M17x R2 7970m CrossfireX Ultimate Installation and Tweaking Guide

Hello all,

I am now a proud owner of a pretty much awesome m17x R2.
Nebula black, with the specs in my sig.

I have edited this post to serve as a Tweak Guide for m17x R2 users interested in unlocking the full graphical potential of their machines. You may find some parts of the following instructions useful even if you don't intend to use crossfire'd 7970m cards.

Why should one do this? Well, for starters, the m17x-R2:

- Supports Nehalem i7 Extreme and is capable of cooling it, thus leading to truly impressive performance results even so many years after release;
- Supports up to 16GB of DDR3-1333 RAM. If 16GB sticks ever become available it would be interesting to see if it can take 32GB;
- Has what I consider the best laptop display ever - 1920x1200, 17.3" Wide-Gamut RGB-LED;
- Supports 7970m CrossFireX in a GREAT way :thumbsup:;
- Is a bit more compact (although just as heavy) as the other Alienware alternative, which may be important for some (such as myself);
- Has pretty much the best build quality I've ever seen in a laptop;
- Bling®-ready ;
- Good sound quality;
- Lots of ports.

This Guide is intended to be used all the way. I have managed to set up my own machine to perfection, with full feature access (HDMI with sound working, perfect Fan control working, hibernate/sleep working, overclock and overvolt as well as underclock and undervolt available, etc). Some parts of this guide may not work for you, but I am reasonably sure of their success rate. Should you follow this guide, providing there are no caveats for you, your end-result should be a machine meeting the standards of perfection Which cannot be said about many other machines.

I don't really have a camera nor the mood to do a full picture guide, so those of you hoping for visual references should head on to this handy teardown guide. You only need to go as far as removing and re-seating the video-cards.

Also, I suck at formatting walls of text If any one of you can find it within the goodness of his heart to make a more visually-pleasing layout for the following guide, please do so and share it with me and you will receive the much-appreciated position as a contributor in the credits

Enclosed, is a brief synopsis of expected performance as benched with 3dmark11:

AlienHack's score: P10049
Nospheratu's score: Firestrike P8337; 3dmark11 P11449
Batfuse's score: P8870
My score : P9810
Trome71's: FireStrike P8333; 3dmark11 P11716

For comparison, the average i7-extreme overclocked 7970m crossfire-equipped m18x machine scores about this much: P11198 (oh look, slower than nospheratu's m17x hehe).

Keep in mind that synthetic benchmarks don't reflect the gaming performance, which for most games will be identical even with the faster sandy/ivy cpu's.

Without further ado:

STEPS:

1. Requirements:


- Two 7970m cards. WARNING. CHOOSING THE WRONG CARD WITH THE WRONG VBIOS WILL RENDER YOUR MACHINE NOT POSTING AND YOU WITH A USELESS CARD. As far as I am aware of, Clevo cards have no restrictions, whereas Dell cards are restricted to being released with vBios versions up to and including 015.021. 015.022 vBios cards are not supported (the machine will fail to Post) nor can they be downflashed (Attempting to do so will brick the card). There HAVE been reports of users getting 015.022--firmware cards and having them compatible, but unless the seller allows you to return the cards, you can't figure out which one would work and which won't.
I have not attempted nor do I know of anyone to have used a different manufacturer card (such as MSI), although I don't see why it wouldn't be possible.

- A modded PSU is not strictly required. Nospheratu, AlienHack and myself have all had success using crossfired 7970m cards in tandem with Extreme Series CPU's, even heavily overclocked on both. Although there is evidence that you would not want to push the overclock too high in order to not degrade de PSU too fast (Nospheratu has experienced lowered stability over time at very high overclock levels), you don't exactly have to worry about power-related shutdowns either. Thus, decent-quality stock 240W Dell PSU's are quite sufficient. This is true even in a context like AlienHack's, where he is currently limited to using very high voltage (1.1V) on one of his cards.

- You will obviously require a CrossFireX cable

- If you can't get your hands on proper 7970m X-Brackets, you can make due with mutilating the brackets of your previous cards to serve as base, by separating the four corners of the X-Bracket from the middle. I have had success using this method, though I obviously do not recommend it. I currently use two intact 7970m X-Brackets.

- If you're going to pull off such a mod, I heavily recommend maxing out the configuration of the machine for bling purposes This means Extreme-Series CPU (though you will be served pretty well even by 720qm/740qm/820qm/840qm with the ability to moderately increase the potential of those CPU's using bclk overclock, slight overvolt and increasing TDP limits in ThrottleStop), 16GB of DDR3 DRAM, 1920x1200 RGB-LED screen, hybrid HDD's or SSD RAID or SSD + large HDD combo. If you're going to spend the hundreds of $$$ that this machine requires for being awesome, might as well go all the way

- Prepare, in advance, a USB stick preloaded with FreeDOS and the AMD 7970m modded vBios pack provided by svl7 over at TechInferno. This is an absolute requirement. Do not avoid this. There are very big chances that your cards may require bios reflash to work in your machine, and not having access to these vBios'es will cripple you and ruin your experience. (Alternatively, you can try the experimental vBios extracted from AlienHack's ES card, which helped fix a few compatibility problems in some cases)

- Note: svl7 has modified the 022 vbios to offer native overdrive functionality without other software tweaks. I recommend you attempt to use them before other vbioses:
View attachment Dell 7970m - 015.022.000.001.000000.C42904A1.119 - OverdriveMod - UV 0975v.zip
View attachment Dell 7970m - 015.022.000.001.000000.C42904A1.119 - Overdrive Mod_1050v forced.zip

- Have a screwdriver set designed to be used with small screws. A magnetic screwdriver would be very recommended.

