Alienware 17 R5 GTX 1070 MXM 3.1B

yeah thats the best price anywhere at the moment

 

thailand computer retailers be laughing at you

 

Lol I bet. Thais are extremely resourceful. They make the best makeshift everything. Last time I visited Thailand, I saw some farmers pulling engines out of lawnmowers and putting them in their own handmade tractors.

 

https://www.quora.com/Thailand-What-is-the-significance-of-the-numbers-555-for-Thai-people

 

I put two of em in an old Clevo. Thread link in sig. Old 75W heatsinks designed for 670M/7970M keep them under 90C drawing 110W-120W. Sounds unpossible but its true.

 

So after much deliberation, I decided to get a GTX 1060 since I was able to acquire a used one for $350 from a fellow techie. It's supposed to arrive in the mail on saturday, so I'll let you all know how it goes then!

 

So the card came early, and I'm really happy! It actually came yesterday, so today I popped my new GTX 1060 into my Alien. Now I don't know what's up with everyone else, but the automatic fan control works fine on my system. I also had to use a lot of thermal paste to get around having to mill part of my heatsink away, and I moved the thermal pads around so they would cover all the MOSFETs and VRAM chips. The only problem I have now is that I can't install a driver, and so the screen is also stuck at its maximum brightness setting. HwInfo64 recognizes the card as a Nvidia GTX 1060 however. If anyone could help me get the driver installed so I can take advantage of the card's power, I would be grateful! I tried the INF modding, but the driver is still failing to install.
Some pictures (I know they're crappy. I can never keep my hands completely still, and they keep shaking slightly.):

 

What is your error message?

 

A screenshot from after modding the INF:

 

Did you go into disable driver/whql checking mode?

Also share your modified inf

 

yeah try advanced startup options and disable driver enforcement or something. Next time you post pictures please resize them to a more reasonable size. What phone/camera did you use to take picture? Try to turn on all the lights in the room if possible, help with the noise.

 

Alright thanks guys. I did not know I needed to do this. I used an IPhone 4 to take these pictures. I'll make them attachments next time since like you said, they're taking up a lot of space and they're an eyesore to me too.
I got the driver to install, but this resulted in a black screen. I'm trying to make the screen visible again so I can upload the INF.

Edit: nevermind about the black screen. That went away when I restarted my alien.
Here is my modded INF if it helps anyone else. Your screen will go black after install. Don't panic, it lasts only until you restart the laptop after installation.
I removed all lines except those essential for the installation of the driver.

 

Sooo I launch some games and there was absolutely no increase in performance over my 860M.....
Except for minecraft with HD texturepack and AAA shaders. The framerate about tripled.
I'm not sure why performance didn't improve for anything else. Did I do something wrong while modding the INF, or is this an entirely different issue altogether?

 

are you on ac or battery? Monitor your clock rates

I noticed you used section 337 is there another dell/alienware that uses a 1060 mxm and that section?

 

I'm on AC power and the clocks are as they should be. I just used a random section number, so I'll try with section 317 since there are other dell 1060 cards that use that section.

EDIT: After doing a bit of investigating and reinstalling the driver multiple times, I've noticed I still end up with the same result. Performance is still the same as my old 860M, but through GPU-Z, I think something is power starving the card. I don't think it's my PSU since the 1060 is an 80 watt card. I think it's either a driver or a driver setting issue. The voltage of the card won't surpass 780mV on my Alien while on my desktop card, it goes up to 1.05V.

 

run a benchmark of firestrike and compare it against this

 

This is depressing. My firestrike score for the 1060 was worse than an 860m firestrike score.
By the way, I have the 180 watt PSU. I'm pretty sure this is adequate for the 1060, but what do you guys think?

 

Nope there is definetly something wrong. I think your psu is the problem.

 

What kind of clocks are you looking at in game? What is your gpu usage?

 

Clock speeds in game range from stock 1404MHz to boost 1670MHz depending on the game. GPU usage is always 97-99% in-game. Most of the time the clocks are stock clocks. GPU-Z reports PerfCap on and off as a power limit problem or a utilization problem as you can see in the pic I provide. I have not found any way to raise the power limit target of my card, and it seems this feature is locked on MXM modules.

 

Did you change your drivers? J95 does a good job modifying drivers. If you have that set up then the only other thing that could be going on is power throttling.

 

Yeah I did. I'll look at my BIOS settings and see if there's anything I can change to get rid of the power throttling. I remember another forum member saying he disabled power adapter warnings on his Alien to get rid of the issue.

 

What is your psu rated for?

 

180 watts. EepoSaurus told me he thinks the PSU I have isn't powerful enough, and I agree since my performance on battery is almost exactly the same as on AC power. That reminds me of when I had my 860m in my Alien, because I had noticed the GPU power draw was always capped at 40 watts on battery. Seems like my system is doing the same on AC power because it can't supply enough power to all the components to operate at max throttle anymore. I'll order the 240 watt PSU since that's the only thing left that could be causing the problem. It'll come in handy anyway if I ever decide to upgrade to a 1070, or possibly any later generations if we're lucky enough to still have standard MXM form factor cards that work with our systems at that point.

