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    Just came from Asus G73JH, I'm not new, but new to Alienware- Advice?

    Discussion in 'Alienware 17 and M17x' started by fallen368, Sep 21, 2011.

  1. fallen368

    fallen368 Notebook Guru

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    Hello all. First of all, I would like to extend my gratitude to all of NBR. This site has been great for all my g73jh needs. I just traded my prized toy, along with $220 and my nostromo gamepad for an alienware m17x r2 running dual 5870m's. Pretty sweet deal, but about equal with the upgrades and mods to my g73. Anyway, I've already unparked the cores and just did a trial run of 3dmark06- 14,476? I have read that these will push 18k out of the box. My g73 with its single 5870m pulled 14,4something with the i7-720qm oc'd along with the gpu oc'd. Now I'm running a 740qm and dual 5870m's and am shocked to see that score. It didn't come with restore disks, and the restore partition is gone. I looked at the restore points and found that it had been restored to factory and all aw software and drivers installed 3 days ago. I've sifted through some of the threads in the m17x forum, but the benchmark results are hard to compare to with people running oc and/or an extreme processor. So, is this a normal score? I've been waiting eagerly to get my hands on one of these and I am having a hard time finding "tips and tricks". I have found the driver section. Just need a little peaking and tweaking advice. Anyway, your thoughts and input are greatly appreciated.
    Thank you.
     
    fallen368, Sep 21, 2011
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  2. DR650SE

    DR650SE The Whiskey Barracuda

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    3Dmark06 is bottlenecked by the CPU, Use Vantage for a better idea.
     
    DR650SE, Sep 21, 2011
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  3. SlickDude80

    SlickDude80 Notebook Prophet

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    ya i agree...and 3dmark06 is irrelevant these days anyways.
     
    SlickDude80, Sep 21, 2011
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  4. fallen368

    fallen368 Notebook Guru

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    Installed vantage and ran a benchmark- got 14,780. Looks right in comparison to benchmarks on notebookcheck. I flashed the modded a10 bios with success. I also flashed the modded vbios to both cards with success, but the overdrive option didn't come up in ccc. When I did this on my asus, it came up fine. I followed the guide I found, and flashed from usb. Any ideas as to why? Perhaps I need to reinstall catalyst?
     
    fallen368, Sep 21, 2011
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  5. fallen368

    fallen368 Notebook Guru

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    Ok, so I repasted it with ac5 (I can't afford icd yet, but ac5 is better than stock). Temps a little better, but now score few hundred points lower. HWInfo says my gpus are clocked at 700/1000. Yesterday, before the unlocked vbios, they were 800/1100. Still no overdrive. I'm confused. Any advice? I would like to clock it to a little more, but I'm more interested in getting it done simply cuz I can't, lol. Guess I'm just stubborn.
     
    fallen368, Sep 21, 2011
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  6. bstapley

    bstapley Notebook Consultant

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    Overdrive won't work in a xfire machine unless you get a modded version of the 5870 bios to allow the overdrive feature. See here: M17X-R2 MR 5870 mod to 6870M with OverDrive Support The problem is that once you flash that modded bios, you lose your vga out or have your fans at 100% all the time (depending on which vBios you flash).

    The proper way to flash higher clocks is to use ATI Flash and permanently flash the cards to those clocks. Actually DR650SE's post would be the most helpful guide to do this:

    http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/520773-help-looking-oc-my-xfire-5870s.html#post6739335

    Also another great guide to overclocking can be found here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/476426-m17xr2-overclocking-guide.html

    Hopefully this helps. I was able to get my GPU Vantage score up to almost 19,000 points which is "ok" compared to OC masters like DR650SE ha ha! Best of luck!
     
    bstapley, Sep 21, 2011
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  7. zoolian982

    zoolian982 Notebook Deity

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    DR is op. nuff said.
     
    zoolian982, Sep 21, 2011
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  8. fallen368

    fallen368 Notebook Guru

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    I'm not sure what that means. But thanks.
    To the others in this thread, I used rbe to mod my vbios and I'm back on track. Thanks for the input.
     
    fallen368, Sep 21, 2011
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