- Have a non-capacitive thermal paste handy - I recommend Prolimatech compounds, even though I currently use Ceramique.

- Have some extra thermal pads of 0.5mm and 1mm sizes available.

- Remove all GPU drivers (AMD or nVidia) prior to beginning the procedure - you don't want to have to reinstall windows. If using AMD cards, use the AMD Cleanup Utility. DO NOT USE THIS UTILITY ON WINDOWS 8. Your other option is removing the drivers from the control panel, then restarting into safe mode and using Driver Sweeper.

- Have prepared the Catalyst Mobility 13.11 beta driver, HwInfo64 and RadeonPro.


2. Hardware Installation:


- Remove the power cable, all peripherals and the battery. Open the screen and hold the power button for around 15 seconds to completely drain the machine of power. Ground yourself previously by touching a grounded metal object. If you can, use anti-static gloves when working inside the machine.

- Remove the three screws under the battery (this will allow you to remove the palmrest/touchpad), followed by the bottom cover. Make sure you keep the screws somewhere where they won't be lost, and also keep them organized separately in order to not confuse them. Be advised that there will be a lot of screws to remove. Once the bottom cover is removed, also remove the two screws positioned near the display assembly, to the left and right edges of the bottom cover portion under the screen assembly (this will allow you to remove the bezel providing the power button and gains you access to the keyboard).

- Gently pry away the palm-rest/touch-pad segment. Lift it carefully without ripping away the connector leading to the motherboard. Gently release the connector. Make sure that the two gum-pieces on either side of the palm-rest do not fall away and become lost. They may fall easily and you should keep them by your side.

- If you do not plan to do maintenance on the CPU, removing the wi-fi card antenna cables or the large cover between the keyboard and motherboard is not required. This is good, because it's a hassle you don't need. at the moment.

- Tilt the screen back and gently pry away the bezel containing the Alien-head power button. This part is also connected to the motherboard using a cable. Make sure to carefully detach it first.

- Unscrew the five small black screws keeping the keyboard down. Gently lift the keyboard up and away from yourself, and then tilt it forward, but not too far. There are two cables linking it to the motherboard - a smaller one on the left side and a larger one near the middle. Gently pry these away as well.

- Installing the cards is pretty straight-forward. Remove your existing cards and the thermal pads on them. The cards are held down by two screws on either side of the width of the card, and you can remove the cards with their heatsinks equipped in one go.

- You have the option of reusing the Dell stock pads or replacing them with your own. Depending on your original heatsinks, you may require different sizes of thermal pads. Moving from a pair of GTX-285m cards, my heatsinks require me to use 0.5mm pads on the vRam chips, 1mm pads on the VRM's, and I also use the fatter pads (around 5mm) to cool down the mosFET's. Other users have reported needing 1mm pads on ram and 0.5mm on VRM. Either way, when preparing the cards, make sure that after you screwed the heatsink down nice and tight, you check the contact between heatsink and RAM, as well as VRM's, and also core contact.

- Another consideration is that the screws may fail to provide proper core contact. This is true when moving from 285M cards to 7970m cards, in which case you will have to carefully pry away the C-Clips (washers) of each individual heatsink screw, remove the screws from the heatsinks, and then re-attach the C-Clips to the screws. This will allow more pressure of the heatsink on the cards and not force you to purchase different heatsinks and/or screws. Make sure you check whether or not you get proper core contact before doing this, because if it is sufficient, doing this mod may result in excessive pressure and the cracking of your GPU core.

- Once you've attached the heatsinks to your new cards, gently seat them in and screw them down.

- Installing the crossfire cable is slightly tricky, because the connector for the second card is placed underneath the heatsink itself, and the heatsink will exert some pressure on the connector. Make sure you curve the cable to provide enough room for the heatsink to seat, while not exerting too much pressure on the connector of either the cable or the card.

- Before doing anything else, if you've not been extremely careful about not touching it and moving it by mistake, I recommend gently disconnecting and reconnecting the LCD cable to the motherboard. The connector to the right needs to simply be pushed in until it clicks and stays even. The connector to the left requires you to gently pull up the metal rim, seat the connector flush against the socket and gently push down the metal rim until it clicks closed. Be advised you're not pushing on the rim perpendicularly, but aim to have it rotate into position. This is to avoid confusing relating to failure to display on the LCD.

- I recommend connecting back the keyboard and power module but not screwing them down, and attempting to boot the machine. If you see the AlienHead logo, you're golden. If not, attempt to boot the machine while connected to a secondary display though VGA output.

- If you fail to get VGA output as well as LCD output, you're in a bit of trouble. First, you will have to test each card individually in the master (left-most) GPU slot, and see if either of them boots. If you have one card that boots and one that doesn't, use the non-booting card in the Slave slot. You will attempt to flash it with different vBioses until you find one that works or you're forced to replace the card. The main body of this guide will assume that the cards booted correctly, with troubleshooting being done on a case-by-case basis in the rest of the thread.

