Another Defective 6990

Just after a week of use the 6990m in my m17x is dead.

Dell has offered me a new 6990m replacement or a nVidia 580.

I personally don't like nVidia cards. I always find they have to be rubbed the right way to make them work.

What do you guys think i should do, go for another 6990m or get the 580?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...omparison-people-who-have-used-both-only.html

You shall find some answers

 

Once you rub it though, it's better than the 6990(*ducks to avoid amd owners). Plus its a free $600 upgrade assuming dell still charges $1,200 for it.

 

I like it thanks. I don't know what it is but I don't like the Optimus cards.

Apparently if I go with the 580 they will have to swap the MOBO too. The price difference is only about $150 now between the two. (I'm not getting the glasses with the upgrade)

Think I'll give the 6990 another go.

 

I am not sure why you would need to swap motherboards. I didn't need to. The link idle hand posted should explain the pros and cons of both.

I think the 580m may be more reliable, I've heard of a lot of dead 6990s (mine included), but never a 580. But that could be due to a larger 6990 user base.

 

swap mobos? Why?

The 580 is a great card. The only real knock against it (if you don't mind optimus) is the throttling on the 580's. So people have gone to great lengths to try and minmize or remove the throttling with vbios updates etc. The latest official update from dell minimizes the throttling but it does not remove it completely

 

I may just swap it to the 6990 for now and if it breaks again maybe pick up a 7 series down the road.

 

Any idea why it died? What were your temps?

I ask because this is the first post I've seen here for a dead 6990.

 

you read my mind...AMD 7 series will be in my laptop...along with a 2920xm cpu. toys toys toys...

 

No it wasn't the temps at all. And it didn't really die. What would happen is the system would jsut freeze randomly during boot and on the third attempt to get in it would go in but Aero and resolution would get all wonky. (switching to Intel HD fixed it).

Funny thing is, if I ran the system with only 2 sticks of RAM (4 GB) ... it was fine.

Alienware support tech said it is likely the 6990M. Since the RAM and all other slots worked fine.

Will keep you updated.

 

If you run with more sticks of ram you get strange boot and aero issues? That doesn't sound like a vid card problem to me.

 

What I usually do whenever I add extra hardware is do a clean install. I know it's a pain in the butt, but it also helps avoid a few issues related to hardware.

You may want to consider it.

(Take the 580m from Dell man, you won't regret it once you tinker w/ it)

 

This sounds like it's more likely to be an issue with the motherboard...

 

yup my thoughts exactly.

Dell tech support tells him its an issue with his vid card when he puts more ram in and has boot issues...like how does that even sound logical?

 

Because Dell doesn't know how to troubleshoot its easier to replace both and hope one or the other fixes it.

 

i would want the least things switched on my laptop...i wouldn't trust a dell tech to come in and pull apart everything to swap out a mobo if its not required. you're just opening yourself up for more problems

But in this case, i think its the mobo that is the problem anyways, so a swap may be required (given further explanation of symptoms)

 

Out of 1000 dell computers, I wonder how many of them needed motherboard replacements.

 

Well my 6990m did fry.. Wasn't getting detected in the bios so that started my rollercoaster ride In my situation I think there was a bad batch of cards because it seemed people were having the exact same issue right around the same time I was.

I got my replacement yesterday and I am finally at peace lol I am however going to undervolt it just to try to ensure longevity of the card.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/600465-6990m-undervolt-achieved.html for those that haven't seen the post.

 

You'll get more thermal benefit from repasting and repadding the GPU than you will from undervolting, by far.

 

Don't know...normally what i've seen is that they go through bad batches every so often...so everything works great, then suddenly, there is a high failure rate from boards manufactured within a certain date period.

 

even just repasting and reusing the stock pads will bring huge benefit

 

I think I will repaste. Almost about everyone suggestes that.

I dind't upgrade my RAM the 8 GB was stock and the first thing I did when I got the laptop was drop an SSD in there and re-install everything. For about a week it has been working great aside from a few graphics glitches GFX card shut off every now and then and I had to hard boot (I figured it was associated with the RAGE drivers I was using but apparantly not)

Tech should be in today to take a look at it. Will let you know.

From reading a bit into it I understand that GFX cards although they have built in RAM they still will use the RAM in your system for whatever they do.

 

I always repaste and repad my GPUs. The undervolting is just another step to keep temps down.

Even with stock paste and stock speeds, under 99% GPU usage my temps never broke 74 degrees so not that bad really.

 

The quality of the stock paste and pad jobs can vary a lot. My peak GPU temps were around 80 C stock. After a repaste and repad I am at about 72 C on the GPU under sustained 100% load on both the CPU and GPU.

 

All GPU should be repasted as stated above.

As for undervolting, both Technos and my 6990s died, and both were undervolted. We could have had a bad batch, but I can't rule out undervolting as a factor. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

 

Mine wasn't undervolted and it died so I honestly think it was a bad batch. Too coincidental in my book but hey anything is possible lol