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

Congrats on fixing, lesson learnt here is read all post, take them all into consideration however ridiculous the content may seem to be.
You should have tried the single card config I suggested and the Xfire cable one Turbodtalon suggested ages ago.
Glad it works now though, happy gaming

 

AMD Catalyst 8.95 03 January - BenchmarK3D What do you guys think of this? Apparently it has full support for the mobility cards. What does that mean?

Also, famrer, I had an issue with the PSU too, I had to replace it regardless. I must have skimmed when he had suggested replacing the xfire cable. Even with xfire disabled, I still had miserable performance. Now everything is much better.

 

Cat AI should be at the default setting. If you turn it lower, then it will Disable CFX. Cat AI can in some games reduce artifacts and increase CFX performance if shoved to the max - however it also has the potential to decrease performance and lower image quality if shoved to the max.

Basically leave it at default.

Tessellation doesn't matter. You could do AMD optimized as it will increase your tessellation performance, however I also thing using AMD optimized may decrease the level of tessellation used in a game - best do your research on that one and determine what you'd like.

Tripple buffering is a way of reducing/preventing screen tearing at framerates above 60fps so you don't have to use vysnc. I believe it creates 1-2ms of lag but I might be wrong. Again research it. There's plenty of in-depth analysis's you can find online for all these.

Not sure on the drivers. I'm happy with my 12.1 preview at the moment.

Have you tried using the old PSU now that you've reformatted and changed the CFX cable? Does the problem return with the old PSU?

 

Grats that you have it all working again.

You mentioned that you no longer have the tearing, but what about the screen shaking? Is that still present?

Yeah overdrive had to be activated but disabled (accept T&Cs but then disable it) for my voltage changes to register.

It is working fine now and I am even using it to overclock a little.

So if you are undervolting, just quickly run Furmark and make sure your voltage settings are being applied. You shouldnt have any problems, as I reckon mine are related to having ES cards.

Interesting that you mention that. Perhaps the throttling is related to the MXM slot? I know that I can physically hear my cards when they are getting pushed. Don't know if that is a bad thing or not I know I could hear my 5870's but not as loud as these ones.

 

Since formatting and installing all the drivers my computer keeps trying to go to windows repair every boot and when I try to go to windows normally it won't let me. I have to shut down a few times and then it finally let's me. Last time I did a windows repair it created some stupid issues so I'd like to avoid it. Any ideas how to figure out what's causing the issue?

Also I have no tearing and no shaking. No screen issues. I'll try the old psu once windows repair is done being retarded. The reason I assumed the old psu is bad is because the 5870s would force a shut down running 3dmark 11 and my sc2 performance was greatly diminished even with xfire disabled. I couldn't run the game smoothly on high / medium with one card enabled. It even sometimes slowed down on low. I'll test once I can boot into windows. Trying the old psu can't damage my machine can it?

EDIT: Not sure is the deal with the PSU. They both seem to be working the same. No clue. Also, do any of you guys leave overdrive enabled but just don't touch the clocks?

 

I would just leave Overdrive as is unless you plan to use it to overclock.

Unsure of your windows issue. Sounds a little dodgy but could be a lot of things.

It's not trying to boot from your windows disc is it?

Can you clarify exactly what it is doing? Typically if windows fails to boot it will restart and go to a selection of options (safe mode etc) and from there you can choose to run windows recovery mode.

 

Issue went away. Seems fine now.

 

Hey Intense,

Installed that driver yesterday. Benchmarks are a bit better, and no problems at all with the install.

However I haven't had a chance to play any games or do any serious testing with it, everything seems to be working fine and I'll report if I come across any issues.

 

A bit of reading seems to indicate that it may be an issue with your MBR. If it happens again it may pay to look in to repairing that.

Google will be your friend for that one.

EDIT:: Just a little FYI, Re-pasted my CPU with IC Diamond 24 carat and results are pretty good. At 24x @ 105/95 temps just hit 90 which is quite an improvement considering before I could never push it to 24x without it hitting 100....