- Follow most of the above steps in reverse in order to put your machine back together and move on to the software configuration.


2. Software Installation:


- Once your system posted, there is one more potential hiccup: it is possible for the machine to start with an incompatible card in the slave slot, and so long as drivers for the cards are not installed, you may even boot into windows. However, the card will be listed as "unable to start" in the device manager, and with drivers installed the system will freeze at boot. Obviously you should try every single vBios you can get your hands on in order to make it work, but if it fails and the card is simply incompatible, you will have to replace it.

- In this phase, you will also attempt to flash undervolted (preferably Dell) vbioses. This would not be a concern so long as you had access to a properly modded 330W PSU - the procedure of which has been outlined by imsolidstate on his own website. Otherwise, I recommend keeping the cards at stock clocks at the lowest stable voltages possible. Your aim should be in increasing your CPU overclock potential and keeping your PSU as healthy as possible. You are forced to flash these vBioses for undervolting because while it is possible and easy to increase your voltage and core clocks from software, it is mostly impossible to undervolt from software. Having a lower-voltage vbios equipped will allow you to tweak upwards from software should you feel the need to, while also having a low voltage option accessible, as well as keeping temperature and power consumption low and increasing the lifespan of your machine. I personally use a Dell 0.975V vbios on both cards.
Nospheratu has devised a pretty easy method to make an Adaptor to provide the 240W ID signal while using any unmodded PSU. You can find his post here.

- After your machine boots into Windows, install the Catalyst Mobility 13.11 drivers with all options. Restart the machine, then install HwInfo64 and RadeonPro if you haven't done so already. Catalyst Mobility 13.11 = Frame Pacing Driver and it works great in the m17x-R2, and every AMD user for whom it works ok should use it.

- Open the start menu, type regedit and open the registry editor. Select the uppermost first option (Computer), press CTRL+F and write EnableULPS. For each entry found (EnableULPS or EnableULPS_NA) change its value from 1 to 0. This will disable the ability of the OS to shut down the secondary card when not in use. If the ability to shut down the second card is something you absolutely require - to your detriment - then do not do this, but keep in mind that the rest of this tweak guide requires this step for multiple functionalities. After this, restart the machine.

- You have the option of entering BIOS and looking for the USB PowerShare functionality. If you keep your machine on a USB-powered cooling pad (As I do and recommend), it might you off that the fans of the cooling pad keep spinning while the machine is sleeping. I personally also hate having USB mouse light on. Disable this feature if you want to not have to unplug your USB devices to keep them powered down when sleeping.

- In Windows, open up Catalyst and temporarily Disable CrossFireX. This will allow the HwInfo64 sensors to properly read clockspeed / voltage / temps / etc. for both card. Open HwInfo64 and configure it. Under the Fan Respin Period I recommend using 1000ms. After that you can minimize HWINFO and re-enable Crossfire. Set HWINFO on auto-start minimized with windows. Keep in mind that when restarting windows, you will have to open the fan control tab in HWINFO on startup each time. You can bypass this requirement by using hibernate or sleep modes, which will remember your fan speeds properly when resuming. ULPS disabled is required for proper usage with HWINFO (when enabled, if the second card shuts down, HWINFO will lose fan control ability as well as sensors over the second card and you will have to turn off HWINFO, disable crossfire, re-start HWINFO and re-enable the fan control settings and then re-enable crossfire all over again. This is why I recommend disabling ULPS). In addition, click configure in the Sensor Status panel and increase the scan interval to 10000 (or higher, if you feel comfortable) and click set. Keep in mind this will increase the time between sensor reading from whatever value you have set up all the way up to 10 seconds (at 10000ms) or whatever value you set it to, thus the changes in fan speed will now trigger with more delay. On the other hand, this will free up valuable CPU time that you really don't want to lose in CPU-intensive applications (especially since the performance drop with the scan speed too high can be up to 15% on the CPU)

You should now have available: HDMI (without sound on Clevo, fully functional on Dell cards), Crossfire, Sleep/Hibernate, and plenty of overclock room for the CPU with ThrottleStop as well as custom independent Fan Control settings for each of the main three components (CPU / GPU1 / GPU2) The amount of headroom is subject to vBios limitations on gpu voltage. Nospheratu has succeeded in using the ASUS GPU Tweak utility to undervolt and clock-control the cards. This is conditional on having run MSI Afterburner (recommended versions are 2.2.4 - 2.3.1) with the -xcl flag once prior to trying the utility. If afterburner freezes your system, make sure ULPS is disabled and try running a game, alt-tabbing out of it and running afterburner immediately. If it is successful, restart your machine and you can then use ASUS GPU Tweak. Visit the link for complete details on how to configure ASUS GPU Tweak.

All that remains to be done now is:


3. RadeonPro Tweaking: - I'm not sure whether or not RadeonPro tweaking is still of any use now that the frame-pacing driver is out. Needs to be tested.


- You can use RadeonPro with most of the instructions here to lower CrossFireX-specific microstutter and generally increase gaming performance.

- Select the "Global" profile and edit the following (push the Save Changes button in the bottom left-most corner of the application window after each change):

- Under the "Visual" tab, do whatever tweaks you wish (i recommend Antialiasing "Enhance application settings" and Anti-Aliasing filter set to "Edge Detect"). Set Vertical Sync Control to "Always On".

