MSI 1070 in Alienware 17 R1 Ranger SUCCESS!!!!

I apologize in advance as I am so excited I can barely type this post. I will be creating a DIY with pictures in the near future, possibly even in this thread, but I will decide that this weekend when I write it up! In the mean time...
I AM THE FIRST IN THE WORLD AND I CAN YELL IF I WANT TO! LOL!!!
HUGE thanks to @woodzstack for selling me the card and if anyone wants to attempt this as well he has the for sale thread here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/fs-msi-1070n-n17e-a2-g2.797652/


Now on to the good stuff!
1070 vs 980m
http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/10685043/fs/10547389



This is a link to all my personal information and photo backups of the last 2-3 weeks of my life on this project. Many of these photos are not directly relevant other than for my calculation and measurement purposes, and if anyone sees any of my personal information that you feel shouldn't be there please be respectful and let me know, I am offering these pictures unedited to the community on my own good will, and if people wish to take advantage of them/me I reserve the right to remove them.

https://1drv.ms/a/s!AhdpwHSIEN-vm3WH3bn4pa2hCL90

I had to use the 75W heatsink due to the one coil that is close to the right mounting screw. But so far temps are completely in check! Yes I am 120hz eDP display.

More to come!!

 

Dude you are a legend! I have to purchase a new gfx card for my laptop anyways so knowing this now I think I'll just wait until I can purchase a 1080 for it. Sent a message to eurocom asking if they'll be selling 10 series card any time soon and just waiting for a reply.

 

Awesome work bro! Luv it when older, venerable machines get a fresh infusion of new tech!

 

Thanks!
They are already selling them but the only ones that can be made to fit are the msi ones (1060 and 1070). Woozstack is "in cahoots" with eurocom and I would highly recommend purchasing from him please direct your purchase requests his way!

 

Yeah that's alright. I meant to say 1070 anyways, 1080 seems overkill without 4k monitor or tv. It will be a few months before I'm able to purchase a card, but I'll definitely contact Woozstack.
Are you using the 220w psu?
Also you might wanna update your sig

 

@loafer987 Kudos to you! You are brave, venturing into the unknown & expensive. Forever will your name be praised in the halls of this forum.
Fitment looks tight, I wonder if it being close to the CPU/HS will cause issues on the long run but this is GREAT news, just when we thought we got screwed by dropping the mxm standard shape, comes hope.

 

Awesome brother!

Sent from my A0001 using Tapatalk

 

As I and @Mr. Fox @Ashtrix @TBoneSan and a lot other always ha said... Nothing beats socket machines!! Why pay for example +- $3000 usd for a brand new AW TurdBOOK with BGA Gtx1070, when you can upgrade your old socket machine for a lot less? Socket hardware FTW

 

That's my wording! I luv getting "old" machines pimped up and kicking a$$ to the new ones!

 

Btw @Papusan: when will you toss a 1070/1080 into your R1 Elitist?

 

Did you have to use a dermal to mod the case or it fitted out of the box?

Sent from my LG-H850 using Tapatalk

 

For what I see in the pictures you have to "tape" cover the Opti-Bay SATA3 socket am I right?

If so there was no enough space to fir both? The sata3 plug + the 1070N upper right thingy?

 

@loafer987

Champion , well done! Rep!

Oh how BGA filth is so anticonsumer. Well done again!

 

Deserves a few rep points I think - Well done.

 

Very nice! +5 rep

Great to see the last good Alienware 17 providing another real world example of why BGA is like a bad case of digital diarrhea. Death to BGA filthbooks!

 

Rep points underway!! Great job for the community!

 

Thanks everyone! Quick responses as I work today.
Yes it took a sizeable amount of dremel work. But not as bad as the guy who put a 980 desktop in his aw 17.
Yes that is tape over the DVD connector. So yes, no more DVD drive. You might be able to make it fit but it would create unnecessary pressure on that corner of the gpu and I wasn't willing to risk my 1300$ gpu to keep a drive I've never used once.

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using Tapatalk

 

@woodzstack should pay you a small commission on every 1070 he sells, up to the purchase price of your GPU, for being the guinea pig. That's a lot of money and effort to spend on an experiment. Glad it turned out nicely. Much better end result than a new Alienware turdbook and a fraction of the cost of one.

 

Other than the crappy locked Bios, AW got everything about this machine so right that I am sure it freaked them out. The ease of reaching critical components (It's is so easy it puts most other AW models in shame), the number of available storage & ram options, the amazing build quality, the actual existence of a DVD bay and also the offline charging USB port, the speakers quality (eventhough it lacks a sub for unkown reason), the unreal beauty of a screen (The true color 120 Hz one & even the 3D option was a nice touch) and much much more.

I wish they would have just capitalized on this design and improved it and just added a proper bios. But instead they went on with the god forsakenly strange designs. even if the new designs weren't BGA, they still fade in comparison to this beauty with their insane lack of options and horrifyingly complicated access to components.