Pulled back to 22x @ 95\80 and did a 3Dmark11 run and scored 6411. Experienced no throttling. About to try the new drivers intense mentioned and I will post back.

 

What is MBR? Also, my CPU is pasted with IC7 Diamond 24 because everyone told me the dot method was acceptable for it. I tried spreading it when I used it earlier that week on my GPU's and it was near impossible. I now have MX4 on my GPU's and IC7 Diamond on my CPU. CPU never gets past 80C but I don't use throttlestop.

I'm not sure why my video cards don't work top notch with just default driver settings. After tweaking things around they work much better. I thought that the performance was as good as it was a week ago, but I can't tell. Its much better than it was the other day, but I can't tell if its as good as it was a week ago. Even though my benchmark scores are still the same. This is killing me.

EDIT: After more testing its defenitly not as good as it was a week ago, but better than it was the other day. The other day I could almost do nothing. I could barely play SC2 on low. Now I can play it on Ultra but I still get frame rate slow down (about 45) in large combat. Also, I could play skyrim fluidly on Ultra before. Now I have to play it on High. I'm on 11.10 after trying the driver I posted and 12.1. Not sure what to try. I have to imagine the video cards are working fine if my benchmark scores are fine. Also, my power wattage never goes above 230 or so even in large SC2 combat.

 

Master Boot Record. As I said, Google is your friend.

I think you may be looking in to your performance a little too closely. It will vary all the time depending on a ton of factors.

Are you experiencing significantly better performance than when you ran the 5870's? If yes, then I would call the upgrade a success. Especially if benchmarking tools are indicating that it is performing as it should.

Your CPU is running a little warm if it is stock imo. Nothing to worry about though, unless you plan to overclock.

EDIT:: Hrm, power consumption should be a little higher than that though. Can you play another game like BF3 and check your power consumption with that? That is a good game as it really utilises both cards.

 

I don't have BF3. I'll check some other games out a bit later. Only games I have on my formatted drive are sc2, skyrim, and portal 2.

I'm not comparing my performance to the 5870's, Im comparing it to what I had a week ago. I have no more visual defects, but again in SC2 performance is very important. The 5870's allowed me to play on High settings while never dropping below 60 FPS. The 5870's don't work like that anymore, unfortunately (maybe I'll stick them in and try now that've formatted). If I'm in a medium sized battle my FPS drops. You can't have that happen in SC2. The problem is, if I lower my settings (which I shouldn't have to because a week ago it as fine) then the performance gets worse. Even with xfire disabled the performance isn't that great. I distinctly remember having no slow down whatsoever with my 6990's on ultra in SC2. For whatever reason, that's not the case anymore.

 

So you're saying that it's not working again.

Even though you just indicated a mere handful of posts earlier that everything was fixed after you changed the CFX cable, reformatted, and got a new PSU?

 

It's working better but that was before I played a game of sc2 where we had maxed out armies and before I had skyrim installed. It was working PERIOD as opposed to the other day which wasn't working at all. I assumed everythint was fixed. I'm trying to tweak some settings to get things right.

Just sitting on the desktop my slave card keeps going from 0% to 100% load in GPUZ. I just came out of sleep mode.

EDIT: CPU stays @ 60 max in SC2. Not sure why I said 80. Maybe I was thinking about the GPU's max @ stock voltages.

EDIT: After tweaking some settings I think I got everything pretty good. The gpu stopped going to 100% after about 2 minutes and stayed @ 0. Hopefully this will work okay.