- Under the "Advanced" tab, disable "Force Triple-Buffering (OpenGL)" and set the Flip Queue Size value to 0 or 1 (determines the amount of frames that will be rendered in advance). Tweak the rest to your heart's content.

- Under the "Tweaks" tab, set Vsync control to Driver Default, set Display refresh rate to 60, uncheck Triple Buffering, Check Dynamic Framerate control, set Keep up to 58-59 fps and save.

- Set RadeonPro to autostart minimized. If a specific application requires further tweaking, create an individual profile for that application to meet your specific demands using the above tweaks as a starting base. Make sure that you can mostly if not always sustain a framerate near to the value defined next to the Dynamic Framerate option. I don't recommend using settings that will push your framerate under 45fps. Lower details if you have to. The 7970m crossfire may be the second/third most powerful dual-gpu laptop solution at the present moment, but there's still games and settings that may tank your performance, and you will require the absolute highest possible contribution from your CPU in order to not be bottle-necked in certain games. I have found that an extreme series processor running 24/24/24/24 multipliers with TDP/TDC settings of 80+/62 will remove pretty much any CPU bottleneck in most games. Just make sure you can cool it (which is why I also recommend a cooling pad such as the Notepal U3).


This concludes our regularly scheduled program for the complete awesome machine that is the Alienware m17x R2

Credits go to Nospheratu (for being the first person to join the bandwagon of this thread and the first to achieve success, as well as providing tons of information regarding many of the instructions above, AlienHack for much the same reason only slightly delayed, Pau1ow, Meaker, svl7 @ TechInferno and Mr. Fox for being general founts of wisdom without whom it would have been much harder to build up the above guide (even if they don't know it ). imsolidstate and StamatisX for being pioneers into the realm of PSU modding as well as being some of the people doing early experiments on this crossfire possiblity (along with svl7). Honorable contributor mentions go to flingin and others I will add here on a case-by-case basis (which means I soon as I remember them ).

And of course, myself for being generally awesome.

 

My friend I am on the same boat. I have ordered 1 7970 m but I am not sure if installing it in the r2 is going to be a hassle free experience. ..
Maybe we could help each other with info on how each one managed tried to install the cards

 

Sure thing As far as I know, just one card should be pretty easy to do, just make sure the heatsink is properly fit. It's once you get to 2 cards and the power consumption starts spiking that problems start

 

So the r2 bios has no problem recognising the 7970 from the start? Because upgrademonkey has a warning saying that 7970 is plug and play only on r3-r4. On r2 it needs a slight mode they say (something about flashing a vbios)

 

Afaik, some are plug and play, and some need to be flashed with the RjTech vBios (although other vbioses have reported working). I know there's a huge vbios pack over at techinferno: Downloads | Tech|Inferno

I'm not sure if the rjtech version is in there.

EDIT: Regarding Raid-0 issues, I've found that by setting Raid enabled in BIOS but not making the disks part of an array allows the user to install windows to one of the disks without hassle, and then use the Intel Rapide Storage Technology application to create the Raid-0 array from within windows. Wish I knew this last night

At least I now have proper raid-0

EDIT2: I believe upgrademonkey cards are Clevos which only work in R2 when flashed with RJTECH vbios. Dell cards should work stock.

 

That's very important piece of information. If that's true then maybe I should cancel my upgrademonkey order and try to find a dell card

 

I doubt it's that relevant. Re-flashing vBios is easy, and as far as i can tell all clevo cards flashed with rjtech vbios work well. From what I've been reading on techInferno, while Dell cards do work stock, they sometimes have stability problems. I think it's the same either way worse case scenario, your order from upgrademonkey doesn't work properly and you rma the card.

 

Yes but if the card doesn't even get recognized and the system doesnt boot how will I vbios flash? A blind flash is not the easiest thing to do.

Where did you order your cards from and when do you await them to arrive?

 

I ordered them from the marketplace here (merchant is Riri-Fifi). They should be arriving sometime next week. I don't think he has any more at the moment, but cards pop up in the marketplace from time to time.

 

I guess you were missing this.
LINK

 

I'm intending to do the EXACT same thing

I've seen a lot of users try different approaches to the power related problems but never the power reduction mods all at once using the 240W adapter. I understand the 920XM is a bottleneck at stock clocks but I'm not interested in synthetic benchmarks. I just want +- 60fps in my games at max detail. Have a look at the unreleased 7950M, same chip as the 7970M but reduced clocks with a TDP of 50W. 50W might be a bit optimistic though, I think 75-80W might be more realistic.

If 7970M owners can manage to run default clocks on 0.95v the voltage requirement to run the same card at 7950M clocks (700/1000) should be much lower. If it works out that would be great and I can do the dual 240W when the performance drops with new gen game engines. If it doesn't work out I'll just do the dual PSU mod now and use one PSU and GPU when I need to travel with the laptop which isn't that much.

upgrademonkey's cards are Dell's mostly. He states whether they are Dell or Clevo in the listings title. An easy way to identify the card would be by looking at the screw holes, Dells are white and Clevo's are brownish. Another easily identifiable sign is that most of the Clevo's have had the capacitors next to the VRM's replaced. They were soldered on by hand after being returned due to issues in various systems.

Don't pay any attention to the images posted by upgrademonkey in his listings though, he's using both clevo and dell card images interchangeably. Pay attention to the listing description to find out which card you are buying.

