M17xR3 w/460M - Dell OEM Nvidia driver issue

When I first received my system I immediately installed my SSD and started installing a fresh copy of the OS. There were some hurdles I had to work through like my SSD needing newer firmware and finding out the Intel Rapid Storage driver BSOD my system with the OCZ drive installed. Then not having all the software needed on the Dell resource DVD. (Command Center and USB 3.0 drivers)

When I finally straighten all those issues out I went to install the 460M drivers. Upon reboot I received a BSOD. I went into safe mode to remove the driver and restarted it. When I went back into the install routine I deselected all the options except the graphics driver and tried again but I had the same result.

I then went over to laptopvideo2go. What they do is take the latest desktop drivers and modify them to work with the mobile cards. You need to download the driver you want, extract it, then download the modified inf file and put that in the extracted folder. After that just run the regular setup routine. I haven't had an issue with video since then.

The question is what is Dell doing to make their driver work and if you uninstall the driver from the Dell image and then reinstall it will you also get a BSOD?? Who wants to try!

 

Ok now this just scares me because I will have my OCZ SSD here soon and don't want to mess with BSODs...

 

Which one do you have? I have the Vertex LE.

 

Vertex 2 - here

 

Yep, Vertex 2 and Vertex LE are pretty much the same thing. They use the same firmware. Make sure you install FW 1.28 and do not install IRST from the resource DVD.

 

I didn't install anything from my resource DVD lol

 

I'll take a look at the drivers this weekend and see what is and isn't included to see if I can find a clash between the different drivers. Quick question for ya Mandrake, did you have to manually put the id strings in for our card into the modded .inf file or were they already in it?

 

It's already done in the modded inf.

 

Ok cool, I just know Dell is infamous for changing id strings to keep them from being compatible with drivers out on release of new systems.

 

which driver version did you grab from laptopvideo2go?

I was hoping to get my system today, but it looks like it's being snowed in. I'll be a guinea pig when I do get it though.

 

I personally grabbed 266.66, I should have my system within the next couple of hours, that's the bright side of being in Utah snow doesn't stop anything til we have 20 feet in the valley lol. I know I've also tested 266.44 on some other systems with good results.

 

DaneGRClose may I ask what SSD and HDD are used in your laptop configuration?

M17xR3: ST Nebula Red | i7-2630qm | 8gb 1333 | 1.5gb GTX460m | 256Gb SSD+320Gb HDD | BT | Intel 6300 Wifi | DVD+/-RW | Win 7 Pro

 

Not certain on the HDD it gets here in a few hours, the SSD is a Samsung I already have.

 

I'm sure y'all already know this, but that's the driver Dell ships the R3 with - I highly recommend not updating it to the newest one out (released 1/18/11)

 

266.66 is definitely not the driver that the R3 ships with unless it ships with a driver installed that isn't on their Driver site. The one on the driver site is the 266.08 that is a Dell modded driver. The 266.66 is a desktop driver, it's been modded for use on laptops.

 

I confirm that my stock driver for my 460 is indeed 266.08. I am downloading 266.66 to test and will post results.

What I got in was:

Alienware M17x Soft Touch Nebula Red
Intel Core i7 2720QM 2.2GHz (3.3GHz Turbo Mode, 6MB Cache)
MOD,DIMM,4GB,1333MHZ,DDR3,2X2G
17.3-inch WideFHD 1920x1080 120Hz WLED w/ NVIDIA 3D Vision Bundle
1.5GB GDDR5 Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M
750GB 7,200RPM HDD
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English
Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BR-ROM, DVD+-RW, CD-RW)
Internal High-Definition 5.1 Surround Sound Audio
Wireless 802.11 g/n


Stock 3dmark06 was 14,406

 

Ok, just got finished testing with the laptopvideo2go 266.66 desktop driver and scored slightly higher than stock, I am going to revert back to the old one.

 

Ah ok well I stand corrected - is it worth using the modded one?

 

IMO not yet, for 10pts its barely a mouse fart in performance. Though I am a big proponent to modded drivers, I'll stick to a tested driver for now.