EDIT: Portal 2 works beautifully - just as well as it did in the past. Skyrim works fine on high with xfire disabled - just as well as it used to I assume. (using 12.1 so can't enable xfire). Maybe I was just wrong about SC2 being able to handle as much as I thought it could. Everything runs smoothly until I have a pretty large army against theirs and everything is attacking. I feel like, for whatever reason, Ultra runs SMOOTHER than high. Also, keeping "Texture Filtering Quality" on High Quality makes games run SMOOTHER than it does on Performance. Any idea why that is? I have the GPU's @ stock voltages atm and the temps are fine so I may just leave it that way. I may try to undervolt later and see how it goes, though. Overdrive is enabled but everything is just stock. For whatever reason, Overdrive UNDERVOLTS my cards! In GPUShark with overdrive enabled both cards read 1.02V. With Overdrive DISABLED it reads 1.10V. Is that not the oddest thing? My temps are fine so maybe I'll just keep it like this. With the 1.02V undervolt, overdrive brings it down to 1.0V. Anyone understand this?

EDIT: League of Legends, portal, and skyrim all work perfectly as well as I remember them. Maybe I just didn't ever have the ability to sustain a solid 60 FPS with a maxed out army against another army in SC2 on ultra. I tried on High settings and it still seems like the ultra settings were smoother. odd.

EDIT: What's a good way to test my CPU? I want to make sure its operating properly. What's a good benchmark software / appropriate score for said software?

 

Same as always, vantage and 3D mark 11 will show you where it stands against the competition. A non Oc'ed 920xm should score in the 17000 in vantage if I am not mistaken. Check the M17X-R2 benchmark thread for an answer to these questions.

And I shall google (thanks Douse), overdrive, which I have never used lol

 

Intense, if you want to stress your CPU and monitor your temps run Prime95 (8 thread test) alongside with a temp monitoring application. HWINFO32 will work and even Throttlestop will work running in monitoring mode. I would recommend throttlestop even just for monitoring as it displays a lot of information that HWINFO32 will not.

It is possible that if your CPU is overheating then it will throttle by reducing its clock speed (different to the power throttling we were talking about before), but if you temps dont go over 80 then you shouldn't have any problems.

Doesn't hurt to check though.

Also I think SC2 is a CPU intensive application so if it were to throttle you would notice it in gameplay.

EDIT:: Saw that CPU never goes above 60 in SC so it most probably isnt CPU related.

 

I notice FPS slowdown with maxed army fighting in base. Just running around with a maxed army is fine, but when I start attacking something it slows down to about 40 / 45 FPS down from 60 (vsync). Even on low settings this happens, though it wanted me to reboot the game for all the settings to take effect and I didn't do that. In a game like SC2, I feel its important to never have any slow down that can screw up your micro. I'll try vantage just to make sure my CPU is working properly. All my other games are fine, and hell this may have happened the same in the past with SC2, I'm not sure.

EDIT: http://3dmark.com/3dmv/3809949 My score is 20647. My CPU score is 14909. If its supposed to be 17000, then something is wrong. That benchmark thread is enormous, but when I'm done with getting work done I'll try and sort through it to figure it out.

One of the drivers I'm unable to install is http://www.dell.com/support/drivers...rFileFormats?DriverId=VXDXW&FileId=2731097216 When I try and install it, it says "system does not meet minimum requirements".

 

Just to give you a comparison, I did a Vantage run and scored 22001.

Bear in mind my CPU is overclocked which is shown by the CPU score and pretty much shows the gap in our score.

Also, my cards are slightly clocked.

AMD Radeon HD 6970M / 6990M video card benchmark result - Intel(R) Core(TM) CPU X 920 @ 2.00GHz,Alienware score: P22001 3DMarks

Comparing benchmarks, your set up is performing as expected.

Anyone know why my processor is not being recognised?

EDIT:: Clocked up the CPU a little more and scored 22619 http://3dmark.com/3dmv/3810160! Want to keep pushing it now!

 

Are you using the 5% BIOS OC? Last time I tried that it created a whole slew of problems. Or are you using throttlestop?

 

Nah I dont touch the FSB overclock. I think I may have pushed it a little too far with setFSB when I owned a 720qm and now my RAM doesn't like it any more

This is all using Throttlestop to increase the amount of power that the CPU is allowed to draw (TDP/TDC) and then bumping up the multipliers.