Here's an excellent blind flash guide with basically everything automated for you if you do need to flash.

 

Hey guys,

For reference it might be worthwhile checking here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/677680-another-7970m-m17x-r2-installation-photos.html

If you haven't already regarding installation of at least a single 7970m.

Regarding the undervolt, I'll be curious how stable the cards will be once they are undervolted...I don't know how much stability is impacted
when doing that much of an undervolt, so let us know how it goes.

Good luck!

 

Slightly different I know but I had very nice results from undervolting and overclocking my single 7970m in my aging M15X running modern games. Only ran into difficulties on older titles. 875 clock and 1450 memory at 0.975v gave better than stock performance (3d mark 11 graphics score of 6500) whilst reducing power consumption and temperatures under load. I have this vBIOS available if anyone requires it. 850/1350 @0.975 also stable. 825/1350 @ 0.95v another very good choice that runs even cooler with roughly stock performance due to the memory boost.

I would highly recommend getting an actual DELL card and not a Clevo card flashed with a DELL vBIOS. Not sure if upgrademonkey or upgradeyourlaptop offers actual DELL cards on blue pcb. Clevos are on green pcb.

I'd be interested to know if the undervolting method works for running these cards in crossfire purely for the "We're running high end cards on 3 year old beasts" club we're in.
Undervolting this card in the M15X helps with throttling and allows better CPU overclocks

Good luck guys!

 

Actually nope, I tried using those files and it wouldn't make a difference. I also tried using Intel's Rapid Storage drivers and those did not make a difference either.
The only thing that worked for me was to install to non-raid disk and then update to raid from within the windows tool.

 

Here's a good image of the capacitor difference between the Dell and Clevo cards.

 

Unfortunately the memory CANNOT be underclocked (3D clocks at least) below stock 1200mhz. I tried once to copy the unreleased 7950M clocks and voltage months back. The best we can do is tweak the core clock and voltage. Many cards run at 0.95V but also many won't. Mine requires 0.975V to run at stock 850mhz stably in games.

Because the memory voltage cannot be altered and clock is fixed at a minimum of 1200mhz in 3D clock mode this severely limits our ability to bring TDP down to below 80-75W. I am pretty sure the 680M is more power efficient because it runs with slower memory that uses less voltage.

Anyways best bet is to set both cards to 0.975V and 850/1400. The 3D mem voltage is locked so running at 1400 won't consume much more (if any) over stock but will open up performance. The undervolt on the core will bring the tdp down to acceptable levels. Especially if you are running a spliced 240+240W brick lol. I can't see twin 7970Ms and an XM running well on just 240W even if they are undervolted! Especially as the XM needs an OC to bring out the xfire potential of those cards!

 

I went through a lot trying to get them to work in CrossFire in my R2 ( thread here). My advice would be to prepare yourself for the 2x240W mod, because running them undervolted to 0.95v even with a 12x multiplier on a 940XM (Turbo disabled) still resulted in shutdowns in situations where CrossFire provided a benefit, for me at least.

 

Yeah your investigation was the first solid bit of info that I've read on any forum to get these cards to work in our machines. :thumbsup:

The only thing that I'm clinging on to is that your last test was with the 330W mod which according to other users is actually providing less power to the machine before tripping than the 240W.

Its sad to see you sell your machine though as you were one of the few remaining R2 power users that brought a lot of info of this mod to us.

 

Thank you all for the feedback and input, it's good to know some details.

@King of Interns: For a fact, the memory can be underclocked. The HD7970m has three profiles: 150 core / 300 memory, 450 core / 900 memory (i think, i don't remember right now - this was the profile my card entered when viewing youtube videos etc. and would sometimes get stock at those clocks) and 850 / 1200 memory.
The voltages on these are 0.825V, 0.9V and 1.05V default, at least on my dell ES card.

Each profile can be modified through editing the preset file generated by Catalyst Control Center when running custom clocks and saving presets. This is how I used to have custom undervolt/overvolt and underclock/overclock profiles for each game.

Even if I have to wrench my head and figure out how to run that 2D profile (450core / 900 memory) overclocked and overvolted, i'm sure it can be done.

Regarding the PSU, the cooling on my machine has some issues and i can't push above 23x multis without severe heat, so i suppose i'll keep the consumption down anyway.

Afaik from reading various people's experiences, the m17x R2 mobo provides power through different voltage carrying circuits to the GPU's and CPU, but the power system for the GPU's is linked.

This is why you can MAD OC a single 7970m in the m17x R2 but run both, even downlocked, and you'll run into heavy issues. For sure this power system is designed for AT LEAST 150W, since the notebook was rated to use 75W gpu's, and clearly a 100W GPU such as the 7970m (which can push heavily above this figure when under heavy load - i'd seen tests pushing the stock card to 140-150W) will never fit the profile... unless you undervolt/underclock.

Anyway, this is an experiment, and I'm sure with input from you guys we can make this work Worse comes to worst, I get the 330W PSU and to the voltage mod, but that's only for CPU overclocking benefits, since the cards themselves are still limited to around ~150W by the mobo.

If any of you have a good idea as to using the 2D clock profile overclocked, this will go a great way into making this mod a success

I see the m17x R2 as an awesome high-performance vintage machine. imho m18x is not a viable alternative due to the size and lower quality screen, and the other m17x's don't hold a candle in anything except CPU abilities.

