Still having power adapter problems with the 7970m....

Good afternoon everyone..so I am not really sure if this is a common problem or not but I figured the quickest way would be to ask. I like many others was getting a lot of improper adapter problems running on the older bios revisions that came with my M17Xr4 and so I updated to the most recent bios....and while it got better , occasionally I still get improper adapter warnings and it tells me the system won't run at full speed. The main reason I am concerned today is that lately I am not getting the warnings but my 7970m refuses to run at full speed until I either re-enable enduro and then turn it back off again (Seems to work) or unplug the system and plug it back in (just found this out) thus reaffirming the machine that it is indeed plugged into the damn wall. The reason this is concerning is because this seems to be happening more often lately and it is getting quite irritating to load up a game and have my 7970 running at 450/300 clock speeds which do not provide a very enjoyable gaming experience. Has anyone else noticed anything like this?

Specs are in my sig and it is a Windows 7 machine, I have not stuck with Windows 8 long enough to really do any tests with that one yet though I assume it will suffer from the same problem.

 

Is this an original 7970m that came with your R4? Or is this a recent upgrade?

 

It is the original , the only upgrade I have done myself was an SSD. Seems to be if I unplug it and plug it back in it will most of the time fix the problem but I thought most people had solved this issue with the bios updates?

 

I am guessing this isn't a common problem and that I am the minority here lol...

 

I don't have an R4 but an R2, which had the same problem.
I tried all kinds of stuff mentioned on several boards, cmos resets, stuff with the battery, bios updates etc. Nothing solved this.

After days of screwing around, I ordered a new adapter. Tada, all problems were gone. A year later, same thing started to occur. Ordered a new adapter, again all solved.

It seems after some research, there is an ID chip in the adapter (which is used to recognize it as a dell adapter with some 2-way identification), which in time stops making correct contact and thus can't negotiate the id with the system. The result is that you get the non dell adapter warning, and your performance is crap
At least, the above is my experience with this problem

Maybe you have someone who can lend you a psu to test this out?

 

Thanks for the response Jigg....I thought I remembered more people having this problem but I can't seem to find much to anything on it haha....I talked to Alienware last night and they were very prompt at shipping me out a new adapter and were pretty confident that would solve the problem so I should be back in business by Monday ( Stupid weekend and no shipping ). I can still get mine going but it can take a few hours of unplugging and plugging in the adapter before it works lol. I will be very happy if this is all it turns out to be , I was imagining worst case scenarios that included mainboard replacements and what not. I will update next week and let you know what the verdict is.

 

New adapter arrived and seems to have solved the problem, the bios is picking up the adapter now instead of unknown adapter type and I am not having any further issues hopefully this isn't a regular problem that comes back.

Back to enjoying all the games!

 

Great glad its solved it for you. Happy gaming!!