[Guide] Installing AMD Radeon Mobility 6970 / 6990 in your M17x R2 (Single GPU and CrossfireX)

This is SO hard to get off. What's the orange tape on top of the CPU?

 

I think it's purpose is to keep the paste from spreading across the entire CPU (not just the die).

 

Also, we put a large piece of thermal pad on the heatsink to fully cover those little grey boxes above the CPU. If you JUST put the pad on the little silver indent then it won't cover it fully. Is this all okay?

 

I never changed the stock dell pad out (so can't be certain if making the thermal pad larger makes a difference).

Turbo or anyone else have any thoughts on that?

 

Something I'm concerned about:

It seems like there's greese UNDERNEATH this yellow square. I think that there's a small slit in that square on the sides of the chip so stuff gets in there! What should I do?

 

you can ignore it or do what i did and remove the square plastic, clean and repaste using quality thermal paste. use isopropl alcohol or arcticlean.

 

I removed the plastic. Underneath it was the driest thermal paste I've ever seen. There's still a TAD amount left that I CANT get off but it should be okay. There's no way I can replace the square sheet, so that should be okay according to Greywolf.

 

Yep, my 920XM didn't come with one so shouldn't be a problem.

 

i'm not sure, but this may be an NBR first...

i just crossfired successfully a dell 6990m with a eurocom 6970m into an M17x R2!!!!

i can confirm it works, both cards have been flashed with clevo bioses, (6990m master and a 6970m slave)
the 6970m has been overclocked to 715/900 in order to lessen the performance gap.

crossfire is working flawlessly on new 11.12 drivers, i kept getting BSOD for 11.11 a/b/c

got around 20,000P in vantage on the first go, just install and run.
and for those of you who say "screenshot or it didn't happen" take a close look at this screenie, look closely at my shader counts for the gpuz windows

different bios revisions too, but for the same clevo laptop, the x7200.
omg i cant believe i actually got this to work!

only issue i have is with the fans, but using hwinfo to correct that problem. the sensors for the slave card take a while to load but once they're goin, it's smooth sailing all the way.

 

Hey xeroxide!

Congrats!! That's amazing...I didn't think it would work.

 

there are new 11.12 drivers? Should I get them too? Do they fix skyrim?

Also, I put a dot on the chip of ic7 diamond 24 and moved it over a bit with a cuetip to get to the center, that's why it looks messy on the right side of the chip. Is this ready for the heatsync to go down?

 

Looks good to me...anyone else?

 

Looks good to me too. That's what mine looked like and my temps are great.

 

Thanks Rypac!

 

Almost done! I want to keep the crossfire cable in the little groove so everything sits flush, plus i'm worried that the black plastic (circled in red) will get too hot and melt the cable. To keep the cable in the groove, it'd have to travel over the copper heat sinc, which also would get hot. Whats the best way to do it?

EDIT: I taped the heatsync so that the xfire cable won't contact it. The tape IS making contact with the heatsinc. That shouldn't affect anything though, should it?

 

not sure, it's the first i've tried crossfire for myself.
skyrim doesn't seem to benefit much (if at all) from crossfire.
BIG difference in saints row 2.

also hard to tell from a photo, but looks like it might need a bit more paste. not much more, just a tiny tiny bit. the paste you currently have on looks relatively flat.

 

Quick question:

If you were to use DUAL 6990Ms on R2 on stock clocks, how far would you be able to overclock the i7 xm so that when you run furmark + prime 95 there is no throttling??

*assuming that temps for gpu is low enough for no throttling.

Thank you for your response to those who have 6990s!

 

All good! CPU maxed out @ 80 during the physics testing in 3dmark 11. GPU never went over 74.

It seems like my CPU temps are still droping @ idle because of the ic7 diamond curing and getting situated.

Thanks to everyone who helped! I'm so happy to finally have it all working well

 

Awesome news! Congrats! Enjoy playing Skyrim on your new upgraded beast!

 

Thanks a ton man. For everything. I don't know what I would have done without your help. Hopefully I'll get down to a solid 40C stable idle. I'm sure it just needs time to do its thing. Even so, in games they're running where they should be and I'm happy with that. I'm sure the cooling pad that comes in monday won't hurt either

EDIT: One thing that is a little concerning is the fans. Normally, when I'm just surfing the web, I don't hear my computer at all. Now, once I start playing a game the fans kick on and even after I leave the game they stay on. They're not on super high, but they're definitely audible. Any ideas?

 

40°C idle is a pipe dream. I have a modified heatsink. I have a 1/16" piece of aluminum plate that runs the entire length of the keyboard. I idle at about 47°C.

