M17x R2, 1 4870=Dead

So, I know this may have been beat to death, and my laptop is ancient, but I'm thinking about fixing my old M17x R2. It's an I7 quad with dual HD 4870s. I believe one of my GPUs is going. It turns on, runs for about 2 minutes, locks up, display driver not responding, little BSoD, black screen that fades to grayish white from the bottom. Before it starts its slow death, it shows sets of 3 or 4 lines in either red or cyan depending on the background. I've tried with a different monitor, and it still does the same thing, so I'm thinking about pulling one GPU and then the other to check them individually.

I pulled the slave video card and ran it with one. The master still ran with red artifacts all over the place. I swapped the heat sink and ran with the other and all is well. I guess the master 4870 is bad. The question now is...Should I replace the 4870 and go back to 2 Radeon HD 4870s or upgrade?

I guess there are a lot of options out there for this thing. Is there an updated list for of the latest and greatest that will work for me in this rig? I've got the 240 brick, and would like to stick with it, if possible.

 

get a single HD 8970M and get another heatsink or mod yourself. Then sell the other HD 4870, then you can basicially play whatever you want no problem, even games like Witcher 3.

 

i have a 8970M in my m17x r2 and it runs great, minus loss of brightness control

 

Thanks for the responses. Is there a particular 8970 I'm looking for? Came with Dells or something? Also, are there other mods for me to accommoate the card?

 

You can get Crossfire 8970M in the R2 correct. Along with 16GB of Ram... From what I seen that old machine is truly a beast.

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No point in running crossfire. Even if OP has a 920XM / 940XM he will get slight bottleneck from a 8970M alone, having cf will give him exacly the same performance as with 1.

I mean considering the fact that you ran dual 4870s I'd say just go for the cheap 2GB MSI versions. I doubt u'll need more vRAM than that. If you for some reason plan on playing something that requires more vram you could go for a more expensive 4GB version.

I don't know about the older Alienware models, but I think it doesn't matter what vBIOS get, I might be wrong tho, hopefully someone can clear it up for you.

 

With a highly overclocked 920 or 940XM like over 4.5GHz would it still bottleneck?

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Pretty sure even when extremely modded and with watercooling I doubt u can get 4.5 ghz out of the chips, If you want 4.5ghz or higher u would have to use ln2 and keep pouring. But even when you manage to get it to usable 4ghz (which is already a feat in itself), the system would still be bottlenecked by quite a bit, and that's when we pretend the EC doesn't kick in and limits everything.

The architecture is simply to old, it lacks features and such.

 

I see... I thought 4.5GHz was achievable. Let's say 4GHz then it would still bottleneck?

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LoL. you might wanna read my entire post.

Honestly it's not like OP will care about it anyways. He runs a crossfire 4870mobility system. If he wanted to have the same performance as a single HD 8970M he would need like 15x crossfire his current card. So he'll more than satisfied.

 

Yes I agree a single 8970M is a good upgrade. I was just wondering for my own research and people could always get money later down the road and do the same thing. I have seen 920XM 16GB Ram 8970M CF M17x R2 think that would be a beast of a system

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Unless you plug a 3k+ screen into it, it will perform about the same as a single HD 8970M system. 1080p still requires quite a bit from the CPU. We did some testing with a 970M + 940XM vs 970M + 4940MX system and even then the bottleneck in games were severe enough to see a rather huge difference, especially in crysis 3 and witcher 3, even doom was quite noticable.

even older games like battlefield 3 and 4 took quote a hit from the CPU being matched with a single 970M. Considering that a HD 8970M performs a bit worse than a 970M I'd say a single HD 8970M will max out the CPU unless we talk 3k/4k gaming.

 

How much of a bottleneck? Like 30%?

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4940MX + 970M

Spoiler

940xm + 970M

Spoiler

The biggest issue on the 940XM system was terrible frametimes and FPS dips. When a game has terrible frametimes, even 60FPS will seem a bit laggy.

