clevo gtx780m or 880m in alienware m17xr4

Hi guys,

I am in need of some advice or assistance.

I am thinking of buying either a gtx780m or 880m to replace my dead clevo gtx680m in my m17xr4. Now that the 880m drivers are out, i guess getting the 880m makes more sense over the 780m.

My question is will the clevo 780m or 880m work in the m17xr4?. Do i need to flash the vbios to a modded 1 or alienware stock vbios?

And i have a 60 hz screen, is it just plug and play or do i have to install unlocked bios for the m17xr4 to disable the intel gpu? I didn't have to unlock any bios to install the clevo 680m though.

Hope to hear from you guys soon.

Thanks.

 

Hi, The only bit I can be sure of is the unlocked bios to turn off optimus. You wouldn't have needed it for the clevo 680m as the 680m is already in the BIOS so works fine with optimus.

After that it's in the lap of anyone that has tried it. I can say that I have never seen an AW not run a card whatever vBIOS is on it, only that one may perform better than the other

 

Hi mikcky,

Thanks for the advice, so does it mean i will lose optimus if i upgrade to 780m or 880m?

Is it possible to disable optimus, install the card and get it up and working then switch back to optimus mode?

 

You will loose optimus and you have to leave it disabled or it will never never stop using the intel. You might be able to turn it on again in the bios for long battery life or an extended period of no gaming but that would be an experiment - and would be useful info for others considering this upgrade.

All I will say is that the 880m is not giving a great boost over the 780m (from what I see) so cost should be a factor

 

Slightly off-topic, how did your 680M die, do you know what caused it & how long did it last? I ask because I have a Kepler GPU too, which is a year old now, and I'm overvolting & overclocking it - just trying to get a handle on failures & what's causing them on Kepler cards. Actually, yours is praps the first post I've ever read saying that their Kepler mobile GPU failed.

On topic, I'd go with the 780M, because then you can flash the unlocked vBIOS for a little more performance - at the moment there's not a modified vBIOS out for the 880M and the 880M has some throttling issues with the stock vBIOS. 780M will also be a lot cheaper right? (You don't need to flash a modified vBIOS for either of them to work though).

MickyD's given you some good advice on BIOS configurations & Optimus.

 

Clevo cards tend to work fine.

 

Actually I bought 2 x gtx680m about 17 months ago. 1 card is brand new on my Msi gt 60 from upgradeyourlaptop eBay and the other is a used card from a local laptop retailer.

The card that died is a used card. No overvolting just mild of in afterburner. Before it died it had symptoms like when I tilt the screen or lid the laptop would freeze randomly. I took it out to do a repaste job started a few times then it suddenly went dead.

Anyway the reason I was asking for the gtx880m is because of the pricing. The local laptop retailer which sold me the 680m quoted me a very good price for the 880m way a lot cheaper than eurocom or upgradeyourlaptop. But I forgot to ask if it's new or used.

Oh ya slightly off topic if I put the gtx880m or 780m onto the Msi gt60 0ne, do I lose nvidia optimus as I was thinking to swap the 680m to my alienware if 780 or 880m can work on Msi with optimus.

 

Cheers for the response on what you thought caused your 680M death. You bought it as a used card, so it might have had various forms of abuse in the past, poor thing! Yep, so I still feel fairly confident about the reliability of Kepler cards.

About your question of losing Optimus in MSI gt60 One, it's possible you will if the 880M is not offered as a configurable option from the factory - it's like that on the Alienwares but I'm not familiar with MSI.

 

Same comments from me .

I will say that with MSI kit I have owned they are more aimed at the enthusiast and as such it might just work. Especially if they release BIOS updates after the 7xx/8xx cards are released? Dell lock down their laptops to only accept parts they supply with a model so after the model is superseded you're into a little more work than plug-n-play .

 

I don't mind giving it a shot on the gtx880m with msi gt60, if it fails i can mount onto the alienware m17xr4 albeit no optimus.

But the problem is i cannot find any info on anyone with gt60 windows 7 machine with a gtx880m yet and i tried looking for the bios 30p or 10p but i can't find anything on the net or even download it. All i read or heard is it can be done with the 780m but you need 30p or 10p bios on the machine.

 

Good to hear you'll give it a shot, but you need an unlocked BIOS on the AW if you don't already have one?

Unless you can track down one of those MSI bios files though you may have driver (easyish fix) and/or optimus (no fix) issues (and a win 8 one will be just fine).

Good Luck