Suggest a video card :)

Currently running an amd radeon hd 6900m video card in my M17xr3 and was wondering what I should upgrade to. Ive had a good amount of trouble with this card when it came to updating drivers so I was thinking of going the Nvidea rout and see what happens. If u could suggest a video card that is good value for the money please feel free to share. I want there to be a pretty big difference in performance. Pricing and link would be great as well. :thumbsup:

 

Hi

For trouble free installation and running you have to use a GPU model that dell supplied with the model. The best NV for the R3 was the 580m. Unfortunately the 580 is not one of their most reliable cards. I lost one in my R3, probably due to a poor factory paste job but the 675m, which is just a rebadged 580m, also died on me a while back. I believe this was due to the NV driver overvolting my card and the chip being borderline at stock (see link below).

If you find a better performing NV card that is not on dells approved (what they sold with it) list then modified drivers are needed, and auto-GPU switching does not work requiring an unlocked BIOS to manually switch.

I can't speak to ATI models or performance comparisons but NV drivers have been very poor for about 6 months now and a LOT of people over in the NV forums are so sick of problems that are moving the ATI.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/721878-nvidia-320-18-driver-warning.html

 

GTX 780m with 326.98 driver. I run it. Not issues. Vbios mod allows desktop like GPU tweaking. Best you can get.

 

I'd grab an NVIDIA card for sure: the 680M or 780M. Both are excellent cards and should work fine in the R3 with a modded vBIOS.

As you want the "best bang for your buck," I recommend the 680M. This card performs very similarly to the 780M, when overclocked, and they should be quite affordable now.

Good luck! There are also a few good tutorials around to help you upgrade, if needed.

 

Go big or go home!!! Grab a 780m if you can afford it.

 

Or if you want to be cheap you can grab a 670MX off ebay for about £230, they overclock very well to maybe 10% faster than a stock 680M - as long as you use a modded vBIOS. (Your mileage my vary though on overclocking - each chip behaves differently).

 

As others have said, go big or go home. 780M all the way.

 

I have the 680m in the R3 and it is great. I say get the best bang for buck by buying the card from the "go big or go home" guys upgrading to the 780m. And save the money towards a new laptop/desktop since by the time the 680m starts to cripple, your R3 will be 5 years old+ and will show its age.

 

I would suggest a 4GB GTX 680m version with a modded bios that truly unleashes the card. I might have one lying around somewhere...

 

That's what I've got, and it overclocks nicely to 915MHz core, 2250MHz memory, and temps don't go any higher than 66 celsius.

 

I put an 8970m in mine because it was much cheaper (at least for the kit which I really wanted) than the 680m. It's a monster, much faster than my desktop HD5850, but if I could have gotten a 680m kit for the same price I would have.

 

Dreadfully sorry to have to contact you this way but I'm still working my way through this site.
Basically I stumbled upon your bios throttling fix for the m17x from a few years ago
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...throtting-fix-no-need-modify-system-bios.html
and what's happened is I've royally screwed the pooch in being a mere casual and not realising I only had a 560m, not a 580m, foolishly believing all alienwares were the same I followed all the instructions to the letter
and now my graphics card is being all sulky.
I can find it on the device list, but it says it's got a 'problem' even tried downloading the drivers but the dead horse isn't getting up. I do still have my backup.rom (or so I believe, good on you for the foresight) but I haven't the foggiest clue how to
run it and hopefully reverse the effects, if at all.
Any and all help would be extremely appreciated, because I'm considering all options and nothing so far I've done has helped
(also ignore my username, one gets rather cranky at 2am after continuous failed attempts at fixing something that shouldn't have been broken with usb keys I'd been waiting weeks for in the mail only royally f**ks it up. - . )

 

The latest officially supported card is the 6990m, on the nVidia side it would be the 580m. You could try something higher than that but you may need to tweak vBIOS's and/or drivers.