Finally a fix for Nvidia Verde drivers BSoD's and freezes in M17x R1?

Relax guys - I remove posts from anyone where the post is a 'oops, wrong thread' and they have gone back and edited their original post - this is done as I come across them as they serve no purpose. I was the one who removed Chris's post.

Dont freak on chris. This guy has helped up quite a bit in both the AW and Dell NBR forums.

 

My apologies to Chris. Batboy is right in that you have done a lot to help us, and as such don't deserve spare of the moment flaming.

This verde driver issue is a problem we've had for a long time without any admitance or support for it from Dell, and since this problem only occurs on the M17x and no other laptops with 260M/280M's it really does point back at Dell. When I saw Chris' name I thought great some feedback... but then I saw "wrong thread"... and after I saw it disappear i got a really stirred.

I wasn't aware that you remove unnessecary post Batboy. I'll keep that in mind next time I see a post go missing.

I still think a potential fix could be to remove the 8x Bus restriction (or let us have an option for 8x or 16x bus) at the same time as the current throttling fix thats in the works. But I guess thats up to Dell.

 

Again, the only time a post is removed is if its,

a duplicate
'content edited and removed by poster'
or a violation of the forum rules

Anyway, no worries.

 

Agree with you on this , Scyphoz. If a final throttling fix will come with the next bios , they should look into this too.

If Dell does this, we R1 owners will finally be able to fully enjoy our machines.

 

I replied before you deleted it BatBoy, but I wasn't trying to flame/troll Chris. Just hoping since we have his attention on the throttling issue we could get some help on this PCIE bus issue as well (or told how wrong we are and it's actually x, which is allievated by turning of PCIE Gen 2 in the BIOS).

 

Hi guys,

Just wanted to post that turning off PCIGen2 in the BIOS has stablized my 17x R1 after living with BSODs and lock ups for months now.
Thanks for the find!!!!
Gaming life is sooooo much better now!

 

So for now it looks like just videos are causing me to lock up. After a weekend of working and playing games, not 1 crash but playing videos it's a hit or miss. I might be able to play 1 or 2 but the 3rd locks up the computer.
This is the most stable the system has been with the 200 series drivers, before it would just randomly crash doing anything.

 

Total with AW single card GTX 260M update from driver P06 to newest driver Nvidia is turn off PCIGen2 ???

 

Yes, the majority of people have found turning off PCIE gen 2 has completely stabilised their systems... There have been couple of people who have experienced the odd crash afterwards but this seems to be more program/situation related.

Give it a go and see how it works for you.

 

Turning off PCI Gen 2.0 coupled with the EC patch from Dell-Chris has made my system a dream. ThrottleStop still runs, but now I'm experimenting with OC'ing the T9600 rather than trying to keep the CPU from throttling plus undervolt (early ideas were the system was actually power starved, since proven otherwise).

 

does this solution work on the R2?

 

I'm not sure, haven't had an R2 to try it on Give it a go and post back whether it helps or not for the R2's.

 

I have a M17X R1 with Q9100 @ 2,26 and GTX280M SLI Graphics and encountered the same problems. Thanks to Scyphoz for pointing out a possible solution.

I see that deaktivating ASPM and PCIE Gen2 seems to be the solution to the freezes. I have to related questions:

1. I would be interested how this influences the performance of the graphic cards. A first benachmark posted in this thread speaks of roughly 10 percent less performance (102 instead of 110 FPS). Are their any further benchmarks available?

2. Does it make a difference to disable Hybrid Graphics? Personally, I didn't notice that in SLI-Mode the additional 9400 causes any additional acceleration. WOuld disabling the 9400 have any positive/negative effect?

 

^^
1. Turning off PCIE Gen2 forces your cards to 8x bandwith and so the nVidia verde drivers won't try to push the system to 16x. I did a few benchmarkings and saw a very small difference ~100points in 3dmark06.

2. The integrated 9400 won't offer you any boost at all, that card can be used in Stealth Mode to save battery life. Disabling it won't have any negative effect.
Personally i don't travel with my m17x and keep both Hybrid Sli and Integrated disabled.

cheers

 

Both are 8 lanes on the M17x, PCIE Gen2 just has twice the throughput on the same number of lanes (i.e. 2GB/s to 4GB/s), so whether it's 8 or 16 lanes, PCIE Gen2 just has twice the throughput. If the M17x does have 16 lanes for the GPUs, and Dell has disabled 8, I'm guessing it's probably some incompatibility with the way they have disabled them and the Verde drivers causing the crashing. Could also be a number of other things.

