M17x R1 Stable drivers for GTX260m sli?!?

Hey guys had my M17x for like a year or so and it has been hell tbh, endless driver crashes and blue screens iv never had so meny problems with a laptop!

Now what i wanted to ask is does anyone know what the best / most stable drivers are for the duel SLI GeForce GTX 260m with the internal GeForce 9400? All i want is stability is that to much to ask xD!? With alienware it looks like it may well be...

Oh also the right directional arrow on my keyboard randomly stopped working :S, any ideas?

 

What video drivers are you running now? Do you normally run with external devices attached? If so...what are they? Do you have PCIEgen2 disabled in BIOS? Are you running overclocks on either CPU or GPUs? This has been discussed sooooo many times and there is no one solution that works for everybody...need more input!

 

Hello, raidouk, here's the path to stability:

-Uninstall your current video drivers thru Control Panel.
-Reboot in Safe Mode with networking and clean your registries with CCleaner, i said 'with networking so you can download the latest nVIDIA drivers at the same time.
Reboot and press F2 to access BIOS menu.
-Here go to Advanced > Graphic Settings > and Disable PCIe Gen2 and ASPM (L0s/L1)
-Save and exit.
-When in Windows, install previously downloaded drivers, choosing clean install, also uncheck the 3D stuff if you don't use it.
-Reboot when prompted and that's it.

Can you give us more input about your keyboard key? is it physically damaged ?

 

Disable PCIe Gen2 and ASPM? Seriously I've been going through all this freezing hell and thats the easy fix?

 

Just do it
Explanation: disabling PCIe Gen2 will force your cards @8x bandwidth, these systems including the M17x R2 run at 8x anyway. But the nVIDIA drivers tend to 'push' the cards past that if the option is enabled giving you an insignificant gain at a loss.
Disable it and have a happy life.


Cheers

 

Thank you for the tip... The system even feels faster... Now lets see how overclocking works in the new A07 BIOS. SUCKED in A03!

 

No problem, Etherm, glad t see you up and running
I found A03 to be a great BIOS. But you'll be happy with A07, it solves the touchpad polling rate issue, not that i ever use it

 

M17X is locked at 8 lanes by default, even in Gen 2.0 mode (effectively the same a Gen 1 x 16 lanes). Gen 2.0 doubles the data bandwidth per lane (i.e. 250MB/s to 500MB/s), so disabling it is puts you at 2GB/s instead of 4GB/s (16 lanes x gen 2 is 8GB/s).

Disabling it really hurt me in The Witcher 2, so I'm just sticking with the occasional crashes now

 

Touchpad polling rate issue? LMAO there are issues I had no idea about haha.

So far no crashes and the system seems a LOT cooler even running hybrid SLi!

 

Wow. Unigine suffers about a 25% loss with PCIe Gen 2 turned off. That sucks. I guess I'll have to see how things play out with my actual games.

 

Hey thanks for the response! I am like mid way though following this right now, just tried to install the 285.38 drivers as i need them for BF3, the problem with the 285.38 and 285.27 is the nvida installer says it can find no compatible hardware and aborts the install!

Also witch GFX card should i download / install drivers for as I have 3, GTX 260m x2 sli and the internal GeForce 9400

The only stable driver i can get is 275.33 and windows installed like 170someting and that worked ok as well but im guessing is extremely old and isn’t allowing me to play newer games, also for some reason when i have those drivers my sound drivers always crash and make random glitchy sound.

As for the right arrow key its not damaged at all i hardly ever use it i properly didn’t even notice right way, if the keyboard isn’t physically damaged then maybe its something software side?

My problems with this laptop are endless, worst part of it is i fix my friends and families computers but i cant fix this mad laptop!

 

For some reason NVIDIA has taken to not including the device IDs for older hardware (like ours) in newer drivers...especially beta releases. And so the installer fails. Check out this thread for help. You will need to download an .inf file with the proper device IDs added back.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/613805-nvidia-driver-285-38-beta-bf3.html