Need help solving numerous problems

Yes, it worked when I took out one of the RAM chips, still get flashing CAPS and I tried all combinations of the 2 chips. I Just don't understand how taking in and out the RAM fixed that issue :S

Can the blue and grey flickering screen I get on startup be a RAM issue too? Happens often when innstalling display drivers, and sometimes just random.

 

How about a nice upgrade to some new ram? Kingston Hyperx ram is awesome. I think your RAM is bad and the kingston ram is like 111 US dollars.

http://www.provantage.com/kingston-technology-khx1333c7s3k2-4g~7KIN9138.htm

 

The flashing screens are either hardware related (bad gpus/sli cable) or driver related.

 

Bad RAM will stop your system dead......As stated above check cables, then 1 GPU at a time, i find it hard that both would be nackered

 

Agreed, bad system ram would be giving completely different symptoms like constant blue screens, failure to get into windows, possibly not posting

 

Haha My bad.

 

Not so m8.....It could be there are two issues present. If his laptop wont post, i woudl look at RAM issues, if it gets past that but the screen is flashing or flickinh, then i would look at GPU cables and poss faulty hardware

 

So I spent ages trying to install the drivers when either running on Hybrid mode or just on the 2 280's. Finally got to load them, (I got blue flickering screen everytime I tryed to start windows, worked fine with the 9400). Now I see in futuremark that one card is getting 85C and the other 35C so it must either be the SLI cable or the slave card I think. Because SLI is supposed to be enabled when I turned off hybrid and the 9400 in the BIOS right? But I did put the SLI cable into place last time -_- So must be something with the card then.

 

I would make sure that your SLI cable is seated well in both cards. I think I remember there being some issues with SLI cables last year when the notebook was still a new model

 

I checked the SLI cable again, got hold of a windows 7 cd and installed again. Installed the latest drivers and have not had any flickering screens yet, also scored 13k in vantage, so I am pleased. Now for the flashing CAPS, I am either buying 4gb hyperx ddr3 1600mhz for $135 or 8gb ddr3 1333mhz for $145, which is better?

 

I assume that 13k in vantage was with physx enabled?

 

Glad you sorted it in the end m8.....I would go for the 8 GB then you are able to do more things like run VMware and play with virtual labs. If however this is not a must for you , get the faster 4 GB. 8 GB is more furture proof

 

Get the 4gb if you want to bench, 8gb otherwise. Also, for the HyperX, get the 1333 Cas 7 NON XMP stuff. The 1600 will run at crappy 1333 cas 9 speeds since your motherboard cannot utilize the XMP profiles

 

I think so, can't find a way to disable it so yeah
Choosing quickboot in the BIOS also skips through the flashing caps thing so I am not really affected by it at all now. Temps in furmark are 85-90C but I won't work any more on that as I finally got the laptop back in working order. And I will only use this laptop for gaming, so since I never use more than 2gb of RAM at once maybe the hyperx can be good option. Also just have to buy a Pelican case, looks so cool! And thanks to Reborn, Scook, Gintor and MKelliny for the assistance!

 

Pelicans are nice!

And if those are the FurMark temps you should be fine

 

Glad you have everything back in working order Kidio. Next time I goto london I will punch those NDC ppl in the face for you.

 

Np Kidio.......Glad all is well, nothing worse than saving for something and then BAM you loose it due to some unforseen issue. Hope you enjoy your purchase for the next few years

 

Hey guys, just had a little update.
I have not had any flickering screens after I installed windows 7 again, but I've had some other issues. I got 2 BSOD today one said hardware was the cause, other said nvlddmkm.sys.

It happened when i started Far cry 2, I did underclock the cards though, is that safe? 583/950/1450 to 425/800/1200. I do this to make the laptop much more silent. Seems like I get errors when I under and overclock, maybe that's not such a good idea, hmm but it makes me be able to play games around people when the fan is only at 2600-3200 rpm

I also have some weird temps on one of the cards: http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/4797/idletemps.png And this is idle.

When gaming Bioshock 2 the temps were on 1 card: 61 and 70. on the other 39 and 41. Maybe it doesn't support SLI. I also tried Far cry 2 and all temps were around 70C

I played Dead Rising 2 for 10 mins with stock values and sound and screen just freezes.

Also I was wondering something else; You guys said it is safest to order direct from dell, but in Norway that is REALLY expensive. If I buy an R2 with 840qm, RGB LED screen and the crossfire 5870, 500gb hardrive and 8gb ram it is $5000. Any other safe resellers or something I could check out?

 

seems strange you get two different temps, i would not say 70 was overly high in gaming.

Overclocking and underclocking is a bit of a dark art. You have to persist in order to find the right balance and untill you have done this you are likely to experience issues.

 

That bsod is caused by the Nvidia driver. Crashing or something. Also your temps are fine. 70 odd or even closer to 80 are normal temps. For gaming you won't really be able to get away with the higher temp noises. Sorry chiefs, its just how it has to be. Also underclocking and overclocking can have different effects on many different games or applications. For example things like 3d mark 06 then to not be so sensitive when your running a high OC on the GPU so it will just keep running and most likely will let you finish benching whereas Vantage is not so forgiving. It is more sensitive and will most likely crash at some point or won't even run at all. You'll have to play around with the settings. Others have tried to undervolt their CPUs and GPUs to lower temps and the like.

If the game is crashing at those particular clocks you can just keep trying different clocks and hopefully you can find one where it will be stable at. That unfortunately is the art of underclocking or overclocking.

Also if you can get the fans to spin in the low 3k margin or below 3k rpm during gaming then that is already quite a win. The 280s are known to be hotter than AMD gpus so perhaps that also influences temps and things. I know for my 260s no matter what I do to the cooling. I have managed to cool it down to low 60s and no higher than 65 during gaming however the fans still sound like a fighter jet plane. It is most likely also helping me achieve those awesome cool temps though. Also the system bios will have built in thermal fan control numbers which will make it hard for you to lower the fan noise during gaming.

