The Daysky D-Book Pro is an interesting $350 combination of dedicated Nvidia 940M 2GB GPU and the ever so common Celeron N3450. The CPU is far too weak for any real serious gaming as it bottlenecks almost all of the new and demanding titles, so I set out here in this video to see if it’s possible to improve both thermals and GPU performance.
And If you caught my review of the DaySky D-Book Pro you would have seen that thermals got up to 80 degrees on the CPU, that’s perfectly fine if it’s a passively cooled CPU and normally it is. But Daysky added a small fan and I set the power limit to off, so it will use up to 15W if needed. I knew that I could improve thermals, but all that was required was a repaste on the CPU. Daysky used a horrible gum like a thermal pad or paste. Quite poor. With some Arctic MX-4 it dropped from 80 degrees C max to 74 degrees C max.
The GPU, on the other hand, would reach 90 degrees C after an hour of gaming. I decided to add a 20 x 20 x 1 mm thick copper chip and this lowered temps around 7-8 degrees C but this was after I overclocked the GPU. My Nvidia 940M overclocked like a champ. I was able to add 450Mhz to the memory clock taking the RAM clock from 800Mhz stock to 1250Mhz. I used MSI afterburner to find the highest possible RAM speed before it displayed artifacts or crashed the GPU.
The CPU core clock is locked out, this can’t be overclocked with software, so I had to dump the bios, edit it using Maxwell bios tweaker. This involves editing the bios clocks and flashing it to the GPU. It’s rather simple and covered in the video. But there is a risk it could crash or you could brick the GPU so bear this in mind.
Through trial and error, adding just 10Mhz to the core clock at a time I found 1346Mhz. This is a nice increase over the stock 1176Mhz boost core clock. And as a result, the GPU performance in Heaven Benchmarks increased a massive 36% and in games and other benchmarks are 25% which is still a huge increase. Nvidia Maxwell overclocks well but remember this is my 940M GPU, your one might not overclock as good or even better.
Overall, games do run smoother and are more playable taking FPS in GTA 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider up on average 6-7 FPS, but the CPU bottleneck remains and this is what caps performance and cannot be fixed in this laptop.
Below are the files need as shown in the video if you want to tweak and flash your 940M. I’ve also included the stock Nvidia 940M bios the D-Book Pro uses just in case. You can find them in the D-Book Pro download section.