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    980m sli performance issues

    Discussion in 'Alienware 18 and M18x' started by inasense, Dec 17, 2015.

  1. inasense

    inasense Notebook Geek

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    Hi all,

    Recently I received an AW18 with 980m sli & 4940mx as a warranty replacement. The system is great aside from the 980m's underperforming pretty severely in synthetic benchmarks & games compared to what I've seen others getting from the cards.

    I've flashed premas 1.1.1 vbios and experimented with the legacy drivers from Dell's website as well as nvidias past 4 whql releases up to 359.06 with no luck. I have no interest in oc'ing the cards-I'm merely seeking the performance they should be providing. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks guys!

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Dec 23, 2015
    inasense, Dec 17, 2015
    #1
  2. kenny27

    kenny27 Notebook Deity

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    Can you please post a Firestrike benchmark score, that might give a clue as to what is playing up.
     
    kenny27, Dec 17, 2015
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  3. inasense

    inasense Notebook Geek

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    Edited, meant to include that-apologies.
     
    inasense, Dec 18, 2015
    #3
  4. kenny27

    kenny27 Notebook Deity

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    That score looks pretty good to me, what were you expecting?
     
    kenny27, Dec 18, 2015
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  5. inasense

    inasense Notebook Geek

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    To be honest, more. I've seen numerous Firestrike scores of 24k+ from stock clock 980m sli systems, and my Unigine Heaven & Valley scores are equally disappointing. To be more specific, I was expecting performance akin to a mildly oc'd gtx 980 desktop card, or thereabouts. I have not found this with the 980m solution, which is indeed a disappointment.
     
    inasense, Dec 19, 2015
    #5
  6. pathfindercod

    pathfindercod Notebook Virtuoso

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    You'll need dual psu's to really psu a 4940xm and 980m sli. Only problem is it's not able to be done with the aw18.
     
    pathfindercod, Dec 19, 2015
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  7. kenny27

    kenny27 Notebook Deity

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    I think your confused with 3DMark 11, in which case 24-25K is what stock 980m sli should get. For Firestrike 19.5-20.0K is as good as it gets on stock clocks.Pretty sure a desktop 980 has 30% on a 980m, so 980m sli is definitely better depending what you call a mild overclock. In my experience 980m sli is roughly the same as a stock Titan X or 980Ti depending on the settings and sli support/scaling.

    That is only if your overclocking otherwise 330W is just enough.
     
    kenny27, Dec 20, 2015
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    Kade Storm and inasense like this.
  8. inasense

    inasense Notebook Geek

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    Point taken. Perhaps the data I'm pulling from is inaccurate/irrelevant. If the performance I'm seeing is appropriate, then I'm satisfied-I just wanted to gauge feedback from those more knowledgeable than I. Thanks for the reply!
     
    inasense, Dec 20, 2015
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  9. [Nikos]

    [Nikos] Notebook Evangelist

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    Stock clocks = around 18.500 - 19.500 points it depends on drivers other hardware and software running on the background so your laptop is running quite good at this time :)

    Enjoy your beast :p
     
    [Nikos], Dec 24, 2015
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  10. Kade Storm

    Kade Storm The Devil's Advocate

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    That's a very decent showing for a stock score.

    One question, as much for inasense as anyone else, but why are the clocks on these cards so oddly low? Some quirk in the vBIOS or GPU-Z at play?
     
    Kade Storm, Dec 29, 2015
    #10
    inasense likes this.