Alienware M18xR2 New/Updated BIOS Mods - NOW WITH MAXWELL LEGACY SUPPORT - Testers Needed

It seems I am unable to undervolt my 980M with Nvidia Inspector with Prema's vbios. Is there a way to accomplish this?

 

Some have received a special vbios with lower stock voltage from @Prema
You need to ask him nicely if he can help you out.

 

Maxwell cards are unable to be undervolted with nvidiainspector. Prema released special vBIOS to individuals in the past which were undervolted, but we were asked not to share them publicly. Unsure if he will ever go back to do things amid the row he had with stolen credit over on TI

 

What's the matter with TI? Should we not cooperate them anymore?

 

No no it's not that, there are great folks on TI and a lot of members here are also there. There was one guy on TI that registered, copied, and published Prema's method of patching the P870DM BIOS, claimed he came up with it when we all know it was a blatant lie. He registered on here too, but was banned in both places for his shameless act of code plagiarism. As a result of that, Prema ceased to work on any public releases.

 

Thanks I will ask Prema.

 

@Swick1981 Any developments about 980M M18-R1 compatible bios? BTW anyone here is anxiously waiting for 1080M release?
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gtx-1080m-specifications-performance-leak/

 

Im waiting too but Nvidia will probably block it with UEFI check so M18xR1 users won't be able to upgrade unless they choose R2 motherboard.

 

From everything I've gathered thus far, including this article from wccftech, GTX 1080 will not be produced on the "M" board size, but will in all likelihood be produced on the same size board that the full, uncut die GTX 980 is. Meaning, 980M might be the end of the road for us M18x R2 owners. The 980M is actually plenty powerful and should hold us over for a few years to come, and if more power is absolutely necessary, just add a second 980M.

 

Hmm the way I understood it was that it's not that they are stopping MXM production, it's that they are stopping the M line, meaning they will be releasing the desktop versions such as from the success of the 980 MXM 200 watt, In a 1080 form with possible down scaled clocks for power and heat reasons. Although the TDP is less then the 980 so maybe the clocks will be the same. I guess we will have to see

 

Tbh as things stand 980m being the highest card the M18XR2 can use is really not an issue even I'm using 2 in SLI and am happy with the improvement they brought. At this point tho I'm not interested in an upgrade for the M18 but an outright successor to it. Dont want a 17inch either otherwise I'd have ordered the sky x9e from eurocom. Until someone spots another site that does built to order laptops or eurocom releases a larger 18inch version of the sky x9 im stuck with the m18x anyways.

 

A single 980M is adequate right now, and I'm talking with about 80% of the settings maxed out!

I just started Fallout 4 yesterday, and I was thinking for sure that I would need to turn some settings down to play the game, to my pleasant surprise I am seeing 60 FPS everywhere with 70% load and the only settings I turned down were those that yield little improvement in fidelity for the cost such as God Ray Quality, which I have on Med. and Decal Quantity, which I also have on Med:

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/fallout-4-graphics-performance-and-tweaking-guide

http://images.nvidia.com/geforce-co...-4/fallout-4-god-rays-quality-performance.png

And this is the case for all of the recent title's, to include Doom 2016, which I can run at 75 FPS with all settings maxed out and on Nightmare, to Dragon Age: Inquisition and GTA 5, both nearly completely maxed out.

I am running Prema's vbios and am overclocked with the card pulling down 11.4k GPU in Firestrike, or about as fast as a reference GTX 970 on stock clocks.

Nvidia's Pascal Architecture that has everyone salivating is necessary if youre pushing 4K @ 60Hz or 2.5k@ >60Hz and offers a really nice entry level GPU with GTX 970 performance for $200 (GTX 1060).

Other than that, if youre still pushing 1080p @ 60Hz there isn't really a reason to upgrade beyond a single GTX 970, unless you want more VRAM, which thankfully 980M 8GB has plenty off.

Yeah the thought of an 8GB GTX 970 in a laptop is pretty sweet actually.

 

Yeah, Better than a Nvidia Crippled Gtx970 with 3.5GB vram

 

Developers are so lazy that new games will run barely on GTX 1070, you will see.

 

You mean like Crystal Dynamics, responsible for Rise of the Tomb Raider whose Soviet Installation is completely unplayable even with a GTX 1080? Or how about EA Montreal's Assassins Creed: Syndicate?

For these games, it will not matter if you have the latest hardware.

