Aw m18x R2 Dual 980m SLI upgrade!!

Windows 10 seems solid, It's a pain to get the audio driver panel to work right. I used a mix of windows 10 drivers for the newer AW18 on my M18X R2. Benchmarks (for me) where slightly lower then on windows 7. couple hundred points, but it wouldn't be noticeable in real life. Anyway I suppose it is a small sacrifice to have the latest and greats from Micro$haft Winblows 10. As far as "downgrading" I came straight from A12 (me thinks) to Swick's A11 with zero issues. Just made that bootable usb with rufus and installed. Reset the BIOS settings to stock, made sure i was in the correct HD mode for my systems (raid for me). Then tweaked settings for performance on the XM cpu as per Mr. Fox instructions (in another thread).

Oh lastly, i installed windows 10 x64 in legacy mode (UEFI off?), so im not sure about anything other then that mode. I am still told (or havent been told different yet) to stay away from Precision tools. and MSI afterburner, although i used it for 2 weeks with no dead screen issues. I am guessing what happend is that they silently fixed it in an update as to avoid a lawsuit. just a theory though. All Seemed well. I THINK i might still have a usb with all the mixed drivers i used to get windows 10 running right. Oh lastly i think the AlienFX button on the top right just doesn't work in windows 10.

Hope that helps some.

 

@KKthebeast use the modder driver from j95 for the recon3di from techinferno. I used this with no problems.

 

Question: does the optical drive eject work?

Homer

 

Hey, time to share my Win 10 experience so far. I upgraded from 7 cause it had software issues.
10 does seem solid, audio still makes its own thing. To experiment, by the way, I bought an external USB creative soundcard and it works in case you need the audio immediately after a clean reboot with the IGFX trick. Ofc, you have to plug something in, cause speakers are a no-go, and still, to get the internal audio to work, you have to put it to sleep for a while. Then you have a working GPU and sound.
The new afterburner works great. It even has a better skin as I see.
Major problem: fan control is not kicking in right with the Swick BIOS. I have HW64, however there's still a limit on the fans. The problem is, I do get the fan to run faster than the OS and bios regulations, but still not fast enough, even if I set it @ 5000-6000 RPM, I don't believe it goes that far. GPU hits 92C, interestingly, it does not seem to affect performance, but still. Afterburner shows a straight line at 1100 clock. So no thermal throttling at 92, I can't explain this.
I remember with a previous bios, probably stock A12, I was able to run the fans at the absolute max. I had a 780M at 1 ghz in it, at 90C and was able to play Crysis 3 like a champ with fans blowing like a jet engine. I'd like to get them to run like that again, the 980M absolutely needs it. It's probably the swick bios that's preventing HW64 from running to the absolute max. I can hear it, even if I crank it up, the blow of the fans is not the same as it used to be.

 

You have other serious issues if you had a 780M or 980M at 90 degrees C or above. With ambient room temp of about 75 F, 2 inch elevation of the computer, fresh pads and paste, I top out at 70 degrees, average at 65 with a 980M and native fan control.

 

@shizz Same here. The highest I have seen is 71C with dual 980m after a 30 min burn test. There is a glitch in HWinfo where it reads the wrong temp on one card. You just disable a setting. Can't remember what it was. I'll have to check.

Disable COMPAL EC: alienware

 

Anyone expiriencing random black screens with 980m SLI? It feels like installing drivers. Tried mulriple drivers and vbioses but no luck. I thought chrome was to blame, but not. It happends when browsing or watching youtube and videos.
Never while gaming or benching. I have a m18x r2 and its really annoying.

 

Does a small message show up in the bottom right side after the black out saying smt like ...Window Recovered from a Display Driver issue blah blah... Also are you on battery power only when this happens?