 

+rep @loafer987 , I thought you were selling the 4930MX jk.

Amazing daring feat m8, haha this one must have struck the M$I, Clevo, AW, nGreedia like a Death Star Boom !!
Looking forward for the Power Consumption / Voltage / Clocks / Temps in FSUltra and A few benches/games when you can & a big thanks for sharing this to the world.

Now that Zotac 1070 Box is here, Let the 3.0b games begin !!
@iunlock, @Mobius 1 check this out

 

Haha yes, it was all relying on this upgrade and how it went. Sadly I had to sell my m18x R2 to fund this experiment so hopefully its all worth it in the end but looks like I'm hanging onto my 4930mx now! sorry bud!

 

From your mouth to Frank Azor's ear's...................................
Amen to that.

 

That must have been painful, still use mine every day

 

Wow, major props for being the pioneer here. Glad to see somebody is pursuing cool stuff like this. Wonder if the M17x R4 would technically be able to do this too with a 3D screen and pure UEFI environment.

 

M17x R4 is not pure uefi?

zotac 1070 pics broken



as well as @loafer987 's onedrive link

would like to see internals on this

 

One drive link worked ok on my phone

Interesting the 75W heatsink seems ok. That's not supposed to happen. I wonder how temps and boost are but even a 10% slower 1070 is an awesome upgrade to a lot of people.

Then again, according to MSI this entire retrofit is impossible even in MSI notebooks with the same MSI card lol.

 

UPDATE #1
I am having strange driver issues. The driver that windows 10 used automatically upon first bootup (373.06) worked perfect for 2d (in windows) use. however when a game or longer 3d load is applied the driver would crash. (30 seconds or so into every game that I tried) after waiting for nvidia driver to recover, the card will allow me to game for much longer periods of time. ( only played for 30 min or less each time to keep eyes on temp etc. )
Heres where it gets really strange... When I updated the driver to the lastest nvidia release using the modded inf from TechInferno, the display goes black as soon as it installs and I lose display output completely. After this happens, if I force power cycle the laptop by holding the power button, the laptop display will show the windows boot uefi screens, then the gpu will boot to an external monitor, but not to the internal display. After the card has booted into windows on the external display, I can disconnect the external display and the internal display will function perfectly until I reboot again. Then I have to use the hard power cycle method with external display to get the internal monitor to work again...
I remember @thegh0sts having a similar (black screen) issue with his 980m after updating his vbios to the prema mod one. i believe this to be a vbios issue, but so far i cant find any modded vbios for the msi laptop cards.
Hopefully will have more time for testing tomorrow.

 

Dang, They were working before, The 1070MXM was full 3.0b type but the difference b/w this and 1060 MSI card were there were more VRAM on this like the 980M and 970M cards and maybe some power phases as well.

I can see the OneDrive here.

 

Any throttling before/during your driver crash (use sensor screen in GPUz)? What *are* the temps?
Does underclocking it as far as it'll go have any effect?
Are all the hot bits mosfets/vrms/rams etc on the card properly contacted with thermal pads?

Try a driver rollback to see if it resolves your latest internal/external display issue.

 

this. make absolutely sure and triplecheck that all important components on the gpu and properly covered by thermal pads.

Sent from my Huawei Mate 8 NXT-AL10

 

Maybe the load is too much for the 75W heatsink to handle ... put some liquid metal paste on that GPU and something like this https://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Copper-Cooling-Heatsinks-cooler/dp/B00637X42A on the 2 pipes. Also, if you can get the M17x R4 high CFM fan that might help as well.

 

I have the R4 fan upgrade and the M11x Cpu fan upgrade. Temps are absolutely not the issue at the moment. All i can think hardware wise is the power coils aren't transferring enough heat off of them. I will have to check heatsink pad placement again.
Heres a full 3dmark 11 run with the crash at the end. It always crashes at exactly the same point in the test. within about a 3 second span. All temps are very under control even with the 75w heatsink so far.

 

place a temp sensor under/near the component and leave it open up - OR get a very powerful fan or something and have it blow in between the components to cool it during the test to see if that is the cause. It might literally not be the cause, and it could be power draw. Benches take more power then using the card for a game would take. This could also be a driver issue, as in the driver goes to load a feature and it's not supported or recognised properly. Like some type of shading or DX12 thing.

 

Looking at your temps - im pretty sure it's the temps. Your hitting mid 80's Celsius. These cards shouldn't be able to put you past 65C in good/great conditions.

Get the 100W heatsink going ASAP.

When a 980M was used with a 75/80W heatsink in the past people couldn't complete a bench either, temps would hit mid/high 80's and then only mid/high 60's when using the 100W heatsink.

 

This is great news! Thanks loafer987.