Oh and add Batman: Arkham Knight to the list.

 

Assassins Creed Syndicate SLI support is golden:

No SLI: 100% card usage 30 fps
SLI: 50% both card usage 30 fps

 

LOL. Exactly. Part of the reason I didn't go SLI. Dev's too lazy to implement it nowadays, it seems that 25% of games have no SLI support whereas maybe 3 years ago 10% of games had no or poor SLI support.

 

Just ran DOOM with SLI profile as best as it could be, frametimes are much worse than in DirectX but game is playable. I confirm that scaling is bad.

 

Hey, bro. See my post here, as I think it might be of interest to you as an 880M SLI owner.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...k-thread-part-3.730723/page-208#post-10310061

 

Hey brother did you try J95 's release of 369.05? I'm getting zero lag with everything maxed out in DOOM SLI.

 

He said these newer drivers nVidia lowered the TDP for the cards as well or so I read

 

Hey,

There is no lag, it's 55-60 fps but frametimes are high probably because it's OpenGL game and SLI in OpenGL works bad.

I had to install 386.25 to play Doom and other new games. I was really scared installing these drivers due to display killing bug but it didn't killed my display thankfully. Performance is a bit better in all games, no throttling same as it was before. I don't want to install any new driver for a long time because im still scared a bit, even on Windows 8

 

Well everyone, an extremely pleasant surprise on my end, one that I had not known of for the entirety of the current 4 years of R2 ownership thus far, to circumvent having to do the tedious but necessary IGFX to PEG and back trick I experimented with simply putting the unit to sleep, something that I was previously afraid of as I was worried it would drain the battery and turn on to shut down or hibernate while in my backpack and suffocate one of the components, anyhow, in sleep the battery drain is very very low, something nearly as low as 1% an hour! Yeah I was hanging out with a friend and we went for a hike and then a few other things later and in total like 24 hours had passed and the battery was around 75% when I woke it up. There were zero other issues, and none of the throttling was present, so this is really fantastic news as as long as one doesn't experience a display driver failure or BSOD one could theoretically keep their unit asleep for 72 hours or more all on battery! I have it set to go to sleep when I close the lid, which is really nice as I just close the lid, store the unit, pull it out and I'm right back where I left off, no waiting for Windows to load nor having to do the tedious IGFX to PEG trick.

Edit:

Reading the comments above,

What would be really exciting is if DX12 actually allowed for Explicit Multi-Adapter Support, which has already been tested with Ashes of Singularity, which would allow for us to run say a single 980M and a single 680M or even a 980M and an AMD 6990 together. This may, theoretically allow for the pairing of a 980M with a lower TDP mobile card and stay under the 330W limit (although 680M seems to pull a comparable amount of current with comparable voltage).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9740/directx-12-geforce-plus-radeon-mgpu-preview

Unfortunately, the brain-dead minions who comprise the Redmond Mafia are more interested in developing a pay-to-win Wall-Mart version of Solitaire (with inbedded ads, the paid version has no ads etc.) that simply returns upon every forced update (yes, all of your privacy settings are being reset with each forced update, in case you were unaware).

I wish I could simply fast forward my life a decade to when Steam has successfully boycotted M$ and migrated to Linux where Vulkan is up and running and offering identical if not better performance.

http://arstechnica.com/information-...microsoft-will-use-windows-10-to-break-steam/

 

I'm getting over P18k in 3dmark11 with the 369.05 drivers steadily. If you are feeling brave... you might give them a try and see if they did any further optimizations in the background

Also, I'm pretty sure they silently fixed the monitor issues in windows 10, just last month I ran windows 10 for 2 weeks, with the monitor at 75hz with no issues (Playing Fallout4 in SLI 8 hours a day), The articles I read about them dieing happened all with in a few days of installing win10. Just a theory though. I was also using a few of the Win10 drivers from the AW18 on the M18X R2. Don't know if that might be why i didn't have any issues.

 

How is SLI in Fallout 4? I know it the prequels, to include Skyrim ran fine with SLI but something feels different this time around, i.e., the game exhibits better performance Windowed than Full Screen, that's a sure indication that something is amiss.

HBAO+ looks so much better than SSAO but if I use it my card is at 99% load nearly the entire time and my frames will frequently dip down to 50 FPS or so, and at 50 FPS there is stuttering. My card also will get up to 82C even with the fans at 4200 RPM with full sustained load so I usually run the game with SSAO, which makes it feel like I'm playing it on a console (SSAO seems to equal no ambient occlusion in this game).

