit

Freeware DVD Player
Freeware CD/DVD Burning software
Freeware Virtual CD/DVD (Mount ISO's as CD/DVD drives)
freeware Codec Pack (oodles of codecs for all your video decoding needs)

Windows Vista 32 bit

Freeware Vista Codecs package
Freeware DP CD/DVD Burner (Plugins are supported for extended functionality)

DRIVERS FOR YOUR OS!:

Windows XP x64 Edition

VGA: Get the Driver here, and the Modified INF here. you need to EXTRACT the driver to a folder, copy the INF into the folder (overwrite the existing nvf_disp.inf) and then run setup, it'll find your card just fine.

CHIPSET/NIC/SATA: use the nVidia NFORCE 430/410/405/400 pack for x64.

Audio: The driver from Everex's site also includes the XP x64 driver.

Wireless Card: MiniPCI.Biz has what you need!

HACKED x64 Files so you can use unsigned themes and such.

More to come as I find them, if you have info please PM or email it to me and I'll update this sucker! Let's keep it as complete as possible!

Benchmarks and scores:

WinSAT score is 4.4 by default, I'll do some tweaking and see what I can get it up to. Specific scores by category follow.

Processor: 4.6

Memory (RAM): 4.5

Graphics: 4.8

Gaming Graphics: 4.7

Primary Hard Disk: 4.4

SuperPI Calculation to 2Million score: 000h 02m 07.836s, all by default


DVD Shrink Ripping, with DVD43 decrypting, "Saving Face" region 1 DVD with all defaults, 97 minute movie, took 32m 47s to rip.

User Manual

Drivers for both Vista and XP

Official Web page

For those who don't know, this lappy was on sale at Office Max until Saturday March 31st for $699, but now it's back to $899. Even at full price you simply WILL NOT find better bang for your buck right now, boys and girls. I've been eyeballing a very similarly spec'd HP at Costco for awhile now, but that one's $1500. The XT5000T has a Turion64 X2 instead of a Core2Duo, which is a shame, but for the price differential the tradeoff is well worth it. I'm listing the specs below for all those interested.

SPECS:

Chipset: NVIDIA® C51D (Northbridge), NVIDIA® MCP51 (Southbridge). Uses Nforce 410/430 drivers

Turion64 X2 TL-50 @ 1.6Ghz. Upgradeable to TL-60.

1GB DDRII 533Mhz Memory. Nicely, it's a 1GB stick so you can easily just add one. For future benefit, this laptop supports up to 4GB (that's right, FOUR GIGS) of DDR2 up to 667Mhz.

17" Widescreen display, 1440x900. Like higher end laptops this is the glossy screen, and it has excellent brightness and viewing angles. I watched 2 eps of Battlestar galactica on it last night (what a fucked up season finale, yo!) from across the room on my bed, with the lappy on my desk. Nice!

100GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Disk. Nice size, nice speed. Even nicer, it has an additional bay for a *second* SATA 9,5mm 2.5" hard drive. It doesn't support RAID0 or RAID1 yet, but according to the support forums that will be coming in a BIOS update soon. When that comes I'll probably drop a pair of 7200RPM beauties in this beast.

8X Dual Layer DVD/RW, it's a Sony (yuck) AD5530A. 8X burner though, so not too much to bitch about. unfortunately no LightScribe. I'll see if there's a drop-in replacement.

NVIDIA geforce 7600 with 256MB discrete memory. Also shares an additional 256 for a total of 512. If anyone knows how to turn off the sharing, please tell me . this is one of the features that makes this such a great deal, as very few (if any) lappies in this price range have such a good video card. No idea if it is upgradeable, but will find out.

RealTek HD Audio with GREAT sounding speakers and its own subwoofer. In the aforementioned BSG watching session (did I mention, what a fucked up season finale that was?) I heard this *crystal clear* from 8 feet away with the sound at 67 (out of 100). Nice indeed! good base, good treble, all in all the nicest notebook audio I've heard. Take that with a grain of salt though, I haven't heard that many notebooks

4 in 1 card reader (SD, MMC, MS, MS Pro)

DVI and S-Video output, excellent for using with your TV or a second monitor.

3x USB 2.0 ports

1x Firewire 4 pin port (mini)

56K Modem (yay....I guess)

10/100/1000 LAN Adapter

802.11 b/g wifi adapter. Nice because it's in a PCIe slot, making it highly upgradeable. Looking for a module with a/b/g and Bluetooth if I can find one!

2 button "Glide Pad". Meh, whatever, gimme a mouse.

6 Cell Lithium Ion battery. This is mediocre, but hell, what do you expect for the price? I have yet to see a better replacement, but as soon as I do I'll link it for your pleasure. Or something.

1 Year Limited PARTS warranty. Doesn't say anything about labor, but it might be worth it to put out for the warranty at Office Max, it's like $149 for 3 years, and given how cheap this already is, you're still coming out WAY ahead.

PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS (provided by AreEss):

PROBLEMS SOLVED:

* Keyboard Enter doesn't work in games

Cause; Keyboard enter is NUMPAD ENTER. Use Sharpkeys from RandyRants.com to remap Numpad Enter (E0_1C) to Keyboard Enter (00_1C). This may be resolved in BIOS at a later date.

* Wireless sometimes does not initialize on boot.

The Broadcom card included with this laptop really is a complete pile of crap.

You could go buy an Intel 3945ABG or 4xxxAGN MiniPCI Express card. The 3495ABG can be found for only $32 on Amazon.com. However, I cannot frigging get EITHER of my 3945ABGs to even show on the PCIe bus!

Atheros AR5418-based Mini PCI-Express cards are known to work superbly with this system. I can't find them online though.

* Vista sucks, I want rid of it.

The recovery DVD is a full recovery DVD. Not a 'recover from hard disk' pile of crap. So go ahead and install XP. Normal ForceWare works for the chipset, but you'll need something like MobileForceXP for the GeForce Go 7600 as it's PCIe and the nVidia official drivers appear to only have the AGP PCIIDs.

Problems Outstanding:

* Don't know of a source for the HDD mounting brackets.

* Extended battery IS AVAILABLE, waiting on source details from Everex forums.

* Accessories and additional parts (e.g. bottom plastics, AC adaptor, etc) must be ordered from Everex by phone right now. You can reach them at 1-510-687-9261. They should be up on the website at everexstore.com sometime "soon."

More as I find it! feel free to contribute!

I just got a credit card today, actually, and I could run down to a local OfficeMax and grab one of these through Saturday (or order online). Can someone post some benchmarks, obviously that's an important thing at this point. Like crunch a DVD with DVDShrink and time the whole operation from start to finish with just the defaults for everything - put in the DVD, back it up, stop the timer, etc. I know with my old Core 2 Duo T5500 + 533 MHz DDR2 I could do a typical movie in about 14 minutes, so I'm curious to know what this lappy is capable of for comparison.

Gaming benchmarks are so passe, really, and I don't play games so... also, some CPU-Z info would be nice to see as well.

SuperPi Mod done to 2M places (not 1 million, 2 million) would give me some idea for comparison also. Actual number crunching benchmarks are what I'm interested in, not gaming.

Thanks in advance if anyone can help...

ps
And of course, what's the obligatory WinSAT score in Vista for the whole machine, too... why not

I got mine today. Great laptop for the price.

I took a picture of the bottom with the covers off to take a look at the two hard drive spots and the memory/CPU area.



You can see the available spot for a second harddrive. Very easy access to the CPU for upgrading it (I had to disassemble my Dell to get to the CPU). Also love how they include 1 memory SO-DIMM leaving the second spot empty for a cheap upgrade.

I've only had the laptop an hour or so now and haven't done a lot with it yet. But I do see one thing that will bug me a bit, for a while anyway. The keyboard has a very odd lay out to me. The SHIFT keys are very short and I end up hitting the key next to it. But most odd is that the backslash \ key is on this keyboard in 3 different spots, but none of them being the normal spot above the ENTER key.



I don't get why the backslash key was put in 3 different spots. And the SHIFT and ENTER keys unnecessarily modified to make room for this.

I'm still very happy with the laptop. I'll just have to adapt to the goofy keyboard.

I cant seem to get mine to connect to the internet via router (not wireless). It tried to "repair" it but all that did was reboot my modem and i had to adjust my port forwards because my desktop had its IP changed.

SuperPI and WinSAT scores have been added. Thanks, Ravynmagi, I appreciate it!

Originally Posted by fatlazyhomer

I cant seem to get mine to connect to the internet via router (not wireless). It tried to "repair" it but all that did was reboot my modem and i had to adjust my port forwards because my desktop had its IP changed.

If you go into the Device Manager, is there a yellow exclamation mark next to the Nvidia nForce Networking Controller?

I just did a Windows Update and included the optional update for the Nvidia Network Controller. And after I rebooted, my network controller stopped working. I went into the driver properties and rolled the driver back and everything was good again.

theres no question mark. My internet is like this - Modem -> router -> Switch -> Laptop. Ive never had a problem before, so I dont know why I would have one now.

Can this thing game? I want to play modern FPS games like BF2142 on it through my 37" LCD. Could this system handle it?

When I did the vista update I lost wireless at all, rebooted a few times no fix. Shut it down for 1 min rebooted and it all worked great.

T

The memory module in my laptop is A-DATA model number AD29608A8A-37DG. I can't find that model for order on any websites. Does anybody have any experience with running the stock A-DATA module with something from Corsair? I was thinking of picking something up from newegg cheap.

Can this thing game?

So far I've loaded Oblivion, Half Life 2, and World of Warcraft on it and it ran comparable to my Athlon 64 3400+ desktop which has a Geforce 6800GT OC.

