M17x R1 video card Questions Please look at Pictures.

Can someone tell me if this is normal, look at the motherboard of m17x R1 where you plug in the video cards? I think because it gets hot there some pins solder bridged.
I just got my hands on a USED dell alienware m17x r1. I also bought 2 cheap video cards 2x GTX 260M and a crossfire cable.. My questions
1. When I tried to install NVidia drivers, the drivers fail because of capatiabity, and when I install the the one from dell, it installed the intergrated gpu drivers.
2. In safe mode I notice, that the 2 video cards are detected, in device manager, but when I tried to use them black screen at windows start up.
3. Crossfire, can I even do the crossfire thing with the cards I bought? ( GTX 260m ) I think maybe the cable is bad..
Please help, please remember I am new to the alienware world..

 

First of all, please make a better photo, i cant see a thing in these ones.

Did you try each card separately in primary slot (left) to make sure that they even work?

And you mean SLI, not Crossfire.
Crossfire is ATi/AMD pairing of GPU's, SLI is nVidia's version.

 

Trying them one at the time would be better. Did you try manually changing to them and entering safe mode to install the video drivers?

 

Thanks for the reply, I did try each one, on the left card slot, turns out the 2 cards I bought were no good.. The original one that was in the laptop works fine. and is detected right away. Also thanks for the SLI not crossfire, info, i'm going to google up some more info on that..
Going to see if I can borrow a friends camera, to take better pictures..

 

I did try this and found out the 2 cards I bought off ebay, are not working, one gives a scramble screen, and the other gives a black screen.. The original video card I had in the laptop works prefect, Thanks for your reply, help me a lot..

 

Cool! No problem. We are here to help. Hopefully you'll be able to get the money back soon and get a new pair.

 

Return cards for a full refund and/or get your money back trough PayPal if selller tries to make any sort of problems.

Do this ASAP