GMABooster gives your netbook's integrated graphics a nudge

It won't exactly provide an Ion-level boost in performance, but it looks like the GMABooster app that's been floating around for a little while does indeed deliver on its promise of providing a small helping hand to the stock Intel GMA 950 graphics found in the majority of netbooks out there. More specifically, the application boosts the clock speed from the standard 133MHz or 166MHz to a full 400MHz, or the same as the non-low voltage chipset found on standard laptops. According to the folks at UMPC Portal, that translates to about a 20% gain in Crystal Mark benchmarks, although you can also unsurprisingly expect to take a slight hit in battery performance as a result. Better still, the app is even available for OS X and in addition to Windows and Linux, so folks that have already been busy tweaking their netbooks in other areas aren't out of luck.

[Via TweakTown]

[jsmrekar Posted Apr 30th 2009 5:57PM]

Juan - quit holding out. Next time tell us.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 30th 2009 7:35PM]

Has anyone tried it with battery doubler?

[ryudeshi Posted May 1st 2009 12:25AM]

Ive benchmarked this on my eee a while back, and these are the results I had gotten with crystal mark:

1.6Ghz/GPU stock

Mark 25069
ALU 5349
FPU 4600
MEM 4519
HDD 5152
GDI 1840
D2D 2926
OGL 683

1.6Ghz/GPU 400Mhz

Mark 26068
ALU 5349
FPU 4600
MEM 4519
HDD 5152
GDI 1926
D2D 3842
OGL 680

and in games I got maybe a couple frames here and there, while some games saw absolutely no benefit..

[ryudeshi Posted May 1st 2009 12:28AM]

oh and it only effected my battery by about 15-25mins (out of about 6hrs) while idle. I didn't test it out under load..

[(Unverified) Posted May 9th 2009 3:22PM]

would this be safe on the Dell Latitude series?