Multiplier overclocking is considered 'safer' then FSB overclocking, but Throttlestop should not be taken lightly as increasing the allowed amount of power the CPU can draw can QUICKLY increase temps.

Also, Throttlestop is pretty much useless in games now that the 6990's eat up all the available power

 

Yea I leave my CPU stock +5% Bios OC. I don't use TS for F@h or gaming. But will use if for everyday activity. With 6990s, if I use throttle stop I'd probably get throttling in games. Havn't tried in a long time, mostly because I never needed it.

Douse, you must have had some bad RAM. I benched my 540M with a FSB of 178MHz or 179MHz, ram held in there strong, but my PLL voltage was the limiting factor which can't be changed without a hard mod. And thats too much trouble.

 

Man, that is impressive. PLL voltage mod?! LOL bugger that!

I could never go above 150MHz when I overclocked the 720qm, and even then it wasn't reliable enough

Yeah I think it is dodgy RAM. I sometimes get beeps on post (computer continues booting fine) which dont actually correspond to any BIOS beep codes, but from my research it indicates bad RAM. Problem is Memtest does not pick up any errors so I have just left it...

Now when I use the 5% overclock my machine is a little unstable so I leave it off.

 

Douse, reboot the system, at post press F12(repeatedly) and choose the fifth option, Diagnostics.

See if it picks something up..

Can you try to run with only one stick and see if you still get the beeps?
Is there any message on the screen when it beeps?

 

Last time I tried the 5% OC, I had problems. Do you think I should try it again? I worry that it caused one of my GPU's to fail.

 

IntenseIGFX, before anything I would create a backup image for your system. But I don't think the 5%OC will damage anything.

 

I will give that a shot now. It is hard to diagnose as it is not persistent and only beeps every now and then. In fact, it hasn't done it for almost a few weeks now

I dont get an error message, but when it beeps I can't use my keyboard during the post period....haha I gave up trying to figure it out a while ago

EDIT:: Katalin, Just did an extended diagnostic test (minus the one where the diagnostic partition was required) and everything checked out. I am happy to leave it as when it beeps it doesn't actually affect anything. If something is flaky it will eventually fail and I can then figure it out much easier.

Intense, if you are relatively happy with your set up than I wouldn't do it. I generally overclock if either a) need better performance, or b) get bored. There are risks associated with any overclock as every system is different. So its cool if you go ahead with it, just there is no 100% guarantee that nothing bad will happen, even though I would say you are 99.99% safe with a 5% FSB clock.

 

What about the extra power draw and heat? I'm happy with this. I think I'll just leave it.

 

I also run everything at stock but with the +5% OC in the bios. Granted I'm also running 6970's, so does give me a little wiggle room with the OC.

I think the highest I've ever seen my kill-a-watt go is 258 during a run of 3dmark11, but in day to day gaming I never see it go above 238 or so.

So I'm happy to leave things just as they are. I tried to use throttlestop with the settings that Cpt was using, but could only get a few runs of 3dmark11 or vantage before it would blue screen.

So thinking I'll leave it just as it is....for now

 

Are you running an undervolt? I'm not. My temps and everything is fine without it and for whatever reason overdrive makes things run smoother, and that disregards the undervolt.

 

Yeah my cards are undervolted to .96. Haven't had any stability problems, but then I don't use overdrive either.

 

Before, Overdrive wasn't even an option in my CCC. Now, however, it is. Even though I leave it @ stock clocks, overdrive seems to make my gaming run smoother. No clue why, or how it works, but it does.

 

I searched around, but couldn't find the answer. I'm installing 2 "Dell Brand" 6970s. Are the clevo bios still the way to go? Or is there more success with something else?

Thanks,
Mak

 

Dell cards will give you fan issues.

 

Yeah, I see that. I'm not too worried about fan issues. I just want to make sure the clevo drivers on the guide are still considered the best ones for dell cards?

 

As far as I'm aware...you probably will still want to flash the dell cards with the Clevo bios. You will still have the fan issues as DR pointed out regardless of the bios, BUT the Clevo bios should resolve the hibernate/sleep/shutdown issues that have been reported with the Dell cards.

