Alienware M17x R2 680m upgrade issues, please help

All right people, I really really need your help here. I bought a 680m upgrade kit for my R2 from Eurocom via Ebay and I have had nothing but problems with the upgrade.

The first kit installed very easily and I used all the tutorials and instructions I could find and was extremely careful as I installed the card. The card seemed to work perfectly fine for several hours during typical usage. Then I put the card under a small load with the first Borderlands game and the screen went red and the machine no longer was able to POST. I put the original 4870 card back in the machine reinstalled windows and the machine ran fine. I discussed the issue with Eurocom and they were happy to RMA the card.

The second card installed easily and I was double careful this time. For both cards I used HWinfo64 to manage the fan speeds. But, even with this card the problem occurred again. The machine worked fine for several hours and then stopped POSTing. As with the previous situation the original 4870 resolved the issue.

I'm practically at the end of my rope with this upgrade. Have there been a large amount of failures with these cards?

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

There is a small chance that the extreme CPU and the GPU together are drawing out too much energy under load. Same with the AMD cards; Crossfire only works with normal CPUs, not extreme CPUs due to power constraints. If you can find a way to swap the CPU to a lesser version, I would go that route. Otherwise you need to search the forum for someone to send you their vbios that they have tested stable.

 

Thanks for your suggestion, however neither Eurocom or I feel that this is a factor. Apparently a lot of these cards have been shipped to people with the same specs as mine and they have not had any issues. Anybody else have ideas? Really need assistance here.

 

I highly doubt that the CPU and single GPU are causing a problem for a 240w PSU. I had that problem when I tried to crossfire with another 6970M a while back.

The card might just be dead. Tis what it sounds like.

 

Here, check out this thread

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/681481-will-2gb-4gb-680m-work-m17x-r2.html

 

Yes, I have seen that thread and that was what convinced me to go ahead and do the upgrade. Its very likely that I do have a faulty card and so far this is the second in a row that has failed in the exact same way within hours of installation. I was using the HWinfo64 rather than HWInfo32 (is there a difference that could be a negative?) and the cards never went over 70 degrees before failing. I'm at a loss. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Bump for more assistance.

 

And what finally happens did you make it works the sli?