Would be interesting to see if the other 8 lanes could be enabled though.

 

Guys, I'm not much of a tweaker, but Bulletstorm keeps turning my m17xR1 (SLI 280s) off... and I'm hoping new gfx drivers (I haven't updated in a year) will fix it. This thread is super-complicated, can anyone just tell me what the exact nVidia drivers I should get is... and I'm assuming I should turn off Gen2 in the bios. Is there anything apart from that? Maybe a patch or something?

Many thanks,
Ian

 

Nope. Just grab the latest drivers from Nvidia.com , Turn PCIE Gen2 off in the BIOS and you're good to go. (You can also consider applying the throttling fix here if you have throttling issues)

 

Hi folks,

I ran 3DMark Vantage with everything under Advanced Grafik Disabled (Hybrid, ASPM and PCIE Gen2) and again with PCIE Gen2 enabled.
I ran the test twice each time an here are the results:

PCIE Gen2 disabled, Overall: 11652/11680
PCIE Gen2 enabled, Overall: 11847/11942
So it seems you are loosing roughly a little bit more then 2% of performance. However, if you look into the details, the Score for CPU and Physics remains in all test almost exactly the same. The PCIE-Option (of course) only affects the Graphics score:

PCIE Gen2 disabled, Graphics: 9764.11/9804
PCIE Gen2 enabled, Graphics: 9943.66/10011.72
So again, it' always roughly 2% less performance.

PCIE Gen2 disabled, Jane Nash: 28.07 FPS/28.36 FPS
PCIE Gen2 enabled, Jane Nash: 28.65 FPS/29.75 FPS

PCIE Gen2 disabled, NewCalico: 29.15 FPS/29.1 FPS
PCIE Gen2 enabled, New Calico: 29.68 FPS/29.75 FPS

Conclusion: Disabling PCIE Gen2 limits bandwith and therefore lowers your performance. However, at least under DirectX10 applications, the loss is rougly between 2 to 3 percent. So if your system is not stable, offering less then 3% of performance seems a worthy sacrifice.

Keep in mind that the 3DMark Vantage Test tests DirectX10 performance, so performance lossunder DirectX9 (3DMark2006)might be different.

 

Why would you turn off hybrid graphics? I was under the impression that is what turned on the pair 260m cards I have.

 

Exactly.
..

 

Well, got a hit on a post I made at the nVidia forums about this some time ago; replied to the person with some of the tech details from here.... hopefully Manuel at nVidia could relay it to their techs (M17x R1 chipset is nForce derivative).

Evidently, aside from the false post DELL-Chris made here, we're not going to get anymore attention from Dell. Which is too bad.

 

We did get the EC patch after the A06 BIOS. And that was thanks to Chris for linking our problems with Dell tech team.

 

Can you post a link to the forum page or send it to me in a msg. I would like to check it out

Thats true, while it is nice to have the throttling issue fixed through the EC patch I'm certainly hoping that when we eventually see an A07 for the M17xR1 that it will also have some sort of fix for this verde issue. I do like to dream a bit though

 

260.89 WHQL freezes on gtx 260m sli - NVIDIA Forums

Sorry for brevity, M17 is in bag atm, using iPod Touch

 

It's nice to see there's finally some attention from Nvidia on this issue. Still, i think Dell's the one who can solve this through a BIOS update. Unfortunately , it looks like (and it was always like this) , Dell is only looking forward to sell as many products possible, showing little support to owners. The throttling fix is a miracle, i wonder how they finally managed to do it. If there's anyone on Dell who should get a promotion and deserves his money, it's DELL-Chris, for somewhat opening the engineers' eyes.

 

What is the "EC patch"?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...r1-test-bios-850-9662-post-feedback-here.html

 

The recent A07 BIOS release has pointed me to this thread as I was totally unaware of this issue, mainly as I had tried the PCI-Gen 2 option when I first got my R1 then when it failed, disabled it and thought nothing more.

Will be interested to hear what others find when trying A07 - I'm at work so can't try tests myself until later today.

