Moving my Dual 5870s Crossfire into my R1 and GTX 260m SLi into my R2.

TADA the old SwitcherOONEy! LOL!


Oles I just put my Dual 5870s Crossfire into my R1 olesss! + my GTX 260 SLi's into my R2 for testing purposes of course oles!

More info to come!

Cheers.

 

Can't wait to see how it's going to work out! Btw, hai reborn! Thanks for helping me out a few weeks ago.

 

Oles! Sure things no worries.

If anyone wants me to test anything just give us a yell OLES!


I'm just trying to get the drivers installed for both now. Having some trouble installing the 260s atm. The 5870s installed with AMD 10.10 mobility with no problems; except I can't see or get to the Crossfire section in CCC and GPU-z keeps crashing when I go to run it.



Cheers.

 

I was told the r1 couldn't use 5870s so the lock ups really doesn't surprise me?

 

Oles No lockups chiefs just the program like GPU-z crashes when I try to run it. + I can't find crossfire anywhere LOL. I'm going to give Dells ATi driver a go next.

Otherwise everything is running well so far. Scratch that. I just tried running movies and some vid files but they can't run. The vid player program crashes every single time I go to open them.

+ Only 1 GPU is being used atm. So not to sure if the R1 can really do Dual 5870s in Crossfire yet.

Cheers.

 

Videos crashing is just a 10.10 driver problem. It happens to me too.

 

Ah okay cool cool chiefs. I'm gonna wipe these buggy 10.10s and revert back to Dells 10.8s soon and do more testing oles!

I've still gotta install some display drivers for the R2 with the 260s. I tried the Nvidia 260.99 and it told me there were no recognised GPUs so it couldn't install any drivers for me LOL

Hows the Outlet system going Joker? U missing your 940XM ey????

Cheers.

 

Isn't few days ago there a guy trying to get 5870M to work on R1 unsuccessfully?

Anyhow, great job reborn

 

Oles Thanks.

I'm just trying to get all the drivers sorted then I can start finally doing some testing and gaming and Wat not!

I think the other guy got it working with a single 5870 successfully. I've seen and heard that quite a few have gotten single 5870s to work but never a Dual Crossfire 5870 setup to work properly on the R1.

Thought I might as well give it a go since I had both at hand. + Scook9 was thinking about trying to get some dual 5870s for his R1 perhaps. I might be able to do some testing for him oles!

Cheers.

 

There is no way to get the 260 to work on the r2 i tried with my 280's and it was a no go.I started a thread about it here.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/485993-m17x-r2-280m-gtx.html#post6278033

 

Ah thanks for that chiefs. I thought it was just me LOL. I tried like every driver under the sun and it would not budge oless. Tried to force install it as well but failed every time oles.

Cheers.

 

Testing for the pure sake of testing. +rep

Love to see the threads like this. If you have the gear sitting around, it's nice to just see what will work.

 

Ehahahh Thanks Chiefs.

Yeh I've been meaning to do this for a while now, I've just been too lazy and busy.

It looks like the 260s are a complete no go in the R2 though as confirmed by another chief that the 280s were a no go either.

As far as I know a single 5870 will work fine in the R1 however I'm having trouble getting 2 of them to work in crossfire. I've tried a couple of drivers now and they install okay however I can't run any vids on any of my players. Eg. GOM, VLC, media player. I can play music mp3 files fine. Also I can't seem to load games but I can do a WEI run LOL ehahaha.

Oh well didn't exactly go as I was hopping. Just plug and play and work LOL ehahaahahah. Now I know. Better for the experience of it eheheeheh!

I like tinkering around with hardware. I think I will test some MX-4 thermal paste next lol. I've already tried Tuniq TX-4, AS5, Formula 5, Some random pastes I found in my draws , Shin Etsu. + a few other random ones I collected over the years.

So far the top 2 are Shin Etsu and TX-4 however I have a feeling that MX-4 will be my new number one soon enough OLES!

Cheers.

 

Wow so many questions, I have a R1 with sli 260m. Are you using the same fans and heat sink from the R1 with those crossfire 5870s.

And Bios are you currently using on the R1?

maybe test out the 5870s with furmark, see if they are getting used and post some temps.

 

Yup chiefs. They look exactly the same to me. I don't see any differences. The fans are also the same in both R1 and R2. I even moved them around last time just messing around LOL. The SLi and Crossfire cable also sit exactly the same way. Pretty much everything looks the same inside except we know that one is using the Nvidia Chipset and the other the Intel.

I was on system Bios A03. Might give A05 ago later. However I'm not expecting too much to change.