This is one of the few games where I can't turn everything all the way up with a single overclocked 980M and has me yearning for 980M SLI.

VRAM utilization never seems to exceed 2.5GB with Fallout 4 lol.

 

Fallout 4 engine is awful, SLI barely works, everything is tessalated, even godrays so it's gimping older cards by purpose.

 

How did they manage to ruin the SLI support? Skyrim and Fallout series had some of the best and smoothest SLI support.

 

That's question to Bethesda. I was really surprised how the hell did they lowered the FPS that much without improving graphics. Dialogs are awful, map is awful, this is not fallout anymore. This is Call of Duty with RPG elements.

Im really worried about TES VI.

 

Well I'm actually thoroughly enjoying Fallout 4, I think it's a great successor to 3 and New Vegas, to me the dialogue feels fine, I even appreciate the addition of new dialogue options such as "sarcasm" (I use it the most, sarcastic in real life) and a Charisma option with color indicating likelihood of success or failure (yellow to orange). Graphics look really good IMO, everything seems to have received a real facelift (Brahmin, Mole Rat, Rad Scorpion, all look great) character animations, textures, everything seems to have really borrowed from the best Nexus Mods from Fallout 3 and New Vegas. The settlement building is fun and so is the weapon modding. Every locale seems to tell a story with details found on a computer tucked away in a room somewhere. I remember picking a lock into a bank vault early on thinking "oh yeah, there's going to be something great in here" only to finally open the door to a vault with a hole blown in the wall with a skeleton hanging out of it "looks like I'm a little late".

Perk system is improved, game feels great to me.

Anyhow, on a side-note, I am trying to get Rise of the Tomb Raider working and I don't know if it's related to one of the latest drivers but I can't seem to play it without the display driver crashing before long, I've even upped the voltage to 1.075v and it still crashes with my moderate OC (+136 / 200 @ 1.075v) whereas +136 / 250 @ 1.062v is stable in every other game I have! It seems this is a widespread issue:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/391220/discussions/1/451852225139502097/?ctp=3

Any solution?

 

Everyone on that form that "has a solution" says to downclock the GFX card. I would suggest doing as they say until the developer can release a patch.

And yes Fallout 4 is freaking amazing, the graphics are beautiful, game play is great, story awesome. Just wish it was longer or more spread out like the old games. The FPS issues in downtown boston area suck but good all around. Love the new settlement building system. Wish that Skyrim's Heathfire had this system. OR even better that they included it in the Redo of Skyrim (which they won't)

 

@GodlikeRU @vulcan78 about the Fallout 4 SLI "issue". Random question have you renamed your Fallout4.exe to something else or added a _ to the name?

 

I removed it after playing 2h and installed New Vegas instead so I can't tell.

 

I finally found a stable OC for Rise of the Tomb Raider of +88 / +125 @ 1.062v (Prema's vbios). I was afraid that the game wouldn't take any OC or heaven forbid, I would have to under-clock the single 980M.

The performance is ok, around 50 FPS overall with a near constant 99% load. I'm currently at the Soviet Installation part of the game and that's how it's been. VRAM utilization is INSANE. Seeing between 6.5 and 7.3GB of VRAM usage with Textures on Very High. The single 980M runs this game way smoother than 680M SLI and I think a part of it is that even with Textures on High VRAM usage is still between 3.5 and 4GB which resulted in a lot of stuttering with 680M SLI.

This is just one of the latest games that has justified the upgrade from 680M SLI to a single 980M among many that I'm currently playing. Either the game has poor SLI optimization or needs more than 2GB of VRAM or both.

You should give the game another chance, it's actually fairly decent, performance issues aside.

Bethesda does get a D- for the performance though, I have no idea why it runs better in Windowed mode nor why I'm getting stuttering when my card isn't even fully utilized and my i7 3920 is at 4.3GHz in certain areas of the game.

 

For anyone reading the posts above trying to get Rise of the Tomb Raider working correctly with 980M SLI the following fix actually works (I used it to address the under-utilization problem when I was still on 680M SLI)

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/rise-...d-offering-95-sli-scaling-on-two-nvidia-gpus/

 

I was told the issue is that the game makes entirely too many draw calls by Borris, the developer of ENB, (which doesn't make sense to me, as you would think that the gpu would be maxed out) Maybe it's a bottleneck issue, = game engine does not have enough "bandwidth" or what ever the software equivalent is.

