6990M showing up as 6970M

So I've gotten my first Alienware today, my first Windows PC, but I'm concerned I may have been given the wrong video card.

When I go to the Device Manager, it my card shows up as a 6900M series, not as a 6990M. When I ran the free 3Dmark Vantage and 3dmark11-P, both identified my card as the 6970M.

Is there a way, outside of opening the laptop up, of making sure they gave me the right video card? The hardware identifier in the Device Manager should be different, is there a listing of what those are for the 6970Ms and the 6990Ms?

From another 6990M thread I found out that the drivers for the are not up to date on Dell's site (in fact they aren't there at all), but there were recommendations to wait until Dell puts out theirs instead of getting AMD's latest version.

I didn't run any software updates yet, if that makes a difference.

 

It's a 6990M, it's just that the Drivers and other GPU analysis tools haven't registered the 6990M yet. They have the same problem in the M18x forum. If GPU-Z reads 715mhz clock speed and reads 1120 shaders, it's a 6990M.

 

My card shows up in Device Manager as AMD Radeon HD 6970M; my hardware IDs being:

PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_6720&SUBSYS_04BA1028&REV_00
PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_6720&SUBSYS_04BA1028
PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_6720&CC_030000
PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_6720&CC_0300

 

Thanks for the confirmation - and I've got the same hardware ID as you Rickards12, sweet!

 

I'm not sure if that's sweet or not because I do own the 6970M and not the 6990M. I'd download GPU-Z and check out your clock speed and shaders in your position and like ichime suggested. I will reference the 6970M in bold and the 6990M in red:

Clock speed: 680 MHz 715 MHz
Shaders: 960 1120

 

people say that you can actually make a 6970 into a 6990 by opening the cores that amd blocked...........

 

No, the cores are physically cut off unless you have an engineering sample 6970m.

 

yes! the guy has a ES version or something like that?...

 

Engineering Samples of hardware products don't make their way into retail channels, so that's highly unlikely. The GPU's are exactly the same, minus the faster clock speeds in the vBIOS and more cores. It's not the first time that AMD has modified a higher end GPU into two SKU's to make extra coin.

 

It's exactly like this, the cards are the same, only different

Dell will never put an ES in a retail machine, they're not that stupid. AMD wouldn't like this at all.

 

To re-illiterate:

6970M: 960 cores / 680 MHz core clock speed / 900 MHz memory clock speed
6990M: 1120 cores / 715 MHz core clock speed / 900 MHz memory clock speed

Both are made from the Blackcomb GPU, so it's no surprise that a 6990M would show up as a 6970M.

 

I checked out GPU-Z and I was hitting the right numbers for the 6990M (1120/715). Interesting that it's the same hardware ID as the 6970M. Hope Dell releases updated drivers soon though - I'd love to get the most out of the card.

 

I don't believe that dell will release an updated driver anytime soon (or maybe yes.. who knows). If you want to get the most out of the card as you said, install amd reference drivers. The latest whql is the 11.7. The fact that it is reconized as 6970 could be a mistake in the bios so a driver won't fix that (most probably it will be "6900 series" after driver update, anyway)

 

This topic is here...
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m18x/596922-i-have-6990m-cfx-already-but.html