 

Well the vbios patcher would allow you to alter the 2D clocks and voltage. There is a good chance the memory voltage runs much lower on that profile. You could try pushing the memory in that profile in increments of maybe 25-50mhz until you are forced to blind flash back to something more stable. The downside to this would be a hot card even at idle.

The program doesn't offer the option to alter the mid states of 450/900 or 450/300 (state mine enters when it throttles lol) how to access these profiles I have no idea!

When I said memory can't be underclocked I meant in 3D profile. I tried it and it didn't work.

Personally I would love a dual 240W PSU mod anyone can build one for me...

 

that shouldnt make any difference since it is the same capacitor just different label.

 

Well, i have 2 240W PSU's But I'd like to not butcher them unless really required... What I plan to do is try to use the 240W PSU. If that's not possible I'll pull the ID chip from one of the 240W PSU's and mod a 330W PSU. If even that doesn't work I'll probably just go full retard and do the 240W mod, but really... I don't want that kind ouf double brick with me. I do carry my machine around.

If the memory doesn't undervolt, I suppose a 650 core, 0.9V clock might do the trick. Remains to be seen... My cards are still in transit.

Regarding the need for 330W or 480W PSU... My old computer was a rebranded MSI GX660R running a 920XM and a 7970m on a 150W delta PSU. I would run that config with the 920XM @ 24x multi across all cores and the gpu stock at 900/1300. There would never be any power trip.

Do the math I believe none of the issues plaguing current users has anything to do with actual power draw on the PSU, and more to do with retarded dell technology (such as the need for a "recognized" PSU). 240W undervolted/underclocked should be more than enough. Seeing as how it's apparently not, it's time to get innovative

 

True that. It is also because dell have decided to cripple the power circuits of the gpu on both M17x R2 and M15x! However it does seem splicing 2 or more adapters helps. Someone even put 3 bricks together and ran the 920xm at 110 tdp in the R2 recently and it did really help.

Basically this mod seems to trick the bios into thinking it has the same power as before while in fact there is double or even triple available. Noone has tried this mod on the M15x as far as I know but I am pretty sure the two machines share similar issues, bios and hardware.

 

You know, it'd be really nice to figure out whether the trip is software or hardware-based. If it's just a matter of a certain array of mosfets being upgraded, that would be pretty cool to do. Any electronics engineers around here? Could take a look at the power routing and tell us what kind of power limits it should have.

 

u got a link for someone who did the 3 psu mod? im very interested in how he balance the load on all 3 psu. as far as i know, the dual psu mod uses a diode bridge, which is very wierd. i would love to know how he did it.

 

I never read this story about a user that managed to balance 3 PSU's...that would be an challenging task...

What i find strange is that everybody talks about undervolting but on one has tested what it does for the Wattage, does it real decrease THAT much Watt?

I've seen that with my rig (see sig) with GPU and CPU maximum overclocked, in gaming mode, it takes 260W out of the wall (peaks) with an average of 220.

What i am trying to point out is that, dual GPU's and XM CPU, OC' ing does not really come into play, no matter what mod you do.
The only real succesfull modder and inventer of the 2x240W is StamatisX and i am not clear if he OC'ed everything beyond 300W

 

@Unphoto: Wattage consumption is defined as a multipication of voltage and amperage.
For example, if we were excluding vRam as a consumer and the card consumed exclusively on the core, and we assumed that the card ran a perfect 100W consumption at 1.05V, then it would balance out the voltage with 95,2 Amps current. If we managed to maintain stable clock speeds while lowering voltage to 0,95 (as some do, and even manage to overclock at this point), those 95.2 Amps would result in a 90W power consumption.

Of course consumption drop/increase figures are non-linear and will vary enormously based on usage scenarios, but I'm confident that a 0.9V undervolt with the right clocks will allow us to keep consumption within acceptable limits providing we hit the stability sweet spot.

Every 5-10W drop is highly significant in this context, but must be balanced and tested very carefully. Ideally you would want to bench and game a single card at a time while constantly altering clocks and using a multimeter to check power draw of the card directly at the mxm socket. Unfortunately I don't have the tools or the skills for this, and no extra cash to get the tools to learn

What is more interesting is this Eurogamer post regarding the 7970m that claims that the card under full load consumes only 65W of power. What really twinkles my imaginary friends is the fact that from any rational perspective, the current issues do not make sense. It does not make any sense to be able to push a single card to obscene overclock levels and have no trouble with a consumption that will be heavily above that of two underclocked and undervolted cards, and to be able to do so while pushing an extreme CPU into the heavens, but put two undervolted cards in and you have to run the cpu at 12x multis just to be able to play... for me this stinks of some badly thought-out throttle and TDP monitoring algorhythms. Fact of the matter is, the CPU stock has a TDP of 55W, and a consumption lower than that. The CPU will not even touch 100W consumption unless heavily overclocked above 23W multis hyper-threaded and under load. It's only above that figure that consumption really starts to spike.

The GPU's should consume slightly more than the CPU, but are recognized to be very cool, quiet and efficient, and they are... unless you use Crossfire, and they'll still be cool, quiet and efficient but you'll trip like a drunk man at the paralympics. On this thought, does anyone know how a system/mobo/bios recognizes what TDP the computer runs at? I suspect something similar to Throttlestop might be needed instead of more juice...