So far in the HWiNFO temps I'm only seeing the one GPU 5870 ever being used. The 2nd one is literally doing and has done nothing lol. Lazy bugger. Just because hes in another house he thinks hes the guest of honour or something LOL LOL ehahahah. So yeh it only seems that 1 GPU was being used. I also can't get access to Crossfire settings in CCC and I want to take some pictures using GPU-z however every version of GPU-z I have tried crashes and produces the same GPU-z error log.

ANother thing I noticed in the R2 when the 260s were in there was that the GPU fans were always on full blast non stop. I figure that was because I didn't and couldn't install a proper driver for them to be recognised properly. So no thermal instruction sets being able to be access from the driver installs.

Cheers.

 

oh wow perfect, are you still using the Bios A03 from your sig?

 

Yeh ahuhs. BIOS A03 is the best that I have used so far.

I did try A04 and A05 last time but they screwed up my battery charging and produced the annoying wrong adapter message every time I started up the notebook from a cold boot.

I really wanted to get crossfire working in the R1 though. So far unsuccessful. However I might give it another go next time and tinker with it some more.

Cheers.

 

well you tired, most likely something with the software somewhere is causing the problems. if you booted up and everything then everything sound it should work right.

but with only 1 5870 working i rather keep my Asus g73 around. I will try it out too if I can find a pair of 5870.

 

Yep ahuhs.

Yeh trues trues that chiefs.

The only other thing I was thinking of for both R1 and R2 was to do a complete OS re install and test things out fresh and so clean clean ehahaah

That however is a bit too much work for now. Perhaps another time.

I'm looking forward to whatever new GPU offerings are going to come out in the near future. I want to chuck them in and do some testing eheheeh. Heck I wouldn't mind chucking in a 980XM in here ehahaah LOL.

Also I think its time to turn you Green buddy oles! Nice chatting with YA! (Oh no I've given out too many rep points in the last 24hrs) I can't turn you green just yet chiefs.

Cheers.

 

cool, I didn't know it was possible to have a 5870m in the R1 at all, been looking to upgrade from my 260m SLI for a while, and this presents an interesting new option...

 

I personally think it's bull that all of these cards aren't compatible considering they are all the same MXM slot. What is the point of standardization if consumers are still limited by the BIOS?

 

Yes but more than that, I miss having my Intel SSD. This Seagate hybrid drive is okay but it's nothing compared to the speed of an SSD. That's the first upgrade I plan to purchase and then relegate this seagate drive as secondary.

 

LOL I love this =^_^= I am a Nvidia guy, so thumbs up!

 

I am still debating on gettng like a 128gb ssd but they are still like 220?

 

Oles Oi nice pic chiefs!

Can't wait to get my hands on that game in a couple of days.

Yeh same here. I was going to buy an SSD a few weeks back but speaking to some peeps on here I decided I will wait till the end of the year or otherwise till next year.
More new SSD tech to come out in the next few months and therefore lower the prices more.

Cheers.

 

980XM ???? You mean 940xm yeah mate, unless you know of a new cpu the rest of us don't, ha ha ha ha!!!

Good job on the video card swap. But doesn't the 5870 xfire perform better than the SLI 260's ?

 

Hey reborn2003.

Did you also move the CrossFire cable from the R2 to the R1?

Yes it would be nice if it was all plug and play, not much point having a standard for the MXM slots when this is not fully posible.

 

Hey there chiefs,

Yeh I moved both GPUs and the Crossfire cable into the R1 from the R2.

I sure hope we are able to use the new GPU cards coming out soon. AMDs 6000 mobility series and Nvidia's 400M Series.

Cheers.

 

I would expect allot of (non)artificial blocks in the BIOS and chipset. Nvidia was known to lock down their chipsets to only use SLI, and keep Crossfire disabled, hence no Xfire in the R1. R2 is known to have approved cards hardwired into the BIOS, so that means no 260s. And since MXM is (as I understannd it) still not a 1:1 specification with PCIe, there is always more programming involved to get it to work propperly.
So overall, good job in the experimenting, but this may be as far as you can take the switch.

 

Crossfire works perfectly fine in my R1

 

Yes the R1 comes with the option for 2x4870's in crossfire, its a standard dell/Alienware option.

 

Most with a newer R1 have the 4870's in Crossfire.

 

Sorry, my mistake. Forgot about that. (doh!)

 

Willing to give this a try again with the new A06 BIOS that is just out?

I still want to see 5870s in CF in an R1!

 

That would be great but i bet Dell would've mentioned something about that in the list of fixes/updates of the BIOS worth giving it a go though.

 

They may not want the support there, but that does not mean it is not there. Also, they could have just added it and stayed quiet since they do not plan to support it.