Thanks for all your help guys! If anyone needs help with software related things, I'll be happy to help ya out!

 

That makes sense my 15" zbook g1 has pulled 230w from the wall with a 200W psu during testing with a zotac 1070 installed

 

The 240 watt PSU arrived in the mail today and fixed all my problems. I'm guessing the card's TDP went over the GPU power allocation based off a 180 watt PSU. Thanks for your tips guys. Now my 1060 is running over 80 degrees Celsius in games though, so I think I'll apply some more thermal paste to the graphics core. I don't think I covered all of it.

 

How would I go about doing that? heat gun until reflow?

 

Exactly! Just add enough flux to the empty pad, put identical model MOSFET on in the correct orientation and use the heat gun on the chips sides with active pads.

 

Heat gun will work but it can be rough in my experience because it has a tendency to wick solder since it blows air. as long as you don't mind cooking the whole card id try a toaster oven. I do it all the time to make heatsinks and it works like a charm. just strip anything that could burn off the card and have an external heat sensor. once your temp reaches about 200f it should reflow no problem.

 

We're not talking reflow here (btw see Louis Rossman's youtube video on baking/"reflowing" chips) but adding a component. Baking the whole card high enough to actually melt the solder is risky as any surface mount component can just fall off...

 

This is my concern as well although Linus was able to fix a 780 card using the baking reflow trick without losing components and my 1070 doesn't have many components on the bottom of it so I might be able to keep that in place during reflow

 

12,338 is my highest 3d mark score, this with optimus on while displaying to an external screen and a mild over clock to the 4700mq to turbo to 3.6 Ghz vs 3.4ghz stock http://www.3dmark.com/fs/13408557

Have you gotten around to flashing the zotac 1060 bios to your old 1060 card? and if so have you tried this combo in your en1070 zbox yet? I ask because the en1070 shows up as having an en1070 mother board in fire strike and I wonder if that motherboard would even accept a zotac 1060 card you might have to flash the en1070 mobo with an en1060 Bios assuming the designation isn't controlled by serial number rather than Bios installed

 

If you're having issues flashing your 1060 with the Zotac vbios you could trade me for the Zotac GTX 1060 I picked up. I'm having trouble flashing it to anything but the Zotac stock vbios, might just be a drop in replacement for an actual zbox though.

 

Check our new GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 MXM3 modules, they are standard size 82x105mm so they fit into any standard MXM 3.0b based laptop. We tested them so far with over 12 of older Clevo MXM 3.0b based laptop and they work perfectly. We provide proper VBIOS and drivers to support them.

 

Did You test that 1070 with Clevo P775DM?

 

Nope, we are unable to modify the heatsink in P7xxDM series to match layout of our GTX 10 series MXM3 82x105mm cards. They use single heatsink for both CPU and GPU. We don't have any issues in supporting them in any other model that uses single GPU heatsink.

 

what about p3000 and p5000 in the new p775tm? it should have a separate heatsink

 

I believe the die location on the newer Clevo's (KM1/TM1/DM3) GPUs are different from the standard mxm 3.0b location but @Eurocom Support knows better than me

 

In that case, I'm starting to seriously consider selling my Clevo. Its modularity is useless.

 

exactly why i've quit the high performance laptop game, standards have gone out the window now that everybody wants to do their own thing.

 

They do not work with 120hz panels the new EURO 1070/1060.

The older MSI ones do though. They also did not work with the 60hz panels either and have had a new vbios created to work for them, reducing power to 90W, performance takes a small hit though, but not much. You need optimus for the EURO 1070 which requires the latest HD intel graphics installed.

 

I just bought the custom CPU Heatsink for my Alienware, made of cooper, and I can see a good improvement over the regular HS.

Here the pictures:

https://imgur.com/a/QOn6x

Thanks to @EepoSaurus for the recommendation of this HS!

 

Yep its a great bolton upgrade.

I need to lap mine though, its no where near flat. I plan to add a couple pipes to it though, see how far I can push the cooling capabilities...

 

I believe the heat sink to be thermally at it's end point. More heatpipes would not in my opinion dissipate more heat. It really comes down to having a weak fan. Even with the current fan upgrades. We really need an unlocked EC. It's a shame really.

 

You can force 7000rpm in HWINFO with the m14xR2 fan but regardless making a switch shouldnt be too much trouble. Its fitting it to the case in a clean way that is problematic.

I think the kensington lock would probably be ideal for where to secure a switch.

 

I have that fan and it is locked at 3400 rpm in hwinfo. If you mean a physical switch then i guess but it seems like too much of a hack job.

 

Odd, 7000rpm shows up on my system.

Im not saying this is a solution though, as the GPU fan does not follow suit. I dont want to test under load since I am not sure if the GPU fan becomes static but works fine for CPU stress testing.

 

My fans show as seperate values. Gpu as 4600 and cpu as 3400.

 

In order yo have the fans to full speed you need to cut the PWM wire on the fan, I did this for the GPU fan and is at maximum speed.

 

I guess that makes my scenario that I am experiencing as an anomaly.