Think about it. You can give an XM CPU multis to the heaven... but it won't touch those clocks (and will throttle and be unstable) unless you raise the TDP limits. I suspect something similar may be in play here, but I can't actually test it out until I get my cards...

Now the thing many people have to remember is that the 7970m is NOT actually a 100W consumption card... but a 100W TDP card. So the 100W figure is from the perspective of Thermal Dissipation, not power consumption.

The real limits of the power system on the board and the card's consumption can ONLY be determined by a skilled engineer who can check out the motherboard VRM design and make the proper calculations regarding the estimated current limits of the power system, while also performing accurate measurements against the consumption of the card at the MXM slot, at the core, and at the the vRam. I personally plan to wing it and just try to hit the sweet spot with experimentation and hope against hope that I can downclock and undervolt the cards enough to perform well without crippling their clocks too much, but any support from a skilled member in the subjects mentioned above (even if only advice on how to check various things) would go a long way.

One more thing: Whap-a-Chow over at the T|I Forums managed to run his crossfire with OC'd 920xm at stock clocks undervolted on a 240W PSU.

Now StamatisX also ran a crossfire, only on a 2x 240W mod, with the cards overvolted and overclocked. The cards would begin to throttle under load... but only when reaching temps above 65C. Until then they'd run just fine. Once temps dropped back down the cards would keep running no problem.... which points to TDP regulation issues. Since by all rational accounts this is regulated in the BIOS, we may have to see whether another revision of the unlocked A10 bios might fix throttling issues if we can get someone like prema on-board to take a look through it But first... my cards have to get here

What this tells me is that the throttle and power issues may be far more linked to whatever algorithm Dell uses to regulate thermal dissipation and throttling. When the cards come I'll probably start checking the unlocked A10 bios to see if altering any of the thermal settings does anything positive. If not, I'll probably stick a pair of high-cfm fans on a notepal U3 and put them under the cards and do my best to keep them as cool as possible.

The good news is that if Whap-a-Chow can run them then... there's not much problem with the PSU delivering power
And if StamatisX can OC/OV them and not trip anything, then there's not much problem with the power regulators delivering power.

That leaves TDP system regulation And I suspect that's where the trouble appears. By now I'm about 90% convinced that locating and modifying the BIOS entries (if they do exist) relating to GPU-side TDP throttling limitations is the way to resolve most issues with this crossfire. I suspect it's currently set at 150W (for 2x 75W cards) and needs something like 200W.

 

You are preaching to the choire here brother Sangemaru
This is exactly why i pointed out why it's so important that people measure how many Watt's they pull out the wall and compare this when the cards are undervolted (less heat means less work, would mean more stable @same clock)

Aside from this theory, the XM CPU's are nice but they don't have as much influence on the FPS compared to the GPU(S) as far as gaming is consurned. OC'ng the CPU will draw more Watt's (more heat) then OC'ing a GPU....so basicly it doesn't really make any sense to OC the XM to say like x16...it just won't affect your gaming FPS.

The part about the 100W for the 680m and 7970m...it's TDP yes but doesn't the PCI-E lan also take 25W?

Link to earlier claim: little to no fps gain on CPU OC
I know this is a bit dated and games link BF3 WILL definetly show benefit from CPU OC but in general it would be more usefull to OC the GPU instead of the CPU

 

Damned if I know, bro What I was trying to underline in the above mostly is that power consumption might not be as much of a relevant issue towards getting these to work as fiddling with the heat and tdp settings (if possible). Of course anyone who wants to OC and max out should always make sure they know as much as possible about what amount of power they're drawing, what the limits are and what kind of psu they need But fact of the matter is, 240W underclocked/undervolted should be more than enough headroom to OC the CPU. And it does matter quite a lot in some games (Starcraft/ Crysys / GTA etc.).

 

1st: i draw way more power then the set 240W when i need to, without my R2 snapping into power cut off.

2nd: You can forgot the A10(u) BIOS update, because the original bios modder/editor (TheWiz) is under the radar....nobody seems to be able to reach him for this topic nor has he been online seen since unlocking A10.

StamatisX needs to run 2 680m's with Svl7's Bios, so he can ramp them up with full OV/OC untill he reaches Dell's new throttle threshold of 93 degrees celcius.....i'd like to see that happening

 

So you too can use the PSU way above specs, eh? Like I said, power limits.. not so much.

Yea, I knew TheWiz vanished... still hoping If i don't manage to get everything done by myself that I might try and rope prema or svl into a bit of advice and/or help.

I didn't know about that throttle threshold... what is it on exactly? mobo, the gpu's themselves, or what?

 

Since i have modded my mobo and Gpu bios i cant really tell ya, but logic dictates that it has to be Dell GPU BIOS.

Why?
My (real) Dell 680m doesn't throttle untill 93 degrees...

My old 4870m's could hit 80 something degrees and not throttle, but AMD's 7970m does throttle after 65 degrees (which is absurdly low for a core running on full spec in my opinion)

They all interface with the same mobo so.....

 

Can you give a few details regarding as to how you modded your mobo?
Regarding the AMD 7970m's throttling at 65 degrees, since this ONLY happens on the R2 (and if I remember correctly m15x R2) and no other laptop (my GX660R rebrand could hit 90C without throttling) I'm a bit skeptical in hoping the throttle issues could be solved by just modifying the vBios.