 

266.66...The latest one.

Using these modded drivers often cause issue when coming back from hibernation. That's where Batboy takes over....

 

Ah, INF, that's what I meant in that other post where I said "INI" Lolz. My bad.

Anyhoo, will this 460m driver issue affect me, when I reformat/fresh install win7? I won't be using any other hdd other than the one that comes with the computer.

Thanks!

 

For the past 2 days, I've been running a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate on a SSD (Patriot Inferno 100GB) using RAID mode. I used all of the drivers from the Resource DVD (P/N 9G8C3) except for the missing installers for USB 3.0 and OSD Alienware which I downloaded from support.dell.com.

Everything was running fine until tonight when I started using the HDMI output and SD card reader and all of a sudden I started getting BSODs within seconds after windows started up. To resolve, I first removed the 8GB memory I added. After power-on without the extra memory, I still got BSOD. So, I removed my SSD and put the original 320GB drive back in. This time I did not get any BSOD. This meant that it wasn't a hardware issue.

Upon replacing my SSD, I got BSOD again. So, I went into safe mode and UNINSTALLED the video driver. I was then able to reboot with the default VGA driver and the system appeared to be stable again.

Finally, I decided to download the NVidia drivers from support.dell.com (NVIDIA_GTX-465M_A00_R291227 and NVIDIA_INTERNAL-3D-STEREO-CO_A00_R291236).

After running these to reinstall the NVidia driver, I restarted thinking I would get the BSOD and guess what, I've been running without BSOD for about a hour.

So, I'm guessing that the drivers that came with the Resource DVD may be corrupt as Mandrake suggested. Mandrake, maybe you can try the drivers from the support.dell.com site?

 

More than likely but you'll have to wait and see.

I did but I was still getting BSOD.

 

bad news... BSOD came back with the dell drivers that were downloaded from Dell's support site.

I can't seem to be able to download the INF file from laptopvideo2go. Can you tell me where I can get the INF to use?

 

Epic fail, hope this gets resolved =/

 

Oh noesssss. I might just have to swap for a 6870 if the 460m is causing this many problems...

 

Go to their forum posting of the driver. Their inf file can be downloaded from there.

I also attached it to this message. Just remove the ".txt" to use it.

 

Hope to have something for you folks by the weekend.

 

Thanks
Just got notice that my Vertex 2 is waiting for me to pick it up, so I'll be doing a fresh install tonight.

 

Thank you! Installed 266.66 and no BSOD yet... fingers crossed.

 

Do you have the 3D system or the Optimus system?

 

3D. Going to return due to Intel fiasco and getting a 6970 when they let me reorder. I really need the battery life.

 

Very good idea. Get 6870.

 

So i had it down pat on my old asus with the 5870....uninstall all ati drivers, reboot into safe mode, run driver sweeper, reboot install new drivers.

The question is for the 460 WITH 3D, what is the procedure....should i do the same or install over the top....if i run driver sweeper, im guessing it will kill my 3d, so i am guessing a reinstall of that is required as well.....anyone have a solid procedure yet...i want to go to the newest nvidia reference.

 

I try to install the driver from the nvida site and it says no compatable hardware detected? do i need a modded driver? anyone got a link to a good one if so?

 

Do you know how to replace modded .inf files in driver packages? If you do just grab the 266.66 driver from laptopvideo2go and the modded .inf file, repackage it and install. If not let me know and I'll upload one for you. Also do you have an Optimus rig or a 3D one?

 

It'd be nice if someone did an optimus inf for 266.66

 

Would this mean that we could get higher battery life? Could a modded INF file turn off the GPU completely, similar to how the 6870 does?

 

Um, no.

 

it would mean I wouldn't have to use the baddie dell drivers anymore, and that's about all.

If no one else does one soon, I'll give it a shot.

 

see here....

 

Yeah guys just wait on BatBoy, modding Optimus drivers is a lot of work. I helped someone do it in the M11x forum and it was a lot of hit and miss work.

 

Boy thats a bummer. I'm not patient enough to deal with crappy drivers from the OEM, and not well-versed in computer stuff to deal with BSODs or the risk of it. Man, you guys are making me more and more anxious every single day LOL!