 

If I'm correct in my assumption, somewhat similar symptoms have happened to me, when gaming specific games tho. Happened on mortal kombat and some other game. The screen goes completely off, backlight and all. Thought it had to do with afterburner and GPU overclock. So no, @KKthebeast , no driver recovery if he's talking about the same, in fact you have to reboot. But if his screen recovers and it "feels like installing drivers", then this is different.
I'm about to swap systems soon though, and report back. Found a good deal in Europe on an M18X R2 with a 980M.
Also I asked the seller about the sound issue. He said he had it, but Dell replaced the mobo under warranty, so it happens no more on that system I'm about to buy. If he's to be trusted and has paid attention to this, then great. Gonna combine it with my 980M and have a SLI to test.
On another note, reading what temps you guys got on a 980M compared to mine makes me wonder at the least. Thought the tech guy had put in a good thermal compound and tightened it well, this is a huge discrepancy in temps from what you're describing. About the HWinfo setting, could only find "EC support" under the "Safety" tab in settings, disabled it, gonna test tomorrow. I have version 5.37-2977.

 

I had those issues , It's a Windows 8/10 combined with nvidia drivers. For some reason, all these " windows " update is screwing up the 980ms.

thanks to @Raidriar advice, I solved this issue by going back to windows 7. ( I was going to sell my 980m to him for $250 just over frustration, but his advise saved me from selling it lol )

 

Thank you for your reply everyone. @KKthebeast
No message after the black screen not the sound that reports an error. Just a black screen for a mere second and then back on. It does it on battery and AC power too.

@shizz
Please inform is of your findings. Also my temps seem to have dropped a bit since one GPU helps the other. Also during gaming there is no black screen, only when browsing. Tried fallout 4, evolve 2, Doom, witcher 3, transformers devastation and GTA V with redux mod and all options at very High. Temps don't exceed 70 degrees. When I was on single 980m I was climbing to 77 tops.

@Rengsey R. H. JR
I think also its a driver related thing. I don't want to revert to 7 and look it further. Disabling SLI on browsing seems to fix it. Enabling back only when gaming.

I also read that desktop 980 gtx users report the same and has something to do when the GPUs switching P-states and voltage. They get 'out of sync' some sort...

 

Reporting. I get black screens when gaming while using firefox in 10, no black screens with Edge. My black screens require restart.
Second, I've bought a new R2 with a perfect mobo, no more sound issues.
Third, I've installed SLI, repasted, ran 10minute firestrike stress test, passed it with 99.1%, temps did not exceed 85. BUT that was with SLI disabled.
SLI, however, is a different story. 12k in firestrike in SLI, 9k single card. Power issue enough to explain this? Cause I am running a single adapter, but is it enough of a trouble to show these results?
Also, in SLI it doesn't pass the stress test by far, and not because of the temps, because they don't exceed 77. But I'm thinking GPU utilization and throttling, for whatever reason, either SLI does not work well or 330w power makes for such dismal results.

Edit: No overclocking whatsoever, of course, otherwise I wouldn't hope to run it with a single 330w. Will measure electrical output tomorrow.

 

@shizz for the time being try disabling hardware acceleration in FF and see if that patches up the issue. Then when either FF updates or nVidia updates the drivers try switching back on.
How to disable HW Accel

 

Hi, I'm a bit late to this thread, are you doing the PEG to IGFX trick? If not your poor performance is directly related to that.

Also, you say 9k one card? Are you running the default vbios? I went from 10 to 11.5k GPU going from default vbios to Prema's vbios. The latter essentially completely removes the default vbios throttling behavior, "boost" etc.

 

Hello,

did you try the GTX 1060/1070/1080 (single and in SLI) upgrade ? We can find some on Taobao. Is it even possible to do the upgrade on a m18x R2 ?

 

No, 980M is the end of the upgrade path for M18x R1, R2, and AW 18.

 

Might be a bit sad that 980m is the highest that it can go but even at that it gives our machines a good 2 or 3 more years of really good gaming. Fact is my own m18xr2 might last another 2 or 3 years at max settings with the current hardware I got in it now at which point I'll either replace it with something from eurocom or that BGA CPU/GPU thing will die off and laptop manufacturers will start using higher quality parts again which alot of us people want.