 

He is hitting mid 80s on CPU ... GPU is super safe at mid 50s and that's is actually pretty weird.

 

You can only red temperature from core but other components like VRAM or voltage regulators can get very hot and here's your issue. Upgrade to 100W heatsink.

 

That issue definitely seems like something is heating up. Usually on Maxwell it would give you a black screen with the Pascal cards the driver crashes.
From the pictures I saw 2 of the coils aren't covered up completely, that could be the cause.

 

No no, those temps you are looking at are the CPU at 4GHZ. I have a modded laptop cooler using 2 desktop 120mm fans. one blowing on cpu side one on gpu side. The 100W heatsink doesnt fit the gpu without bending the copper strip that runs from the memory chips over the the vrms. If you cut this strip the VRM cooling benefit would be lost. With the 75w heatsink the core temps have never gone over 71*C. but as you can see the card isnt coming up to boost clocks yet either.

Yes I have tried multiple gpu monitor programs and nothing seems to be able to read the vrm temps like the old 7970m's used to. Hopefully modding my 100W heatsink will happen later tonight, but it requires a few more modifications to make it work.

 

http://www.laptopmain.com/msi-gt73vr-disassembly/
I have been using this link for the research over the last couple days. It would appear the vrm cooling is bigger problem than I anticipated. However the 2 coils you are referring to are not covered in the msi machine either... so now I know those arent to blame. Looks like i'll have to move onto the main vrms.

 

Yes VRM cooling is definitely an important point to cover. I would try to see if you can fit one of those clevo backplate heatsinks to the backside of the card and mod the 100W heatsink to fit properly

 

VRAM sensor is useless. VRM or voltage regulator is probably overheating.

 

Hmmm.I once had the issue with my 980 where there was a gap between the VRM and thermal pad and that was causing black screens even at stock clocks after about 30 mins of overwatch, even though the temperatures were about 75C max. And this was one of the smaller VRM's on the side. Once i closed the gap. It never happened again, even with the higher clocks.
But you do have point about them being uncovered on the MSI machine. It might be something else heating up. That MSI heat sink looks beefy though.
If it was the VRAM, then you will start seeing artifacts and pixellation.

 

no won't fit, but we can create something else instead, like a TEP module, which can help bleed some temps.

if the card is cooled enough, it will even draw heat from there, but if it's not cooled properly, temps bleed everywhere into every component and saturate the components underneath even.

I'm going to go and suggest insulating underneath and then maybe adding a small amount of copper shims where you can fit it, until you have the heatsink perfected. You can use Aluminium as well if you have no copper. like the foil can be cut and shaped and folded, but it carries a capacitance, so be careful how it touches components or if it shorts something. In places where you have more then 2mm to cover with thermal pads, i recommend filling the gap with something like copper or aluminium instead and then using as little as possible thermal paste or padding...because while thermal pads conduct a tiny bit of heat, they are relatively insulators in comparison to metals like aluminium and copper.

 

Very true. But a lot of times certain components do not get enough contact area. Which slows down their heat drain.
But I'm sure it's not that much here.

 

well, just got another AW17 in the mail, it's been awhile since I've used one, time to test things out.

 

So I think I may have an idea. On top of the mosfet and coil cooling I still need to look into, I noticed something on the msi review I linked earlier. These two components are designed to make direct contact with the heatsink. (circled in red) There's a bunch of them on the backside of the card as well but MSI and eurocom both choose not to cool the backside ones, however MSI clearly has designed their heatsink to make contact with these points on the front of the card. If this is in fact the issue, then the upgraded cards in the eurocom sky x9 shown here should also be suffering from similar issues to what I am having, or at least some of the core clock limitations that I am experiencing.
Maybe @Eurocom Support could give me some input as to why in their video they are not using thermal pads on these components.
I used the Eurocom video as my reference as to thermal pad placement, so this is how I noticed this. Eurocom also isnt cooling the 2 mosfets above the cap on the right that I keep having clearance issues with. which are also covered on the MSI heatsink.
Just some food for thought before I call it a night. i need to but some arctic silver thermal adhesive to solve my cap clearance issues I believe so it might be a day or two before I get the 100w heatsink modded to work.

 

They look a lot like what people are painting with liquid metal to remove power limits on desktop cards. Resistors that are involved in current regulation iirc. I'm in the habit of making sure anything bigger than a resistor has a thermal pad on it, even if not directly under a heatsink it's still something to bleed surface heat away and be the difference between bug free operation and ... an EVGA Pascal card catching fire

Also, invest in an infrared temperature gun. Best 13 bucks I ever spent.

 

Similarly I've marked red area on the 880M that my heatsink didn't covered - http://forum.notebookreview.com/attachments/thermal-jpg.121355/

 

I noticed that too when I got my laptop and on both my former 880 and current 980 I added very thick thermal pad to transfer the heat to the heatsink.

I hope there was a point in doing this.