 

Don't be, there is just a lot of work in the structuring and modding of an Optimus driver package. I learned quite a bit helping Nautis mod the PB fixed M11xR2 drivers and can't say for certain I could do it again. I'm sure BatBoy will come through sometime this weekend and from the next driver release on we should be good with the Nvidia drivers.

 

No idea what you guys are talking about haha. Well, I know the subject, but I have no idea what those fancy lingo mean.

 

I'm actually having trouble with the non-Dell drivers.

My R3 is the non-3D model with the 460M.

I did a clean install yesterday of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit on an OCZ Vertex2 120GB SSD. I downloaded all the drivers from the Dell website so I'd have the latest, got everything installed and even made sure not to install the Intel IRT drivers.

Based on what I've read here, I tried the laptopvideo2go method first, the 266.66 with modded .INF. Everything seemed fine, no BSODs, but the Nvidia control panel would crash every time I launched it.

So I uninstalled those and tried the reference drivers direct from Nvidia, 266.58. Those wouldn't even install as they said I wasn't running a supported card despite the fact that I was able to choose 460M as my card when I did the download on the site.

I finally went back to the Dell 266.08 drivers and those installed without a hitch, and the Nvidia control panel is working fine.

However, I have a few questions:

1) How do I know that the computer is switching between Optimus and the 460M when playing games? I am getting horrendous frame rates in Second Life, atrocious compared to my desktop ATI Radeon HD 5850, even at lowest graphics quality. This indicates to me that it's not switching over to the Nvidia GPU.

2) In a non-3D setup, isn't the Fn-F7 command supposed to force the switch? I still get the message that "this does not do anything" that I've seen the folks with 3D setups report. How do I force the system to use the Nvidia GPU?

 

Those laptopvideo2go drivers are not modified to enable Optimus. Don't use them unless you don't already have intel's drivers installed. Apparently Batboy is working on a set of Optimus drivers for us right now ( as pointed out by mandrake). This is also most likely the reason that the drivers are causing BSOD for all of the 3D systems (because Dell's include Optimus functionality).

To know if GPU is in use:
Nvidia Control Panel -> (menubar) Desktop -> Display GPU activity icon in notification area
You'll get an icon that looks something like this when you click on it



To force the GPU:
Nvidia Control Panel -> (menubar) Desktop -> Add "Run with graphics processor" to context menu
Then right-click on any program -> Run with graphics processor -> High performance NVIDIA processor

or you can add a program to the optimus profile @
control panel -> manage 3D settings -> (Tab) Program Settings
pick a program from drop down. If you don't see it, deselect "Show only programs found on this computer"

The horrendous frames are probably two-fold
1. Dell drivers are notoriously bad for optimization
2. Possible issue with gtx 460m

 

kunekaden,

Thanks for your help. I had actually discovered the application exception in the Nvidia control panel while you were replying and put Second Life into that. Bam! Working great now. I will leave the default set to Auto and just make sure that I add exceptions. I really want to optimize battery life during the times I'm not gaming.

But that GPU activity icon in the system tray I didn't now about, and I turned that on. Great tip and I will keep an eye on that for other games.

I look forward to BatBoy's work. I already used his posts on restoring the Alienware look and feel to make the new install look just like the original OOB.

This is my first Alienware, and I love this forum and the folks with all the great help and tweaking info. I'm hoping as time passes that I can make my own contributions.

Thanks again.

 

My first Alienware, too. There's a lot of great info on these forums; I'm glad I found them. If you're looking to contribute, I could use some help with optimus real-life battery tests. Drop me a pm if you're interested.

 

Roykirk, when you said you used Dell's 460m drivers without issue did you install the intel HD graphics drivers first and then the nvidia?
After a fresh windows install if I try to update 460 first I get an error that Intel HD graphics drivers need to be done first. I then install intel HD without issues but after I install 460 drivers the system freezes and I have to do a hard reboot to go into safe mode to remove the nvida drivers and then it will work again using intel HD graphics.
Any suggestions?