 

Ones a quadro ones a 970M... Not really a far comparison

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The quadro is 5%- 10% faster than the 970M, it was in the system with the 940XM.

 

After a quick search this information does look correct. Thanks for the info, so why do people get 8970M CF for this system?

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Also to take it a step further:
https://www.3dmark.com/fs/10121969

It has been benchmarked, as you can see the graphicscore is 100% performance of the card ( link here), no bottleneck whatsoever in GPU benchmarking, the moment you start playing games with the card + CPU the bottlenecks were rather severe. Especially in wticher 3.(the bottleneck was around 60%, deadsmiley didn't even get to novigrad and had terrible performance, My guess is that in novigrad we talk about sub 30 FPS)

I think it's because people are not aware that the bottleneck is there. Most people think that a 940XM Overclocked will suffice for SLI/CF systems, many people still think that a 920XM/940XM won't bottleneck a 970M at all, even tho it does bottleneck it severely in most games.

The only game I can think of that may get considerably more performance in a 940xm+ CF/SLI setup is maybe metro.

 

From what I know 1st and 2nd gen a very low in performance compared to 3rd and up. I have seen a stock 2960XM just barely beat a stock 3610QM

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Yeah, the first gen was a major upgrade from the c2q series, sandry bridge was a major upgrade from the 1st gen and ivy bridge was a major upgrade from sandy bridge, everything after ivy bridge were minor improvements over time. For instance an old slightly OC 4700MQ smacks all kaby lake HQ's in their faces.

Once you got ivy bridge or newer u're set. That's why most people buy new and expensive pascal cards for ivy bridge based systems.

 

Yes that does make sense as I see 1070s in the M17x R4... And 980M SLI in M18x R2... So would 780M SLI bottleneck in an M18x R1?

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depends on game and CPU.If we say that the CPU is a 2920XM @ 4.2ghz combined with stock 780M's then the only 2 games where I would say that someone would notice any form of bottleneck would be Ashes of the benchmark or newer civ titles. Other titles like witcher 3, crysis 3 and GTA 5 will maybe have slight bottleneck but nothing you would really notice. Sandy bridge is still quite potent and powerful. Unlike the 1st gen sandy bridge does actually bring something to the table.

 

I see, good to know.

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Sidenote: This only goes for the OC extreme sandry bridge CPU's. The other "standard" ones are meh.

 

Of course. But the older cpus are very cheap you can get 920XM for under 100$ on eBay I'm pretty sure. 2920XM I'm sure under 200$

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Well yeah, they are old and if you get a notebook with 1st or 2nd gen CPU's u usually suffer from terrible IO etc.so nobody really wants it.
Overclocked 2920XM is in the ballpark of a 6700HQ and SLI 780M are around 980M / 1060 Max Q. If we look at efficiency as well then there are many reasons as to why people might not want to go the "old but gold" route.

 

All the conversation has been very helpful. I noticed what you were saying as far as scores when comparing 5870 x2, 4870 x2, 8970, 7970, etc. It seems that the 8970 is kind of the max with my current 920 cpu. Can you explain to me the specifics of the bottle neck? What causes it? I guess this would help me really understand the limiting factor. Also, is there much of a difference between the 2GB and 4GB versions of the 8970?

 

I guess my understanding is that the GPU is waiting idle for the CPU to finish its tasks?

 

4GB will hold larger texture files

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With 8GB of RAM and my current CPU does it make sense to go for the 4GB VRAM version? It's about $100 to get that extra 2GB of VRAM.

 

Depends on the game... Games with larger textures like GTA V will benefit from the 4GB, personally I would get the 4GB for furture proofing

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Sounds like the master's solder is cracking. Bake it. You've got nothing to lose, typically visual artefacts are fixable by baking the card.

