Alienware m17x r2 with (M6100) HD 8950

Greetings gentlemen
I come to share my experience updating the GPU of my old M17x R2 to an amd firepro M6100 (HD 8950), a decent card.

When installing it, the first thing I noticed was that it heated up to 90 ° C, in short tests please note that the heatsink did not make perfect contact, use the M18xR2, from Nvidia 100 watt 3-pipe, so I took a small 1.5MM copper box, after that temperatures don't exceed 75c.

After a short time, I realized that the stress tests passed successfully, however I ran into an annoying problem, I am unable to browse certain pages, or play MKV format videos because the PC crashes completely. .. When entering safe mode, if you do ... reinstall the drivers and I've done almost everything and still haven't solved the problem.

Update the laptop's BIOS to a modified one with 100 watts tdp and 1120hetz cpu clocks, 1650 memory. For now stable, I have been using it for several days now, the GPU Z indicates that it is working for PCIe 8x 2.0. know why ,.

Any ideas as to why I am having the problem when playing videos? A help would be nice! Thank you!

I have attached the overclock Bios that I found from a user of this forum, the bios stock is the one with the name saturn and the overclok 1120m61001650

 

x8 2.0 is because the laptop only supports PCIE 2.0 for the MXM slot, with the other x8 going to the other MXM slot. I don't know of any way to reroute this or if you even can.

As for MKV videos and the like, maybe check windows crash logs or something or other? might be a good start.

 

the computer crashes completely, it does not give a blue screen, I have a certain idea of what causes the problem but everything points to what the drivers are.
I forgot to mention that the brightness control is broken

 

I come back with another news I was able to solve the problem, deactivating the acceleration for hadware in the browser and the player in my case VLC pleyer, now I can use this update fully: 3.

 

Good job. Have you tried running it in Crossfire ?

 

Crossfire is useless, even if you could get it to work lol

 

I would need another card for it, I don't have it: c maybe in the future I will try

 

This doesn't sound like a solution. All you did was remove the load from the GPU to CPU.

Meaning, there is still some issue...Can you play games or run benchmark fine?



Regarding M18xR2 heatsink...is it plug n play in the M17xR2? I have an extra one laying around.

 

if true it really is not a complete solution benchmarks can be obtained without problems and games are going great for me no problem to date the heatsink of the m18x r2 does not fit perfectly on the m17x r2 it excels on the In the back, I had to grab a dremel and blow up the back of the laptop and the screw near the screen, but I think the stock heatsink would be enough although they should get the same set of X brakerts from the HD 8970m suppose a little foil copper 1.5 to 2 mm

 

Don't bother with trying to get this card to work in crossfire on this machine and I've tried multiple times including two with the connector. Something to do with the bios where only one card will work with an error on post, also doesn't work when trying the firepro m6000 resulting in the same message. Dropped the same cards in the m18x r2 and they worked without issue.

The crash from what I've read online is that it is driver related with the audio.

 

It could also depend on the codec of the video. MKV is just a container. If the video is encoded in HEVC, M6100 cannot decode this video and it will freak the system out.