Latest Drivers Checklist for the M17x-R2 with HD5870 (September 2010) incl. VBIOS Flash Guide

Yea all setup and running... now just waiting for dell to send me my 2nd 5870m so i can open this baby up, do the retention mod all at once on both gpus... and close her back up and begin benching .. and games of course

 

Hey Jstar, glad you could get your system swapped as well quite an improvement to be honest

Regarding my flickering problem, it is a pain in the butt!
I've tried v-sync on/v-sync off, triple B on/ triple B off and even A.I on/A.I off but I always get either tearing or flickering.
Are you guys running games like L4D2 or BBC2 with no eye straining?
Thanks

Mike.

Edit: Are you running the Dell 8.763 or the latest ATI drivers (8.782)?

Edit 2: Ah well, easy fix. Stopped running GPU-Z in the background.

 

I love the welcome screen changer
Bump

 

Has anything in this thread changed since it was created? I should be recieving my new M17x in a day or two. I basically plan on doing a clean install of windows then following the list down as soon as I get it.

 

Still up-to-date from dells view. There are newer drivers for chipset, ethernet, wlan from intel and newer gpu drivers from AMD. You could also get those, but i havent setup a fresh installation in a while. I can recommend the latest intel wlan driver you find on Station-Drivers: le site de drivers, bios, firmwares avec un forum d'aide, as the one from dell had some minor dpc latency spikes every 5 sec. There might be also newer bluetooth drivers. But newer isn't always better, though i don't know for sure.

 

Hey Grim - have you added the updated drivers to the original thread post? Its probably a good idea to add them with a date stamp so people know they have been updated - I usually check this thread regulary and I would imagine a lot of other people in the community do to keep their systems uptodate.

 

Timestamp: September 2010

Also no need for timestamps directly, would be a better idea to orient oneself to the revision/build version and see if you find something newer from the main manufacturers. Though you never know what dell has modified on given drivers which can give incompatibility issues.

And no, i won't update this topic again. When new drivers arrive (from dell), someone normally creates a thread for just the new driver, whatever it may be. As i said before, there are newer drivers for some components available, but since they are not directly from dell, this is kind of unsupported material, it may or may not work better. What you have in here comes directly from dell, which you can also find on their support site. For everything else, i don't want to give out support or instructions, as results may vary from person to person. Of course if dell decides to update atleast 3 drivers again, it may be time to provide a full checklist again for the respective month, without the flash guide then, as i will assume that you already did that step.

That said, these are still the latest official supported drivers dell has released and with these you should be good to go.

 

that's what I suggested earlier but the op seem to feel that it is not necessary. either way, most of the drivers here are outdated anyway, they appear to be Dell's latest but if they are not manufacturer's newest drivers. depending on your preference, I myself prefer latest and greatest. keeps my M17x on the edge

 

Not every user that comes here, is registered and as tech-knowledged as you, me and that other guy no one knows who he is...

I also prefer all the latest, but if you want to solve issues on this forum, no one really wants to give support for all the different unknown drivers you may have installed from some other place, which may give unexpected issues. Also, there would be specific topics for each drivers anyway to discuss on their behaviour. What i know is that the system runs very nicely with the drivers provided by dell. For everything else i appeal to everyones own capabilities, research and find out how the drivers run.

Feel free to create a new topic with innofficial drivers and stuff you might find important for other people to stay up-to-date. I couldn't change the topics timestamp (September2010) anyway

 

Guys, i gave an honest answer with a reasonable explanation, if you can't accept that, well your problem... If you think you are smart enough to provide the releated information by yourself, then do so, create your own thread/list, but please stop crying about something i'm not obliged to do. It's not very nice to indirectly offend and not respecting someone else's oppinion on how people do things on the internet or communicate with each others. Also if you can't see my smiley emotions, on that i was not harsh in my answers, then please try to think for yourself on what you may not have understood from my replies... Please, Thanks!

 

Going to agree with Grim on this. There also have been numerous posts by the AW folks mentioning that they will not support problem reports if using non-dell issued drivers.

Regardless, nobody should be giving Grim grief over his driver list. He takes the time to maintain it and thats enough for me.

Please remember the forum rules:

Thanks everyone.

 

Grim, I still love you

Batboy, you are the Mod of all Mods, you keep our Threads sweeky clean

 

Thanks, but its a team effort - I have quite a bit of help from members and the rest of the mod team. Believe me, I'm not the only mod who monitors Alienware.

