770 card running at half speed .. graphics are bad... need help.

So I've spent over 3 hours troubleshooting the performance of the AW17 with Dell today, we uninstalled and reinstalled drivers, and other things, in the end, the data shows that the card is running at some 420mhz, and there is no fan's running.. Temp never goes over 41C.

Tested with both 3DMark11 and Heaven. We used GPU-Z and confirmed that the car in use is actually the Nvidia and not the Intel.

This seems like a hardware issue, but all the hardware self tests show nothing.

They are dispatching a tech with a new card, but I wonder if any of you geniuses have seen this before and maybe can contribute to my solution?

Thanks in advance.

 

also, as a side note.. whenever I try to run the system maintenance, it does nothing other than update the date last run to the moment in time I pressed the button.

Very odd. It will defragment the drive, etc but the "Start Maintenance" doesn't do anything.

 

This may seem like a really silly question, but I have to ask. This happens while connect to AC power, not running on battery, correct? I ask because once in a while we find someone thinking they can run the discrete graphics at full speed using battery power and doing that's a no-go.

 

The computer is connected to AC and is in "High Performance" the GPU is also set to always be used, no "Auto" modes.

I have had a history with this laptop of power problems, in that it would not recognize the AC power as sufficient, even though it is the correct part. We resolved this once before and the error is no longer occurring

They also updated to the latest firmware today.

This seemed to begin after installing the latest Nvidia driver, but I can't be for sure.

 

wow wow wow... I just realized in the BIOS the Adapter warnings were disabled and this is infact continuing to occ.. I got a warning

"AC power wattage and type cannot be determined" upon reboot.. We maybe onto something here.

 

Fox, you're genius ...


do you know if it's safe to plug in my 300w AW18 adapter into the 17 to test of the ac adapter is bad?

 

I've seen exactly this when there is a PSU detect problem, card will never go to full speed to avoid overload.

From previous people having that error it can be the PSU or simply a loose socket causing the detect line to be dropped. Wiggling it can sometimes show that problem but it's a MB replacement to fix!

 

You should be able to do that. Won't hurt anything. I know of one person that uses their Alienware 18 330W adapter even with their Alienware 14 to avoid having to deal with two AC adapters. They actually discovered that by accident because they left the Alienware 14 AC adapter at home by mistake and used the 330W adapter on a trip and it worked fine. I've heard that there are one or two Alienware 17 overclockers using a 330W AC adapter to make up for the 240W adapter being too weak for heavy 780M overclocking, but I haven't identified who "they" are.

 

it seems to have fixed itself when I unplugged and replugged in the 240W original Power Supply.... but this has now happened on 3 or more occasions.

So this PSU is on the motherboard?

 

I would try PSU 1st.

 

Meeeee I use the 330Watt for my Alienware 17 for heavy overclocking

 

Ok, but with this being intermittent, can they test the PSU if it happens to be working at the time they come? Also is the PSU the power supply unit? Aka power adapter?

 

It could be a weak solder joint to the centre pin at the plug or the brick. If it's intermittent the chip has not been shorted (which can happen since the inner barrel is 19.5v).