 

that would depend on the game. big games such as MMOs, open world games. pretty much any game that requires alot of calculations to be made. most games now have relatively simple calculations and rely heavily on gpu to make it pretty.

 

That's exactly why I'm going for this configuration. My i7-940xm is still more than enough to run most games maxed. For the exceptions (SC2 / etc.) I plan to run one card and massively OC the CPU, otherwise run crossfire stable and the cpu as fast as possible while still stable.

 

I did not modify the mobo itself, i use the modded mobo bios (a10) and modded GPU bios.

That's what i said

If a game is written for a good multi threaded.exe you will definetly notice a better game experience.
Again, 8 out of 10 games will not run better on a high CPU overclock, it will however speed up the response times in the OS but usually the drive will be the bottleneck

 

What's that about the 65C throttling limit for the 7970m? Is that for real? I am ordering a 7970 these days and I didn't know that it has such a slow throttling limit.

Is that with either the dell cards or the Clevo / Eurocom ones? Or both? With all the bioses we use?

People who use these cards in m17x r2 even single not crossfire, do you really have such a slow temp limit for gpu throttling?

 

I haven't heard about the 65c throttling either, although I am aware of the 80c-85c temp shutdowns with Dell 7970M's. I do know its not vBIOS related as Clevo cards flashed with the Dell vBIOS do not exhibit this behaviour on our systems.

Do you guys perhaps have a link to the 65c throttling?

 

That throttling limit only appeared in CrossfireX mode when StamatisX was testing. I am unaware of whether or not he ever fixed that. As far as I know he used Clevo cards with RJTech vBios.

A single card should not throttle below 85C, you're safe buying it, don't worry. You'll love that card.

Here you go: [M17x R2] with AMD 7970M CrossfireX - Page 5

Once more, this is a specific usage scenario (crossfireX in a m17x R2). Normal single users or users in other machines should have nothing to fear.

 

Thanks for the link

Unless I'm missing something the cards aren't throttling cos of the temps there. He's running a redonculous 1050/1400 oc with 0.10v overvolt That has put a strain on the limited power available to us. We're pretty much safe as we intend to go down with the clocks and volts instead of up... sounds like a crazy thing to do with high end cards

 

Now I am happy again. I wouldn't want my 7970m to throttle from sow low temps.

By the way guys, talking about the i7 920xm and it's overclocking . And how that helps in games.
Guys I really can't think why an 920mx with all it's cores running at 3ghz or 2 of its cores running at 3,5 ghz (with throttlestops help) isn't fast enough for all current games and it might bottleneck the 7970s (even in cf)
I think that a i7 quad core at 3,5 is super fast as a chip for modern games ... What more so we need? 4cores at 4ghz to say that we have enough CPU power in our games? And all this on a 5years old laptop?

 

A 920XM is still a formidable chip with ThrottleStop. Actually a 720QM is still a decent chip for gaming paired with a 7970M or 680M for games. MSI recently released a laptop with an AMD A10-4600M paired with a 7970M. Its a horrible combination as the A10 throttles the 7970M a lot and yet that laptop won awards for gaming value.

The cherry on the top is the 4 year old 720QM is faster than the A10-4600M

Since you're going single card you're in an ideal position to overclock your 920XM with ThrottleStop if ever you need to, since the power restrictions do not apply to your configuration.

 

920xm overclocked over 3GHz across all cores rapes almost any non-extreme CPU up to haswell, included. Don't worry about it's performance. It's going to be strong even on broadwell.

 

I already run it like that with my current 5870 crossfire. The cards are at 800gpu 1200mem and the 920xm. Runs at 3458mhz (1 and 2 core) and 3192mhz (3-4 cores)

I get 4650 on 3dmark 11 and the temps generally are all sub 80 degrees on gpus and CPU, usually 65-70 C when benching. So I suppose I could even give more current to the 920 from the unlocked bios and maybe go 3450 MHz all 4 cores but I don't think I need it ...

 

Unless you're running it with hyperthreading disabled, your score is like 30% lower than it should be.
Use throttlestop to increase TDP limits somewhere around 75-80W and TDC up to around 60-62A.

Of course, this is providing your cooling can take it

PS: Is that overall score or Physics score?

 

so you mean i should get +30% on 3dmark 11?? so like 5800??? i dont think thats right!!! its too much!! i mean the 7970 gets like 6500 max ! i just have 5870 crossfire!!!

i have hyperthreading enabled, 4 cores of 920mx @ 3.3ghz catalyst 13.4
and the results for 3dmark 11' are :

4929 total score (the 4600 i said was with 2x fsaa , i had forgoten it open on ccc)
GT1 24.35
GT2 23.46
GT3 28.47
GT4 14.00
PT 20.45
CT 19.01

 

Yea, my bad, I meant you should get something like ~6500-7000 PHYSICS score 4929 total sounds very good.

 

so did u receive your cards

 

They're floating around in the post office. I was so excited today and then I called and asked about them and I'm supposed to just... wait until they call me or something. I hate Romanian public services.
I hope I might get them tomorrow. Got a brand new Notepal U3 to cool around, and if I absolutely can't do the mod my way, I have an electrician waiting to do the PSU mod for me... but I'd still like to try and do it my way.

 

i wish you luck
in what speed do you run your 940xm?
what multies? x/x/x/x ?