I would shoot for 50°C idle.

 

because after a gaming session, the idle temps are usually a little higher due to the fact that the heatsink's warmed up. takes a long time to cool down, even longer since the fans slow down as the system cools down.

in short, it's your normal fan operation reacting on ambient temps.

 

Please also keep in mind that the 'fan' noise that you are hearing may be either the GPU or the CPU. It is important to know which one is kicking in for troubleshooting purposes.

 

temp for the gpu is fantastic. did you experience any throttling of cpu or gpu due to power issue?

 

Whoa insane!

I've been running a Dell+Eurocom 6970 combo for about 5 months now and I'm having the fan issue like you are.

I should have realized you could CFX a 6970 and a 6990 together.

Eventhough we don't have the exact same setup, it's good to see another person using 1 Dell card and 1 Eurocom card. You may not know yet, but if you find in testing that one card is having a problem where it's shader is at 106.5C or you get random shut downs under any type of OC, can you please keep me posted? I want to figure out if it's a Dell+Eurocom combo problem or something unique to me.

I'm getting fed up with this dell card. I swear it's the root of my problems. I think I'm going to end up selling it and buying a Eurocom 6990 to CFX with my 6970.

It's awesome to see this! I knew you could do this with desktops, so it's only logical that it should be possible with a laptop. What gave you the gumption to try it?

Also, which card do you have as the master?

 

well i didn't want to sell a card which i had drilled holes into (eurocom 6970).
even though it works, i cbf explaining the fan issue and all so it was just sitting there.
i figured i had nothing to loose in trying it with the laptop open and just have the cable connected loosly and boot.
i knew the bioses would have to be right, so i prepared them before... in the off chance that it would work, and to my delight, it did

temps are good on my end for both cards.
kept under 85C even after long gaming sessions sitting the laptop on a cloth surface.

the 6990m (dell) is the master card. i figured if i have to use one card for a game it might as well be the slightly stronger one.
one interesting fact, when the slave is at 100% usage, the master is at around 92%. it's always 5 - 10% less usage than the 6970m, makes perfect sense, i guess i could muck around with the overclock to see what gets them both balanced haha.

i did get a random shutdown with just battery power. switching crossfire off when using battery seemed to fix this... it's not like i'm going to game without the ac adapter anyways.
as for overclock, i've only overclocked the slave card to 715/900

i tried overclocking to 800/900 but experienced throttling so pulled it back. (ended up with 18k vantage marks due to throttle)

 

None whatsoever. I undervolted the cards to .96v. I have the stock 5% OC on the CPU and my temps are fine. Idle, this morning before gaming my CPU temps were 39C - 40C and jumped around 5-7 degrees. After 2 hours of skyrim last night my GPUs still didn't go above 77C and I ran it on Ultra with smooth 60 fps.

Maybe it's just the new cards but I dont remember the fans staying on so long after gaming. I didn't do much this morning so it might be better now that the CPU has had time to set. I'm out right now so I'll check when I get home.

Gaming performance is fantastic. I'm running 11.10 with App profiles 10.9 cap 4.

Also, for people with 6990's do you notice fan noise on a lot? It's not full blast or anything but I remember my old config being fully quiet. Maybe it's just the new cards being how they are? Again, I haven't tested much today past turning it on and checking idle temps. I'm getting my cooling pad in the mail tomorrow and I'm sure that'll make it even better. Granted my temps are fantastic and performance follows suit, I still want to make sure the fan noise is normal (if I even still have it - I'll know in a few hours).

Also, I have the 1.0 thick thermal pads on my GPUs if that helps anyone. I'm really greatfull that the graphics cards are working so well and now that the c clamps are off and I know how to open the machine, I can fix the issues myself ( with you guy's help of course )

EDIT: Also, when I open Hwinfo32 and I look at the system summary I see Core 0,1,2 and 3 constantly switching speeds. I'm not doing anything any they keep going from 9x to 24x. From 1196 Mhz to 3100+ Mhz. Is that normal? I don't remember if it did that before or not.

ALSO, my idle master GPU temp is 65C or so. Is that okay? My slave stays @ 37C. Is that normal? Again, they never get hotter than 77-80 so I know the max is good, but I'm not sure about the idle.

 

So happy to hear the cards are doing great for intense =] Getting mine in my system soon.

 

Also, the left side of my keyboard (over my master card) is a little warm. I think I may just repaste them since the tech spread the paste over them instead of did the dot. I don't know...my max temps on my cards are great. I'm just worried because of my min temps. My master card sits @ 60-65C without doing much of anything. Is that bad? If I touch the back of my laptop (the heatsinc) on the left side its hot to the touch. Right side is fine. Is that just because the master works harder?