 

Well in the end, laptops are not really like modular desktops. And well, average market now is thin and light laptops so that's why many are going for BGA crap.

 

False. 980M will work in the M18x R2 and Alienware 18 but not in the M18x R1. 880M is the best the M18x R1 can do

 

Thanks for the clarification.

 

Yeah but better use 780M in M18xR1 as a lot ppl reports problems with some of 880Ms.

If you miss additional 4 gigs of vRAM then, you know. No risk no fun

 

Or... upgrade all the choice bits to make it an R2 and then go 2x980s. But to be honest, I would have gone another route in hindsight... soldered chips or not.

Just saying...
Homer

 

Too costly to get R2 motherboard that is limited to maxwell only

 

I am using the premamod vbios for clevo ( GTX980M_8GB_MXM_OC_PM_v2), J95 drivers and swick. Yes, I get like 9k single and 12k dual. Windows 10. Still not getting it, what did I do wrong

I do the trick. Boot - switch to igfx - I do not wait for the OS to boot, doesn't seem to matter, bios and PEG again.

Here, the firestrike result, notice GPU load.

 

~18k GPU and 9k CPU youre there!

What are you talking about?

That's what 980M SLI is good for IIRC.

You have a little left on the table CPU you wise (I'm around 11k CPU) but this is assuming youre running an Extreme Processor.

Edit:

Ah yes, I believe I see what youre talking about with the SLI score, it's your Combined that is bringing down your score and I have to assume it's because youre only using one PSU and Combined is stressing both your GPU's and CPU simultaneously, and those with dual PSU are seeing 500+ Watts current being drawn via Killawatt with 980M SLI and an Extreme Processor under full load.

Here's my combined for comparison:

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/9459379

Also, unfortunately you have to wait for the OS to load before restarting, re-entering BIOS and switching back to PEG for the trick to work. So if it's not power starvation that is probably your problem.

What I do to make this less painful, when I am using the R2, assuming you use it on a daily basis, is simply put the machine to sleep instead of shutting it down. That way you only need to do the trick when you get BSOD / Black Screen etc. Even if youre mobile, the battery seems to drain approximately 1% every hour, so you can probably go a solid 72 hours with it asleep without needing to plug it in and charge it.

Also, I'm not sure that there are issues with 980M SLI in the R2 and Win 10, but I do remember some stating they have compared the two and there was far less throttling and weird crap going on with Win 7.

 

Just to answer you, firestrike extreme and ultra go through perfectly, meaning 100% GPU util. I get 7500 and 4200 in SLI, respectively. That's with one adapter, so I don't overclock. The results can probably be better. The normal firestrike, as you see, doesn't. Something's wrong. Anyway, got a P870DM2-G with 2x1070. Goodbye M18X for now. Maybe I'll keep it.

 

Hi to all. I have M18X R2 with A11 Swick's BIOS and currently running i7-3940XM / 24 Gb RAM / single 980M / 330W PSU. I have several questions, guys. And some news for you, also. First, my questions:
1. Does anyone have the same mobo (M18X R2) and 970M SLI here? I need to decide should I go for 970M SLI or 980M SLI.
2. Did anyone have any system freezes with 3940XM? It looks like CPU occasionally starts to run at 100% and that freezes the mobo. No BSOD, just 100% CPU load and I can't see what process causes it - in Process Explorer I always see 97% idle processes.

Second, my news for you:
1. I have successfully tested single 970M and single 980M with my mobo and got NO trottling at all at stock vBios and rates. The same goes for OC'd cards with stock vBioses. Drivers are the latest from Nvidia, have tried to mod inf bymyself and download from some forums. No trottling.
2. The audio problem you are facing sometimes corresponds to a buggy motherboard's memory controller (confirmed by Dell's support) and if you want to low the rate of occurance of this problem you need just to use not more than 24 Gb of RAM. Don't install all the four SPD sticks, just use 3 of 4 and you will not face the problem in 90% of cases. Or you can still use full 32 Gb of RAM and at the rate of 50% you will have audio card issues or occasionally BSODs after returning from idle/standby state.