Originally Posted by josht

The memory module in my laptop is A-DATA model number AD29608A8A-37DG. I can't find that model for order on any websites. Does anybody have any experience with running the stock A-DATA module with something from Corsair? I was thinking of picking something up from newegg cheap.



So far I've loaded Oblivion, Half Life 2, and World of Warcraft on it and it ran comparable to my Athlon 64 3400+ desktop which has a Geforce 6800GT OC.

Not sure about Corsair, but a few people have mentioned they bought the Transcend memory and it worked fine. Mine should be arriving today.

Could someone check and see if the go7600 uses a 64bit or 128bit interface and the core speed/memory speed. Everest should work. I remember reading about some of the earlier go7600 being crippled with a 64 bit pathway.


thanks much
Andy

Originally Posted by MiXdNuTs

Can this thing game? I want to play modern FPS games like BF2142 on it through my 37" LCD. Could this system handle it?

Will depend on the resolution used. Sure won't game at 1920x1080 (1080P). But a 720P television at 1366x768 should be doable.

I haven't done much gaming yet. Still waiting for my extra gig of RAM to arrive and I spent yesterday testing Vista, determining I still hate it and reformatting and installing XP.

I did some 3DMark06 benchmarks and this is what it did:

3DMark Score 2225 3DMarks
SM 2.0 Score 881 Marks
SM 3.0 Score 828 Marks
CPU Score 1164 Marks

The video drivers found on everex's website seemed to work the best. I tried the newest Mobileforce drivers on tweakersrus.com and lost 200 points.

Originally Posted by andy A

Could someone check and see if the go7600 uses a 64bit or 128bit interface and the core speed/memory speed. Everest should work. I remember reading about some of the earlier go7600 being crippled with a 64 bit pathway.

This from my 3DMark06 benchmark:

Video Memory 256 MB
Core Clock 445 MHz
Memory Clock 398 MHz

And Nvidia.com says the Go 7600 is 128bit.

Originally Posted by Ravynmagi

This from my 3DMark06 benchmark:

Video Memory 256 MB
Core Clock 445 MHz
Memory Clock 398 MHz

And Nvidia.com says the Go 7600 is 128bit.

thanks for the core/clock.
Reason I question the nvidia specs is that there were actually some go7600 64bit and the 128bit would definitely be better

Andy

I'm also unable to find that memory anywhere. However, if anyone's interested in swapping a more easily locatable type for one of mine so we both end up with matched sets, I'd be open. I suspect others would as well.

I'm ripping a movie right now, I'll post the results when it's done

EDIT: Done, it took 32 minutes and 47 seconds to rip a 97 minute DVD. Bear in mind that it was a protected DVD with DVD43 decrypting in the background.

Let me rip something unprotected, it shouldn't take that long to rip a normal DVD...even if it is running a full GHz slower than my single core desktop, it's a duel core, which should help.

By the way, has anybody had any luck with clockgen on this lappy? For that matter, can the video card be overclocked? As far as I can tell, the 7600 in this laptop is just a 7600GT with massively lower clocks...

Originally Posted by Unknown-One

Let me rip something unprotected, it shouldn't take that long to rip a normal DVD...even if it is running a full GHz slower than my single core desktop, it's a duel core, which should help.

By the way, has anybody had any luck with clockgen on this lappy? For that matter, can the video card be overclocked? As far as I can tell, the 7600 in this laptop is just a 7600GT with massively lower clocks...

I haven't, but I'm interested in doing so. I don't know for sure, but I kind of doubt that DVDShrink is multithreaded software since it's so old. It's also worth bearing in mind that the DVD drive in this guy's not going to compare to a desktop dvd drive, of course.

I do look forward to your results, though! Please post them as soon as you can and I will update the OP!

When I owned a Core 2 Duo T5500 powered laptop of late (few months ago), DVDShrink brought both cores into play during the crunching so... since I always use DVDShrink for a 1:1 copy (meaning I just shrink the whole damned thing with default settings - it looks fine to me on playback) for DVD9 to DVD5 conversion, it was a 12-14 minute job most of the time for a ~2 hour DVD with some extras on it (meaning between 7 and 8GB of files on the original DVD) - and that's doing the conversion from content already on the hard drive, mind you and not from the DVD sitting in the Plextor.

So, I would think DVDShrink is most definitely multithreaded and whoever coded it did one damned fine job of it.

I couldn't get ClockGen to work. Not sure it would have mattered since while running Orthos at stock speed, I was able to get the CPU hot enough to shut down the laptop.

I had better luck with the Go 7600. Stock speeds are 450/400. I went up to 528/486.

Video Memory 256 MB
Core Clock 528 MHz
Memory Clock 486 MHz

3DMark Score 2617 3DMarks
SM 2.0 Score 1054 Marks
SM 3.0 Score 999 Marks
CPU Score 1178 Marks