 

Sorry for hijacking this discussion, guys. But i haven't been able to get my answer using the search engine so i am asking you. Has anyone managed/tried/tested AMD Radeon 6970M Single/CF in an M17x-R1? Also can an R1 or an R2 handle Dual CF 6990Ms? Thanks in advance and sorry again for hijacking.

 

The cpu will constantly adjust it's clock speed to shell out the best performance/heat/stability ratio it can find. When you're not gaming and just sitting in the OS, the fluctuations can be kinda big. However, unless you are on battery power or have power saver mode or balanced mode enabled, it should not be going down to 1196Mhz. It's lowest should be 2.0ghz for the 920xm or 2.13ghz for the 940xm.

If you are on AC power with highperformance mode enabled, then it seems like something is amiss. Doublecheck that your PSU breaker hasn't tripped.

As for the idle temps of the cards, 65C idle seems maybe a tad high. Mine idles at 60C, but that's with it pushing a 4.3MP desktop and HTML5 in Firefox. Since the tech did a horrible job repasting the cpu, maybe you should consider redoing the gpu's. As long as load temps are where you say they are then there isn't really anything to worry about.

You also need to keep in mind, that in windows, and applications other than games, any gpu related data is processed soley by the master. It's not unnormal for it to be hot to the touch while not gaming.

 

Someone got 5870 CFX working in a R1. They posted about it on this forum. I don't think 6970/6990 CFX has been tried in an R1 yet.

 

Thanks for your response, i was hoping someone would have tried this since i first saw this thread but no luck. Next year i might just buy a pair of 6970s and try them in my R1, but it would have been safer if someone tried it before.

 

How do I check psu breaker?

 

If the blue light on the end of the PSU cable is off eventhough the PSU is plugged in, then the breaker has tripped.

 

Blue light is on. The performance is fine but for whatever reason, even during a benchmark they occasionally go down to 9. Not as often as they do when its idle, but they do occasionally go to 9.

As far as the re-paste on the master gpu goes, I repasted it with MX4 and spread it instead of dotting (as per greywolf's advice). I used the mx4 instead of ic7 because its much easier to handle. IC7 is impossible unless you're doing dot method, but greywolf insists that spread is better for video cards. When I turned on my PC my idle temp was 43 on my master card. I was pretty stoked. It then proceeded to get back up to 60-65 so I'm not sure what that means. The max temps are still doing what they were doing before. Maxing out around 76-77C. I'm getting a cooling pad in the mail tomorrow so I'm not sure how much that will help.

Regardless of ANY of these numbers, performance is flawless.

EDIT: LOOOOOOL!!!! I just unplugged my external monitor and guess what? IDLE TEMPS 39! ON MASTER AND SLAVE!

Video cards = CHECK

AARP, are you sure that it should never hit 9x? It isn't affecting my performance. I think I may be all done!

 

Awesome man...not sure why that particular card still tends to idle a bit on the high side. Sounds like the max temps are fantastic, just that one side for whatever reason is idling a bit higher.

Not sure what DR650 or the others running 6990's idle at.

 

Awww come now. Be the guinea pig.

 

Even if the 6xxx series cards do not work in the R1, you can turn right back around and sell the card.

 

I'm fairly certain it should never hit 9 when plugged in and on high performance. One of the reasons why intel markets the i7 920xm @2.0ghz because 2.0ghz is the base clock. It's not supposed to drop below that unless you're trying to save power.

MY i7 820qm never drops below it's base clock of 1.73ghz (or in my case 2.12ghz) when plugged in and on high performance mode. The i7 920xm should do the same. I'm fairly certain your cpu is throttling. You should run Prime95 in conjuncture with hwinfo32 and see what happens. Watch both the temps and the multipliers. If the temps decrease as the multiplier goes to 9x then you're definitely throttling and performance is being affected even if you can't tell.

 

Idles fine now. Both are idling right now around 40C.

Problem is, the master card heats up when I plug in my external monitor in. Slave stays fine.

I got 150 points higher in 3dmark 11 with no external monitor plugged in.

Any ideas how to deal with this?

 

Hey guys,

I was looking over my HWinfo info (that sounds redundant but you know what I mean), and I see pretty much the same thing on my 920XM that Intense mentioned earlier. At idle a number of my cores will go down to 9 on a regular basis, obviously they fluctuate, but they always drop to 9.

So is this expected behavior? or is something else going on

(I'm plugged in and on high performance)

 

During 3dmark 11 physics testing it stays @ 24x the entire time. I think its just how it works. When I play SC2 it'll drop to different numbers. Skyrim almost never drops below 20x.