 

I'll answer your questions in a more general way, at least for the first one. The newest laptops have much, much better displays, gsync and higher refresh rates. Believe me, an IPS screen makes a huge difference in gaming experience and the M18X display seems horrendous now that I got a new laptop. Second of all, a single 1070 in a newer laptop would give you better performance, much less hassle. The keyboard on the M18X is also not perfect, to my experience; a normal clicky keyboard on a laptop feels better imo. About the CPU, never had that problem, that and the speakers were about the things that ran right while I had it.

 

I am currently running a single card on windows 8.1 with 353.00 and stock bios. Havent been keeping up with this thread in quite some time. Have searched through for awhile now and it seems the latest usable driver is 368.25. Am I correct, or is 368.25 for windows 10 only?

 

Windows 8.1 LMFAO, you haven't upgrade to Windows 7 yet?

Don't bother with 10, unless you like forced advertisements, updates, and the NSA peeking around through your personal files with no actual improvement in performance in games (DX12, where is it and where is the vaunted performance bump?) but an actual potential performance hit (many games just don't run well on Win 10).

As far as driver compatibility there is a way to modify any driver on your end:

http://null-bin.blogspot.com/2015/08/how-to-modify-nvidia-notebook-driver.html

 

Well... That indeed unconventionally answered my questions...
I'm now getting about 130 points more in Firestrike with the 378.49 vs 353.00
According to HWMonitor my peak temp on full load (bf4 on max for -2 hours) is 77c.
Steady 50+ FPS in my current favorite, "The forest", on MAXED settings. Which also plays at a beautiful steady, locked 30fps in "virtual" 1440p on stock monitor with settings in nvidia's control panel. I'm happy

^All with stock clocks


Here is the 378.49 drivers ready to go for an m18x r2. Maybe it will save someone 10 minutes..
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ipyzy4gxldqybhx/378.49.rar?dl=0

 

Oh"well http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/nvidia-geforce-drivers-378-49.800767/page-7#post-10449624 Not all that glitters is gold

 

For 980M? YES THANK-YOU.

Edit:

Yeah I heard that the desktop version of this driver was causing nothing but problems but hoped it might be different with 980M. Good thing I read Papusan's comment, anyone have the last best stable for 980M? Thanks in advance.

 

Not everyone has forgotten bricked screens in AW + some Clevo Try some of those suggested in thread I posted. But stay away from the latest. You never know with the Green Morons

 

Thanks, what thread exactly? I'm still on 368.25 lol.

 

good lord...........

THAT was the bit of information I was looking for before I upgraded.
When I read your comment on my phone I ran over and booted my rig up to a black screen........ Nearly had a heart attack..... Reset again and DDU'ed and am safely back on 353.00... ill delete my dropbox file so no one makes a fatal mistake on my behalf..

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...80m-sli-upgrade.765169/page-323#post-10451536 Or see similar Nvida threads for previous Ngreedia drivers. Most of them posted by bro @Phoenix

@Filthimoney @vulcan78 +++ Always take a extra look in the forum when new drivers is released

 

You actually got a black screen from that driver?!

I just upgraded to 980M in July of last year and I was fortunate to get my hands on a modified 368.25, I'm not sure if there is a new driver but I would like to move a copy of Titanfall 2 from my desktop over to my laptop and am curious as to how it will run on that older driver. (single 980M, TF2 doesn't have SLI support anyway).

Some games don't actually need a newer driver, it's funny but, now that we're on the subject, 378.49 has actually destroyed performance for Resident Evil 7, one of the very games it was supposed to improve performance on lol.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/5pzqpi/resident_evil_7_performance_tip/

If youre playing RE7 as I am, be sure to ctrl+F "reshade" on the page above. NIGHT and DAY difference, check out the before and after screenshots. I'm currently enjoying the game at 110 FPS avg. @ 2560x1440 with single 980 Ti on the ROG Swift with everything maxed out except shadow quality - High and only TAA (signature). Loving big Maxwell.

