M17x r1 and one dead GPU, second GPU usable?

I have an M17x R1 with two 260m cards in SLI. Last night it turned off suddenly and refused to even try to turn on a little bit. That is usually the result of something like a short in the hardware, so I opened it up and took out the primary GPU (the one on the left). Sure enough, after removing the bios/cmos battery for a few seconds it now turned on. A few tests later and I have determined that it will definitely not turn on with the primary 260m in.

So luckily the R1 has the integrated 9400m to fall back on, and that is how it is running right now.

I suppose my question is: Can the M17x be made to run from the other 260m while it is in the second slot? If not, would it be possible to swap heatsinks with the broken card and just slide the second card into the first slot? Alternatively, I would be willing to put in a single more powerful card in the primary slot - lets face it, the 260m SLI setup didn't set the bar very high.

Normally I would get dell to send a guy with a replacement, but the (twice extended) warranty ran out last week and, as it turns out, looks like the warranty was unextendable past 5 years anyway. (warranty period starts 2009 from a faulty XPS)

Looking forward to more info. Searching for keywords "can m17x run off second GPU only" gets results related to disabling the integrated graphics card .

 

Someone else would have to confirm this since i donno if R1 and R2 are the same, BUT:

1: you should not expect it to work in secondary slot alone. (it will not in the R2 so my guess is not here either)

2: The secondary card can easily be moved to primary slot if you carefully take care of the pads on the memory and put it back on the correct places, pluss you clean up and add brand new heatpaste. Preferrably of a good quality. There are videos made for this if you are not 100% sure how to.

3: The R1 supports as much as 2*5870M as top cards. Not sure how they perform compared to the 260M but from what ive read even one should be apx same as 260M SLI.

The first search you did, we pretty much solved that? (not able to run on card in secondary slot)

Now search for upgrade M17 r1 GPU in this fora. Was discussed not long ago. You will find the alternatives.

 

Thanks for the reply, based on your suggestion I swapped the heat sink and put the other 260M in the primary slot. It almost works perfectly even with the integrated graphics disabled, aside from the laptop turning off within a few seconds of starting something GPU intensive, but that is a problem that is well documented within these forums... most likely it is immediately overheating due to my shoddy heat sink swap. I will try it again another day with some good thermal paste.

I was originally unsure because I had read in some threads here that sometimes the cards have slot specific VBIOSes.

In the meantime I can get along fine with just the 9400m.

Thanks for the help!

 

If you are going to keep your M17X R1 for at least another year, then I would highly suggest you upgrade to the 5870m.. I used to own 260m SLI in my R1, and then upgraded to a single 5870m. That single 5870m completely destroyed the two 260m's in everything, I really was not expecting that much of a performance boost! As you said, the 260m SLI really doesn't set the bar high enough, I would really hate being stuck with a single one of these. You can even sell your 260m once you get the 5870m, so the upgrade would be very cheap on your end.

 

It will work fine once you swap the gpus, there will be some issues, such as HDMI not functioning correctly. To resolve all issues you will need to flash a master vbios to your slave card.

I would recommend putting you current master card in the oven for 10 mins @ 385 degrees, there is a %70 chance you can fix your card buy remelting the solder in this way

 

True, also you can find some information about overeating here.