 

I have to agree also, Grim has taken his own time and effort to compile a list to help everyone. Its a great guide to get your system fully working with the latest DELL stuff and i dont think was ever intended to be anything other than that. If people wish to install non dell drivers, then thats up to them...but, for alot of people, its a great starting point to getting their system bang up to date and working as it should.

Full marks Grim, top man.

 

This thread is really useful for all of us and Grim himself has been very cooperative. When u have such a nice guide to install every thing from scratch in a proper order, i dont think there is any need to install other drivers apart from Dell's.
So far my system is working top notch be it games, full HD movies etc. I think people should simply follow the guide on the first page and see the difference it makes. I just hope Dell releases new display drivers to make use of some new games.

 

After a fresh install, you can easiliy uninstall the Dell GPU drivers, get the latest AMD Mobility and App Profiles and there is your support for the latest games, if they got support from AMD anyway. Also a direct install of AMD GPU drivers is possible, if you already have the new VBIOS installed.

Cheers

 

Oh So the new AMD drivers work well if i have the latest vbios?
Are there any compatibility issues?
How should i go about the installation? I mean what softwares should i use to uninstall the dell GPU drivers and install latest AMD drivers?
One more thing, i am having great trouble enabling AA in the new NFS Hot Pursuit from ATI CCC and forcing it. Nothing seem to work. Surprisingly and sadly there is no AA settings within the game. What can i do to make it work as i have tried all settings to the max but had no luck.

 

Yes they do. The only compatiblity issue you will probably see, is on bad coded games or yet unsupported games from AMD's side.

No major Windows issues (only those you can read from Known issues from the Release notes itself).

Since i always refer to a fresh install in this thread, i assume you did that, without updating and updating from earlier factory install. So if you made fresh windows install, installed Dell GPU Drivers, just uninstall via Programs (Express Uninstall), Restart and then Install the AMD drivers.

About AA in CCC, if you don't have ingame AA settings, you can't force them via CCC, that's for Dell drivers. It should work to force AA via CCC on AMD reference drivers, when AA is set ingame to off or not available from my experience. Cheers

 

Thanks Grim. Will get on with it

 

By the way, since i have not installed AMD video drivers before. Do i have to install the Desktop or Mobility Radeon video drivers?
Under Mobility Radeon drivers there is Catalyst control center 70.1 MB, Revision 10.11 and Catalyst Software Suite, 1.1 MB, revision 10.11
So which one of these is to be installed?

 

I already bundled 2 packs with everything we can use from AMD for 10.11 (unmodded, just put everything together as is):

Basic ATI Mobility Catalyst 10.11 Package, which includes:
ATI Display driver and HDMI Audio driver, ATI Install Manager, Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable 2010, Application Profiles and Catalyst Command Center, it's 10.11/Windows 7/64-Bit.

Catalyst Mobility 10.11 "Basic Care" *.exe (Sendspace) | *.exe (zippyshare)
Catalyst Mobility 10.11 "Basic Care" *.zip (Sendspace) | *.zip (zippyshare)



Complete 10.11 ATI/AMD Mobility driver package including original ATI Display driver, OpenCL driver (ATIStream), HDMI Audio driver and WMV-Decoder.
Software includes ATI Install Manager, Avivo Video Converter, Hydravision, Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable 2010, Application Profiles and Catalyst Command Center, everything 10.11/Windows 7/64-Bit.

Catalyst Mobility 10.11 "Complete Care" *.exe (Sendspace) | *.exe (zippyshare)
Catalyst Mobility 10.11 "Complete Care" *.zip (Sendspace) | *.zip (zippyshare)



Copied from this thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/534022-10-11-drivers-now-out.html

PS: We can use the Mobility ones without any mods, or modded desktop ones, whatever you prefer. 10.10e is also a pretty nice driver (actually newer than 10.11).

 

Hey everyone. I am trying to flash my Mobility Radeons 5870s on my MX17 R2. But when I run the downloaded bios thingiemabober i get this:

[/URL][/IMG]

It says: The following VBIOS update is intended only for the following video card: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870. The update cannot be performed on this system.

Thanks in advance would really like to flash the vbios as i am having issues.

 

You need to install the Dell drivers first. I am guessing you are using some of the ATI ones (10.10's or 10.11's). You may be able to get it to work with some sort of regustry or INF hack too, but I didn't even try it that way.

I had to switch just to do the update, then switch back to the drivers that I liked better.

 

How are the new 10.12 drivers? Can any one provide link for basic and complete package please.

 

I dont think anyone has put a package together for the 10.12's yet afaik....Grim took his own time to prepare the above ones but havent seen anyone post this kinda thing for 10.12 yet....