 

I'm not sure but to be honest it doesn't even look like that much is going on for it to be using 7GB of VRAM!

Speaking of bewilidering performance, I finally managed to get Fallout 4 playable by turning down Shadow Distance to Medium. I was getting like 40 FPS with a lot of stuttering in the town north of Diamond City (where you have to save the idiot human and the mutant in the tower). It runs so much smoother with 60 FPS pretty much everywhere. I intend to go back and actually try to get a feel for what I've sacrificed for the massive increase in performance.

Oh and I left God Rays on Medium, those actually look decent, even though the Nvidiot dev's responsible for their implementation thought Tesselation was a good idea to use with them (to make FO4 run like crap on AMD hardware no doubt).

These are good tweaking guides for both games:

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/fallout-4-graphics-performance-and-tweaking-guide

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/rise-of-the-tomb-raider-graphics-and-performance-guide

 

This should help you out ALOT @vulcun78 Fallout 4 Shadow Boost It dynamically adjust shadow rendering distance based on your FPS.

 

Thanks Brother Beast, I am looking forward to trying this fix when I get home.

 

Well in an attempt to stay on topic I have to say that I haven't had to do the IGFX to PEG trick since learning that the R2 can stay asleep for quite some time (it seems 1% battery life equates to 1 hr sleep time). And even restarting the computer for whatever reason doesn't require it, only shutting the computer down does.

 

That is a good trick brother. I will have to try it for sure!

 

Battery life is only relevant if you're currently leading an, ahem, "nomadic" lifestyle (euphemism for not being able to afford to live in a dwelling, ironically in a locale of gross affluence, i.e. the San Francisco Bay Area).

 

Nice work. Now for the question. Will I need this BIOS for a M18 R2 running windows 10 in order to get the machine to recognize dual 980s? Or is this just for those wanting to stick with windows 7?

 

you need it run (install) Windows 7 - 10 in Legacy mode
Windows 8 - 10 can use UEFI in which your dual cards should work

 

Thanks bud now for a dumb question that Ive searched for the answer for but dont quite understand the implications of. What is the difference between running the laptop in Legacy or UEFI mode?

 

Short answer UEFI is what allows Secure Boot in Windows which is commonly used in Windows 8 and above.

Long answer
Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a specification for a software program that connects a computer's firmware to its operating system ( OS). UEFI is expected to eventually replace BIOS.

Like BIOS, UEFI is installed at the time of manufacturing and is the first program that runs when a computer is turned on. It checks to see what hardware components the computing device has, wakes the components up and hands them over to the operating system. The new specification addresses several limitations of BIOS, including restrictions on hard disk partition size and the amount of time BIOS takes to perform its tasks.

Because UEFI is programmable, original equipment manufacturer ( OEM) developers can add applications and drivers, allowing UEFI to function as a lightweight operating system.

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface is managed by a group of chipset, hardware, system, firmware, and operating system vendors called the UEFI Forum.


New gen vs Old gen I'm in legacy mode and haven't noticed anything that i can't do if that is what you are concerned about.

 

I stick with windows 7 for driver compatibility, although it is possible to hobble together a mix of working drivers from the M18X R2 and the windows 10 drivers from the AW18 to get most used functionality of the M18X R2 working in Windows 10, it's not ideal or supported. ie getting the audio drivers to work as you are used to is a pain at best. There was a display corruption issue when win10 was released as well that would corrupt the display's "firmware" requiring a special pieces of hardware to fix and the knowledge on how to reprogram displays. I think it might be silently fixed as i ran win 10 on my M18X R2 for 2 weeks with no issues and most ppl "burned out" after 48 hours.

Just a few things to research and verify before making your choice.

 

Help - I'm at my wits end - I have a Alienware 18 - R2 - Have anybody solve the video upgrade to win 10
I love this laptop - but - I've shipped all the way to Texas - trying to get it fixed - I am I beating a dead horse
do I need to sell it on eBay - help - help

 

Ran into a little problem. Flashed Bios Mod without issues but now my graphics card is not recognized. I uninstalled my NV drivers and now they will not install. Thanks



M18x R2, 3630QM, GTX680m, 16GB, 250GB SSD, Win7 Pro 64

 

Change display mode to PEG

 

Thank you brother, that fixed the issue. Cheers

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