 

Bake your gpu.... People are truly insane these days... It has a chance of exploding you know

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Honestly, I used to be an electronics technician for a major comm company, and in a controlled environment we would re-flow solder to fix cold joints. I've also repaired a few YLoD PS3s that way. That was when I had the right tools though. If I baked the card, I'd have to reach somewhere around 380 °F, which could be a damaging temp for some other components. You're right though, it would be a last resort, otherwise it's going in the bin. I'm still going to take this occasion to upgrade, but it will be an easy science project. I'll wear my safety glasses.

 

I've revived a 5870M and 6970M by baking them. a 4870 would probably get revived too. I would add no clean liquid flux to the board, especially under the die BGA to make sure it reflows properly.

 

Please don't call re-flow a repair, because it isn't. It's a temporary solution that means nothing.
Also no, there are no component that die at 380F on your card, neither do you need 380F to fix your card. The small bumpers on the card need around 90-100c (300-330F) only. That's also the reason why people can fix their card with a hairdryer.

 

How can you say 300-330F is 90-100C ?

 

Well, not repair. You're right, it is a crutch till it fails again. We had different items that we were fixing that had a tendancy to have cold joints because of the the way they were designed. It was a known problem that had an engineered fix from the company. I don't know specifically if there are any components on this board that would die at 380, but as a person that performed component level repair, I know that there are some components out there that can die at that temp if it is sustained. I realize and know that re-balling/flowing is a myth when it comes to GPUs etc. Cold solder joints are usually not the actual problem, and the heating process is actually doing something else to the chip. Also, there really isn't any way that we can know the exact makeup of the solder. I had several different types that had a huge range of melting temps.

 

If it doesn't work before, and does after, then it's repaired.
The ends justify the means

Heat cycling over many years of use can cause the solder to fracture away from the land/chip pads. This can lead to intermittent, impaired or no connection of said pin to whatever it was meant to connect with.
If the card isn't giving video out then it's likely finished, but funky colors and driver crashes are more than fixable by heating it up (a lot).
In some cases it may be a temporary fix, but if the card is out of warranty and otherwise dead, there's no harm in trying it.

 

Just to share the data, I baked it and all the artifacts are gone. Just like there's nothing wrong with it. There was no harm, because I was just going to put it in the bin anyway. Whether it's bumps or joints, the heating got it working normally again. I suspect it will fail again pretty rapidly, and I am going to upgrade to an 8970 still. I may try to stress the current setup to see if it will fail again.

As I was performing removal, analysis, etc. There were a few things that I noticed. I got this LT as gift. "Not used anymore, you want it?" I cleaned it up, installed a fresh copy of 7 and an 850 evo.

With regard to the graphics card areas, they look like they are designed really well for air flow, but the exhaust channelization is really fine. Both sides were completely clogged. I pulled both off and noticed that the thermal compound used was minimal. With new compound and completely cleaned out air flow, I'm getting significantly lower temps. I suspect the neglect is what caused the failure in the first place. I will definitely be cleaning out these areas at least every 6 months or so.

Another Q. For some reason I thought I had a 920, but I've got an 840. Do you all think that I ought to upgrade to the 920? I will be playing new games on this thing, and I realize that it's a laptop, it's older, and that I won't be able to max out settings. I just need something to take with me on work trips that will play vids and run Rhinoceros, Faro Scene, etc. I probably will not be overclocking, but it's not out of the question.

 

There is no point in getting the 920 or 940 if you don't overclock imo. If you are prepared to lower settings it should run newer games fine, but if you want better performance i'd suggest looking for a cheap M18X R2 or an M17X R4. I'm holding on to my M17X R2 for at least a couple of years as 95% of the games I play are quite old now.

 

Thanks Arrrrbol. Admittedly, with work and other real life priorities on blast, I'm really far behind on games I'd like to play. I've got a list of about 15 that I haven't gotten to yet. So, many of them will be pretty old and I feel like I'll be okay. I just don't want to limit my card too much with a slow cpu.