 

Is this thread still relevant as in being the thread with a collection of the latest drivers for the M17x R2?

I will be receiving my new R2 today sometime and I'm looking to install a SSD and format and reinstall everything from scratch so I'd like the latest info.

THanks

 

Well, I know that 11.1 version drivers will be coming out soon

Press Release:
The latest Catalyst Hot-Fix; (11.1a) offers increased performance brings a slew of new features and should be the driver used for any performance testing. Below are a few of the highlights from this driver:

Performance improvements for the AMD Radeon HD 6800 & HD 6900 series include but not limited to:

AMD Radeon HD 6900 and AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series:

* ·3DMark Vantage improves ~7%

* ·3DMark06 improves ~3%

* ·Call of Duty Black Ops improves ~20% at 4xMSAA and up to 35% at 8xMSAA

* ·Riddick Assault on Dark Athena SSAO performance improves ~20%

* ·Unigine Heaven OpenGL performance improves ~10% at moderate, 30% at normal and 100% at extreme tessellation levels

* ·Aliens vs. Predators improves ~9% at 2xMSAA and up to 20% at 4xMSAA

* ·Batman Arkham Asylum improves ~4%

* ·Crysis Warhead improves ~2-4%

* ·Metro 2033 improves ~28% at 4xMSAA

· The Catalyst Control Center includes an early prototype of some new tessellation controls. Our goal is to give users full control over the tessellation levels used in applications. The default selection "AMD Optimized" setting allows AMD, on a per application basis, to set the best level of tessellation. The intention is to help users get the maximum visual benefit of Tessellation, while minimizing the impact on performance. Currently no applications have been profiled, so the "AMD Optimized" setting will be non-operational until further notice.

· The "Use Application Settings" option gives applications full control over the Tessellation level. Users can also manually set the maximum tessellation level used by applications with the slider control

· The long term goal for the "AMD Optimized" setting is to use the Catalyst Application Profile mechanism to control the AMD recommended level of tessellation on a per application basis. AMD’s intention is to set the tessellation level such that we will not be reducing image quality in any way that would negatively impact the gaming experience.

Hopefully these will work well with our systems.
I am still on the 10.11 as 10.12 gave me some bsod issues

D.

 

I too was having sleep related BSOD's with 10.12 even with the official vbios. I found that if I altered a few things, this went away .... lots of use are still experiencing issues with AMD drivers, this i know for sure. Mayeb check out my thread about how to resolve a few issues when running AMD drivers. I cant promise anything but I have had a few people report success in avoiding BSOD by doing what I have done.

Personally, i am on 10.10e modded desktop drivers that i got via guru3d (asder) and havent had a single bsod so far and get the added benefit of MLAA too....it was nice to see the new CCC via Jokers uploaded file but i couldnt live with the chance that the system would just crash for no reason - so i ditched 'em

Take a look:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...-issues-when-using-reference-amd-drivers.html

Hope it helps, if not, nothing lost eh?

 

Hi Grimfan,

I made a Critical problem with my AlienWare M17 R2 same you have.
By mistake i erased the hidden partition (100 MB) Reserved OME i think

and without it i can't recover my Laptop to Original OS.

Any helpful Ideas.

 

You can reinstall windows from scratch, install all the drivers. Then you can make an image of the OS and have your own recovery disk/partition. I sugest the use of Acronis True Image for this purpose, but there are several softwares that will do it and much better than the Alienware Respawn that come with our systems.

 

Thanks CPtXabaras,

But you know what, i liked alienware pin photo appear when you go to properties of My computer, which came with original OS, i couldn't make it appear again ??? beside i feel after installed WIN 7 Ultimate my Alienware stuck many times .. just freez without any response till i shutdown from power button. strange ?

 

If you have made recovery discs (when you bought/got the laptop) before you did anything to it, its simple. Just use those and it will restore your "WHOLE" system to "out of box" state including any partitions on your hard drive. Will revert to how it was when you unpacked it all.....including OS.

If you didnt create this media at the outset, and you only have the AW OS disc, all you will be able to do is perform a clean install.

If you want to "customise" your system again to get that "Alienware" look to everything instead of MS Windows, just follow this:

Alienware Wallpapers - A01 (Windows Wallpapers)
Drivers and Downloads
Custom Desktop Themes - A-02 Alienguise Theme Combo-Win7 (Windows 7 Skin)
Drivers and Downloads

To change your Login Screen, use this application and one of the included wallpapers above or any you like:

Windows 7 Logon Background Changer
Windows 7 Logon Background Changer - Customize your Windows 7 welcome screen wallpaper

All on Grims first post at the start of this thread - that should give you the Alienware "look and feel" back on a clean install.