I guess for performance we have to sacrafice for putting up with a bit of fan noise. No biggy ey.
Other things you can do are only to game next to an Air con or really cool place with a notebook cooler underneath as well.
+ also experiment with all the thermal pastes under the sun like I am currently testing out lol. However I remember you saying last time that you didn't want to touch that again since you managed to fix up the last error. So no worries.

Cheers.

 

I get crashes even when im not over or underclocking. The audio get's like "stuck" and the screen freezes, sometimes BSOD sometimes just stand there. I will try some other types of drivers I saw on another thread here with a special inf file or something. I just don't get why this machine has to be so difficult to live with!!!!

Reason why I hate opening the machine up now is that the brown thing that is holding the cable between the panel with the power botton is gone, so I have to use tape and hope it hold together as I put it back.
And hopefully 5870 crossfire is more silent than 280m sli which sometimes get to 4100 rpm!

 

Yeh it sure can be a very annoying driver problem that one. I had the same thing last time on vista and another time on win7. Can't exactly remember how I fixed it but I think it was mainly just trying out a heap of other Nvidia drivers until I found one that was stable enough. I sure do hate how some newer drivers are better for newer games but somehow cause a bug or will stuff up older games. And then of course the vice versa problems. Then like your case where it is completely unstable atm. Usually when that happens you will have to uninstall the driver cleanly Fresh and then either reinstall it again or try a different driver.

Cheers.

 

Before my cooling mods and tinkering I did get to like 4300 rpm. It was super loud. Felt like I was at the airport lol.

Now I've been messing with the cooling and thermal pastes so much that recently the max RPM when I benched 3d mark 06 yesterday was like 2700rpm. It shocked me how silent the machine was overall when usually I would hit at least 3500rpm during gaming or any intense 3d app. So temps and fan noise are a thing of the past for me now. Yippee. Can't wait for more of the pastes I ordered to turn up and see if I can get them even lower lol.

Cheers.

 

Yeh the 5870 I have gotten super silent now. After heaps of experimenting with thermal pastes. repastes and doing so much testing on it oles. It is super silent and cool temps. Fans don't even rev past 2700rpm doing a 3d mark 06 run now lol. I'm waiting on some more thermal paste I ordered to do more testing oles.

Finally the forum is alive again. Died on me while I was responding to you earlier oles.
Oh woops seems my message got through anyway somehow lol oles.

Cheers.

 

Yeah it's finally back! Think I found some stable drivers aswell, the 197.16. And I am so jealous of that 2700 rpm!!!
Any game I try the fans go to 3800 rpm after 1 min, and temps at 50-55C so no problem with temps lol Will have to see if anyone else with the 280m sli are getting the fans under 3800 rpm while gaming, applied thermal paste 7 times now in different amounts and not seeing an huge improvement in temperatures.

 

Which paste did you use again chiefs?
I used to use AS5 now I'm using Shin Etsu and will be try TX-4 soon when it arrives. I also tried some random other tubes of paste I had in the drawers from past years. lol.

Also I bought and changed new pads. They seem to work much better as well. I also did the CPU paste and pads. Thats where most of the annoying loud sound comes from if I'm not careful. So I made sure to give the CPU paste and pads some good attention. Seeing as all 3 fans are linked or something in the bios. So even if the CPU gets hot all 3 fans seem to boost up and spin hard as well. So making sure my CPU temps were down helped keep them quiet as well.

Good stuff on finding the stable driver chiefs. It can sure be annoying.

You can check out a few of my temps and pics/posts over here in this cooling mod thread oles

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/523915-pics-cooling-mods-done-tx-4-clip-mod.html

Cheers.

 

It was the AS5. Maybe I should change the pads on the memory aswell. I tried applying MX3 on the GPU memory, what a mess that was lol. Seems to be a good gap between the memory and heatsink so I will need some thick pads, got any suggestions to any pads? And I see here changing paste on the CPU also might get the fan noise/temps down, so maybe I should go on and attack this beast from all angles.

After I cleaned off the paste from the memory there still is a sorta white layer making the black memory chips seem grey, does that matter?

 

Yeh its hard and can be quite messy pasting up the mem chips. I for one am not game enough to do it. Since I am always opening up the notebook. Changing from paste to paste as well oles.

Yeh def fix up the CPU paste. That will help out a lot. Once you get in there its prob all dried up already and barely anything there left i'd say.

When your doing the pads and GPU stuff flip the notebook or card sideways so you can get a better look at how it is making contact with the heatsink. Not enough or proper contact will cause issues.

You can get some nice cooling products from this site here.
FrozenCPU.com | 1.877.243.8266 | World's Largest Selection of PC Modification Supplies

Cheers.

 

Just changed paste on both GPU and CPU, maybe 2-3C improvement. But the 3800 RPM fan still kicks in in every game I play. I underclocked from 583/950/1450 to 350/650/900 and now I can only hear the 3200 RPM and I am able to use it among people. When I buy my next laptop I will only buy depending on fan noise lol

Do you think Alienware will focus more on getting the future laptops more quiet or will they get even louder?
Because in my opinion they are not useable when fans run at 4000 RPM, gives me a headache, even with headphones on. And as I can't use it when outside of my room, it's kinda weird to sit in my room with it when I have a awesome desktop 2 meters across the room lol

 

How do you go into applying new thermal pastes? Through the compartment slot or is there another way? Was considering trying to do the cooling mod as my temps are 100'C whilst gaming :/ Apparently that's normal tho but they seem a tad high? Never had any issues and I am at 800/1000.