 

I have been running the latest bios and the P06 dell graphics driver since dell released the P06 driver as I have found all subsequent drivers to make my machine unstable. With staying with this beta driver I found my M17x to crash hardly ever and in its present state I am a very happy with it.

My question to anyone who can answer is; am I going to see any improvement in perfermance by installing the latest verde driver (and now A07 bios) and disabling PCI-gen 2 option or am best to sticking with what I have already got?

 

It depends on what games you play, to be honest. People who are playing games that use DX9 or can be tweaked with SLI profiles (that are available to P06) shouldn't feel the need to go to Verde.

Unfortunately, almost any newer game using DX10/DX11 technology is going to run like crud. Perfect examples are WoW (With DX11 compatibility mode on, using DX9 mode works, but you lose some of the improvements they made to the engine), Civ 5 (again, DX9 mode is available, but it's hideous compared to DX11 mode), and most recently, Dragon Age II (again... has a DX9 mode, but compared to DX11 mode, it's like comparing an Atari 2600 game to a PS3 game....)

I'm currently using the newest Verde drivers (released for the 580 desktop cards) and having a wonderful time playing Dragon Age II on High quality with DX11 on and some small post filtering (2x AA, 2x Anthroscopic, etc).

I was secretly hoping A07 BIOS would address this, but I think we all knew it would just be the official EC fix.

 

I used to play WoW alot noticed small performance issues between using the Dell P06 and a verde release driver. The main improvement I found was in areas with high ground clutter graphics (grasses etc.) where the P06 drivers would appear stuttered (even though the FPS in game stayed solid) whilst the verde drivers would run smoothly.

Other than that, if you planning on getting any new games you probably run into issues based on driver support. I have started playing rift and it used to tell me that I needed to upgrade my video drivers anytime I was usin the P06 drivers. This may become more prominent in other games as time goes by.

 

Does the A07-Bios Update include the EC-Patch? If I understand it correctly, it does.

A07 sets PCI Gen 2 to "Enabled" so don't forget to change it "Disabled" again.

 

Whell, someone uses CE patch?

Which driver is using?

Achieved some good results with A07BIOS

I'm frustrated ...
I used different drivers, never solved my problem of blue screen, crashes ...

Only P06 works perfectly, but it's Beta


My PCI Gen is activated

 

joaoweber, turn PCI Gen2 off. Performance with 2xx.xx drivers is much better then compared to the P06. By disabling PCI Gen2 you loose only little performance but it's more compared to the P06 and it is stable! Until a further Bios-Update by Dell, the solution by Scyphoz is THE way to get a stable system!

 

I do this now, but which driver is better 2xx.xx ? or 'good'

Tanks.

 

Grab the latest 267.24 drivers from here:

NVIDIA DRIVERS 267.24 BETA

 

Just take the latest drivers (I use 266.58).

 

I dont know how to thank you guys enough. I flashed the new a07 bios and I have the latest nvidia drivers. until today, i really wanted to take a hammer to my computer.lol. everyday it would freeze or completely crash.
I have only been running it for a few hours with the pcie gen2 disabled... Its like a brand new computer. The thing is definitely twice as fast now.
Thank you.

My computer
m17x-r1
t9600 processor
8gb ram
dual nvidia 280m gtx

 

Greetings, fellow R1 owners.

I found this forum while trying to figure out WHY it was that my $4K+ laptop was getting pwned by a Toshiba with a single 8700M GT, on relatively easy games.

Long story short, I'm very happy to have found yous guys, and I have bumped up to A07 and the Verde BETA drivers you linked to, Scyphoz. (TYVM, BTW)

I'll post up my results later, after I have some time to tinker with it (PCIE-2 turned off, etc, etc...)

 

Guys Tanks, Really work great for me.

 

I tried these this week and found as with every other nVidia set, that the SATA drivers cause my system to hang after logging in (even with a clean profile) and the HDD light stays on solid. If I rollback the SATA drivers in device manager to the standard MS version dated 2008 iirc, then all is well again.

Does anyone know of a reason for this? I'm not using RAID, AHCI only, it's the 320GB HDD that was supplied, although now I have a 2nd drive though it was happening before I installed that.

 

Just leave the standard Microsoft AHCI controller for your HDD, no need for any other changes.

