defective 5870m crossfire cable?

I recently started noticing in-game flickering as shown in this video (only in games, other times look alright): Alienware M17x-R2 (Flickering with BIOS A02) - YouTube

I have contacted my laptop seller and just when I was about to send my laptop back to them for inspection the problem mysteriously disappeared, but that was after I restored my GPUs overclocking settings to default.

So I thought the problem was caused by overclocking but it appeared again serveral days after.

Since I really don't want to send my laptop back cos I have to move my personal data to somewhere else, and also, I don't like the possible situation that I might have to wait a long time to get my laptop back, so I removed the keyboard and tried to determine the problem myself.

now it seems that the problem is caused by the 5870m(s) crossfire cable, because the flickering problem is gone if I slightly tilt the cable to certain point, so I think the cable must be make bad contacts.

The problem is that this crossfire cable seems quite hard to come by, so does anyone know if there is any place that I can get one for a reasonable price?

 

Have you tried reseating both GPUs and the crossfire connections completely? Sometimes just doing something as simple as that will solve the problem. My R2 had a similar issue too that was fixed like this and lucky for me too since the crossfire cable is only sent out by Dell along with the slave GPU if I recall correctly.

Here's what I found out of the guide here on the forum.

"*RV546 - 5870, secondary with cable and heatsinks (goes on right side)"

I will search the part number up for you and hopefully fin something!

 

Over at the owner's thread this seems to be a common problem. Not really sure if its just faulty cards or software compatibility. I did hear that changing the light settings in CCC did work for some to get rid of the flickering. IF that does not work you may have to reinstall the stock driver and to a VBIOS install.

 

hmm, you are right, I have reseated both GPUs before but never uplugged the crossfire cable, maybe I should just try that and see what happens! BTW, I never knew the crossfire cable was with the salve GPU but not the master GPU , thanks a lot LannBot!

 

Thanks Captain, I'll try to find the thread about the CCC light settings first and see if that solves my problem.