Hope that helps!

 

if your system freeze or is unstable i sugest you to have a look at this thread. If you follow the instruction on it you will have an out of the factory clean install on your machine.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...d-your-m17x-r2-full-detailed-description.html

 

Correct. But you will ONLY be able to get the recovery partition / OEM back (if you deleted them) with recovery media that you created. Installing a clean OS using the OS disc that shipped with your system will NOT reinstall your recovery partition IF you have already deleted it.

 

were there any new updates to the drivers since this thread was created? just checking.

 

Go to support.dell.com, hit drivers and download, enter service tag number and u'll have the latest drivers for ur lap.
Remember to install them in a proper order.

 

hmm i ran into an error, i clicked the setup icon from c:drive/dell/drivers/ r281544 and i get an error that says: ""This VBIOS update can is only intended for the following video card: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 The update cannot be performed on this system.""

lol, i know for a fact i have dual 5870's. ...any suggestions?

 

Without me reading this whole thread again, I seem to recall that this problem may have been covered in here already somewhere......I know I have seen it before but just cant recall where! - think its here on this thread or could be on this one http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...5870-gpus-5870-vbios-discussion-non-beta.html

 

k i found it, thanks man

 

No worries - I knew it was there somewhere

 

when i try to install the vbios to a usb.....the application does not agree dat i have an ati radeon 5870...any other way to flash the vbios

 

^^ I'm assuming that you are trying to flash the Dell Bios? If so you need to be using the Dell driver first...then you can update the BIOS. See http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/519439-17xr1-r2-dell-8-763-driver-4870-5870-gpus-5870-vbios-discussion-non-beta.html for reference.

Also, if that fails, you can also perform the BIOS update using the advanced USB method located on this post:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/519439-17xr1-r2-dell-8-763-driver-4870-5870-gpus-5870-vbios-discussion-non-beta-66.html#post7511609

I ended up having to use the 2nd USB method because I was getting the error saying that I didn't have the 5870's installed. It then allowed me to flash the BIOS as normal. Hopefully this helps!

 

Hi,
I'm waiting now for my R2 CF5870m. The first thing I'm going to do is the clean install of Win7.
I've noticed that drivers on the dell website are pretty old. I'm going to to download the newest I find in internet but don't know what to do with gpu driver and vbios. Should I first install vbios (which one?) and then drivers (for example 11.8)?
It's my first CF system so sorry for noob's question.

 

Check first if the new vBIOS is not already flashed.
You can check that with GPU-Z.

 

ok
if not I should flash vbios to the newest one before clean intsall ?

Is there any problem to install newest gpu drivers directly from AMD website with non-modded A10 bios.
those from dell website are 1 year old!.

 

Flashing the vBIOS doesn't have anything to do with the Windows install, Do it (if you still need) whenever you want, before or after.

As for the drivers see wichones work best, definitely don't keep the Dell ones.

Cheers

 

Guys i need some help. Am i missing some thing here? Is there a new Vbios out on Dell web site? GPU-Z says my graphics bios version is 012.020.000.027.037640
I have always followed the correct method of uninstalling old drivers and installing new ones. But today after i completely removed AMD 11.10 drivers and installed the new 11.11 version, for the first time i got a BSOD upon reboot right at the log on screen.

Only safe mode would work and i coudnt even uninstall these drivers from safe mode so had to use driver sweeper to get rid of it. Only after this i was able to log in through normal windows start up.
One things for sure that it was a driver related problem. My ccc has become a mess now, AMD ccc still shows up under program and features but its useless.

System restore was showing some useful restore points where i thought i can go back to a previous good config but unfortunately those restore points are no longer there after i attempted a windows repair.
Can some one please tell me what have i done wrong and what shud i do to solve this issue.

 

11.11 was a fail on AMDs part when it came to crossfire setups. Stick with 11.10

 

But did you install 11.11 drivers? Is any one having problems with it? Please let me know bcoz i am getting BSOD after i install 11.11 drivers. Whats even weird is i am getting BSOD when uninstalling 11.10 drivers. This all started happening when i tried to install 11.11 . Has there been any updates to the vbios or other components? I have posted my problem in brief in my previous post.

 

No I didn't, and everyone with a crossfire system is having issues with it. Don't waste your time with it. There has been no vbios update or anything.