 

Thanks guys. Wish me luck

 

nope, new 12.1 preview drivers working the best for me.
if you mean bios then yes. having the dell bios will cause major power issues.

 

Good luck Makwu!

 

So...no luck. I can boot into safe mode just fine. But when I boot into normal mode, computer shuts off almost immediately. Any ideas?

EDIT: SO, very strange. If I go into safemode, dell ati drivers, reboot, i can get into regular mode no problem. Screen res is off, obviously. Device manager sees both cards, fans on both cards are running. Everything seems fine. As soon as I install ccc and drivers, crashes in startup every time. Either right before I enter my password, or right afterwords. Known issue?

 

Sounds like bad cards to me.

 

Sounds reasonable. Ideas to try before I come to that conclusion?

 

Yes. Install an ATI preview driver. When it prompts you, tell it to install anyway. That is the only way I got my old Dell brand 6990 to work.

 

Sigh. Think my monitor just died on me. I moved card 1 over to slot 0, planning on reflashing it, to see if maybe one of the cards worked. But screen never came on. Put only old card 0 back in slot 0, still no screen. Put old 5870 back in, still no screen. Get beep error for no power supply, all fans run. CPU fan speeds up a bit around the time it should be loading windows.

 

Hmm..do you have an external monitor or TV that you can plug into? Also what driver version where you using when the system powered off immediately.

Would definitely be worth reseating the cards/cables etc, make sure everything is plugged in completely...nothing shorting, etc

One other question..when you installed the cards did you make sure the battery was removed, power cable not attached etc? Just making sure that there isn't a possibility that some sort of electrical surge didnt' cause a motherboard/video card problem.

Hope you can sort it out.

 

Was running 11.9. Battery was not attached, unplugged. I did realize I forgot to remove the battery when I was frustrated and going back to the 5870, but problem was already there. I don't actually have an external monitor here. Might be able to borrow one though.

 

One other thought...you could try unplugging, taking out the battery, hold the power button down for about 30 seconds. Then unplug the cell battery (which will reset your bios)...leave it unplugged for about 30 seconds or so, then plug it back in, put the battery in, plug it back into the wall and see if it powers up.

 

tried that first thing. no love

Whoa. Some craziness. Screen booted this time for no apparent reason (I have card 0 in slot 1, card 1 in slot zero, so need to reflashed). The usb loads millennium boot from the usb, but everything is off. Says "emergency boow//. Instead of B:/, it says B;\> and none of the keys from the keyboard match up, seems like random output. But get this, depsite all the types, I still works. For example, keys for "atiflash" outputs on the screen aweflash. Yet ,if i submit that, it flahses the card and tells me at the end "Reswart Sysuem to Complete VBIOS Update" In all my years of computers, never seen something like that.

Added: Loaded windows welcome screen with significant screen artifacts. Shut off again when I pressed enter. This time was with Catalyst 12.1.

 

Makwu, try your cards WITHOUT the Clevo VBIOS, and install ATI preview drivers that force themselves to install. I had the Dell 6990, and that is the only way I got it to work.

 

I'll give that a try...if somebody has the Dell 6970 0 and 1 bios. Mine already had clevo installed i believe.

Found it: Here for anybody who finds this on accident via search:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m18x/584140-6970m-vbios-m18x.html

Update: Flashed to Dell bios, first card works so far, but overheats super quickly (I assume that is the fan issue referred to). I'm looking into the fix, but if somebody wants to point me in the direction while I look, it would be appreciated.

 

It should not overheat unless your running 3D applications.

You should use HWINFO32 for monitoring, and you can also use it to control your fans based on temps.

Would be nice to have more variables but this is all we have atm. See screenie for my settings... Your thresholds will depend on if you have a second monitor attached as this increases clocks (and in turn, the temps) of the primary card which will mess with your idle fan speed.

Yes the fans run a little higher then I would like, but I have found it is better this way otherwise they go up and down all the time.