 

My thanks to Alek123 and Scyphoz and any others who contributed, as turning off PCIE Gen 2 seems to have finally alleviated BSOD's and freezes of one sort or another than have plagued my R1 for more than a year. Dell replaced my system, then replaced my MB, replaced the video card, reformatted and reinstalled the OS, etc. I keep things clean and up-to-date in terms of drivers, but have had the same problem no matter which Nvidia driver I use. Finally I read this post, turn off PCIE Gen 2, and no freezes for several days running in hybrid mode. No noticeable reduction in video capability. My R1 is actually running as I hoped it would when I bought it. I'm sort of waiting for the next shoe to drop, but this fix seems right now to have done the trick.

 

i can say the same thing. i can finally use the new drivers from nvidia without crashing. my games can run better now. although homefront till is laggy, but not AS laggy as before the new drivers. hope it doesn't start crashing again like it used too, so far so good.

 

I would suggest following katalin's advice for now and just use the standard microsoft AHCI driver if its giving you better performance. I run RAID myself so I have never seen this issue occuring.

The drivers I previously posted are the Dell 15.57 drivers with a modified .inf to force it to install the SMBus driver which it previously skipped. Other than that its pretty much the same standard storage manager thats always been there. Fingers crossed one day we get some newer chipset drivers that may fix this issue for you.

 

Hello everyone!
Thank you all for you feedback and support for this fix. I'm glad to see that turning off PCIE Gen 2 is helping you all to finally get stable systems after up to a year or more of crashes (in some cases).

Now we just have to hope Dell gets around to fixing something up so that we can one day turn PCIE gen 2 back on with the latest nVidia drivers. Til then... keep gaming! and enjoy your stable systems!

 

Well, I'm now the owner of a seemingly dead M17x R1 and was wondering if someone could point me to the best BIOS settings to start the resurrection of this thing. The previous owner complained that it would BSOD/Crash/Freeze/etc and that he was sick of it being completely unstable.

I tried taking his original build and wiping off the old nvidia drivers and installing the beta verde ones mentioned earlier in this thread as well as turning off the Gen 2 PCIE stuff, but the system still crashes. I would like to do a fresh install of Win7-64 and get this thing working properly, but I'm not sure of the best process. Here's what I'm thinking.

Set the BIOS (A7) up to restore defaults, then disable discreet graphics (Re-enable after fresh/stable install of Windows) and disable PCIE Gen 2. [No other changes in BIOS?]

Install Windows 7-64 on non-RAIDed SSD with AHCI. [Fingers crossed!]

At this point I'm a bit lost due to the issue being discussed in this thread... Do I get the Dell-supplied chipset drivers, or should I get them elsewhere?

Are there any drivers listed on the Dell page, with the exception of the GPU drivers which I will get direct from Nvidia [Latest Beta Verde?], that I should get elsewhere? Are the ones listed safe to use with the config/setup I've mentioned above?

Sorry for the novel... I am just happy to have found folks who know how to fix this issue. Let me know if you need more information.

THANK YOU in advance!

 

I'm kinda new here, too, 5150. I think you'll find quite a bit of what you're looking for HERE

 

I appreciate the link, but I'm looking to hear if information here supersedes the information on that page.

 

I would definately recommend a fresh install of Windows 7 if you have just gotten the M17x from someone else. At least this way you will be aware of everything that has been installed. Don't bother with the alien respawn disc unless you don't have the windows 7 disc which should have come with the M17x.

Definately update to the A07 bios if you haven't already. I would probably do this after doing a fresh install of windows... just incase the crashes are software related and cause a crash while your flashing I prefer to use a bootable USB drive but it can be done in windows (the windows bios flasher has a tendancy to have periods where it says its not responding... give it some time and it should bounce back). For graphics settings in the bios I have hybrid enabled (personal preference) and PCIE gen 2 and ASPM turned off (ASPM causes crashes when swapping between dedicated and integrated graphics with hybrid enabled). Thats all I change with the bios.

Its up to you if you use AHCI or RAID. I recently read a thread where someones M17x was hanging on windows startup in AHCI mode. In this case the fix seemed to be reverting the the standard windows AHCI driver.

As far as the drivers go you should be able to use all the relevant drivers which are posted on the dell website. For the video drivers just get the latest ones from the nvidia site (either whql or beta, both work good on my M17x).

Good luck! and let us know how it goes. Fingers crossed a good re-format is all you need to get things working well again.