Greywolf has the same situation.

I'll try the furmark thing though

 

For the record mine did this with the 4870's installed as well...so I don't "think" its a throttling problem. They'll stay at 24 while gaming, they only drop down when idle.

 

I don't remember if they did it with the 5870's, to be honest. It probably did. If I were throttling, would I be getting such a good 3dmark 11 score? I had throttling problems back in may before I repasted for the first time and it killed all my numbers.

Some games - the cores move around (never dropping below 9x) and others it stays @ 24. Seems like a utilization thing to me.

 

Someone previously on this thead (somewhere in the bowels of this thread) had the same problem. I tried searching back a bit, but wasn't able to find it. Maybe someone will post on what they did or will remember what they did about this.

Or maybe DR650 has some secret search method to pull out all these obscure posts in this mega-long thread. He tends to be able to pull this stuff out of here

 

He's at a wedding. He should be back tonight / tomorrow.

EDIT: Also, it seems there are some discrepancies between hwinfo32 and throttlestop. According to the top number in throttlestop, my CPU never gets below about 1700 mhz. Stays around a 13x multiplier. I honestly have no clue what all of it means and with the exception of reading the temperatures, I have no clue how to work throttlestop. I just know that when I check "Set Multiplier" as Turbo and turn it on, it doesn't actually seem to do anything.

 

Ahh that explains it...I thought he was being awfully quiet

 

It shouldn't drop to 9x. If this is happening on all 920xm's then I guess that's just the way it is, but it doesn't make it correct. I've never experienced this on my 820qm - it is a different cpu, but turbo-boost is turbo-boost and doesn't work differently amongst the two cpu's.

As long as it doesn't happen in games then I wouldn't worry about it too much. I thought IntenseIGFX mentioned it happened in a few games and caused hiccups.

If more people confirm this is happening with their 920xm's it'd be something worthy to ask Intel directly about - because basically the product they are advertizing is not what they are providing. Unless the user has specified otherwise the i7 920xm should never drop below 2.0ghz. That is it's advertized base clock. That is what intel means by advertizing the cpu as 2.0ghz.

The i7 720qm is called an i7 720qm largely due to the fact it's base clock is 1.6ghz and under normal-non power saving conditions, will never drop below that clock.
The i7 820qm is called an i7 820qm largely due to the fact it's base clock is 1.73ghz and under normal-non power saving conditions, will never drop below that clock.

Same goes for the i7 920xm.

So this is either something screwy with HWinfo or something is either wrong with the cpu, or something is wrong with the i7 920xm and 6900 series combo in the R2.

I've been fighting throttling issues with my gpu's that I can't seem to find the source of. Everytime I think I find the problem and fix it, it comes back. At stock clocks and undervolted cores the throttling still exists but is sooo minimal it really can't be detected. (less than 2%). Anything above stock clocks or undervolted cores the throttling increases exponentially. (I'm hoping these new screws might fix it).

Dropping to 9x even at idle looks suspicious to me. Maybe that's the way it is, but I can tell you it isn't like that for me with the 820qm - and that's not the way it should be.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/629574-cpu-cores-keep-changing-even-throttlestop.html

Aside from one odd game of sc2 against the AI, I haven't had any issues. That was also the first game I played with my newly pasted card so it may or may not have anything to do with it.

Hwinfo32 and Throttlestop say different things. According to Throttlestop I never hit lower than about 1700, which is still wrong according to what you're saying (which makes perfect sense).

I will say that the machine DEFINITELY went below 2.0ghz with the old GPUs if that makes any sense. I'd be very interested to figure this out as well.

My cooling pad comes in tomorrow too so that'll be nice. I'm considering repasting the CPU again but with mx4 because it's so much easier to work with. Maybe I didn't use enough IC 7 or maybe I'm just neurotic, but I'm worried about it hitting 85C. It did it once in one massive fight in skyrim with all the settings on ULTRA so maybe it's normal considering it doesn't go past 80 during the physics benchmark portion. I've heard that by just lifting the vents up off the ground, the cooling is considerably better. I want to see what the cooling pad does for me before opening up, since I know my temps are reasonable - I'd just like to drop them if possible. I've read about some people modding their cooling pads to drop the temps 10C consistently? Taking off the grates or something? I assumed the only mods were for aesthetics(lights and reduced sound).

I'd also like to determine why my idle GPU is nearly 20C higher with my external monitor plugged and using extended desktop. Is there a way to fix this or is that just how it is?

I'm posting screenshots of my bios. Maybe these will answer questions.