Yeah I don't know what the hell NGreedia is doing with this latest driver branch, or about 90% of drivers since 2014, they are really really losing a lot of credibility in this regard.

I remember back when, say between 2011 and 2013-2104 and they had excellent driver support.

I guess that is what happens when greed clouds your judgment, with AMD nowhere near competing with them they figured 'hey, why put so much money into driver quality control when we can just put that into the pockets of upper management!"

 

Opened lid, pressed power, no post, no beep, just black for about 10 seconds until I pressed power again. I'm just chalking it up to a "glitch" in the system. Idk..

From that linked thread it seems 375 drivers are safe. Surely an upgrade from my 353.00...

Thanks @Papusan I'll be more cautious in the future.

 

What link exactly? The link Papusan included in his previous reply is the previous page of this thread lol.

 

The link takes you to his original post with a link to thread where it states the newest kills the 980m. Couple posts later someone posted saying they are running 375 with no issues, and has yet to be corrected or warned so I'm expecting it is safe.....

Has been out since November. I'll do a little more digging before I update tomorrow afternoon and let you know.

 

Ok let me know how it performs!

 

I just recently acquired a 1.00v vbios that doesn't throttle, whose voltage slider can be unlocked by modifying MSI Afterburner (if you so desire more voltage) which I am absolutely in love with as my temps aren't flirting with 85C anymore at the 1.065v with Prema's publicly circulated 980M vbios. I did lose 100MHz off the top and about 1k GPU Firestrike, from 11,400 to 10,300 GPU, but man my temps really did drop 10C so it was completely worth the peace of mind.

Anyhow, attached is a screenshot after a one hour Dragon Age: Inquisition run, nearly maxed out at 1080p, 60 FPS about 90% of the time (some dips down to 50-55 FPS).

A 71C peak but actual temps hovered around 65-67C, this would have been 80C+ on the 1.065v vbios.

The average GPU utilization was skewed a bit as I did pause the game in menu to make something to eat for about 5 minutes, and only played for about 40-45 minutes although Hwinfo64 logging started the moment I started the PC. Actual avg. utilization was around 75% going by observation. I was actually temp testing to see what setting the fans to 3700 RPM right away would do for the temps as leaving them on auto, I notice that the GPU fan doesn't seem to run at a sufficient RPM, what sounds like 3700 RPM, until the temperature hits 74C, which is nice because as soon as that happens the temp. will drop down from there and there is less noise.



PM if anyone who is tired of 85C is interested.

And don't forget to elevate!

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/the-ultimate-cooling-mod-to-end-all-cooling-mods.586490/

 

I've been on 376.09 for a while now, since I did the BIOS update and a clean Windows 7 install. No smoke since 2 Jan.

Homer

 

Well 375.95 ran like dog s**t through a screen door.. 6057 firestrike with prema v2..
I'll play with a few more tonight including 376.09 and report back

 

Smoke?

 

Well.. I tried various newer drivers, all ran terrible. Went back to 353.00 with prema v2 and firestrike demo ran smooth as butter. Decided to try 1 last newer driver someone else spoke highly of, Crap. Went BACK to 353.00 with prema v2 and now it as well, runs like crap... I'm not sure what's going on, I'm frustrated and going to try again later.

Also wondering does prema mod need to be reinstalled every time you ddu? Would be way easier to take that out of my install/reboot steps...

In the dos box it appears it's replacing the same file each time.

 

A video BIOS file is never over written with the install of a new driver, removal of driver or the use of DDU. You SHOULD not be doing a vBIOS install unless you are wanting to change the vBIOS on the physical EEPROM of the video card. Video Software Drivers are installed on your physical storage (not the EEPROM of the video card).

Hope this clears it up for you.


-imest

 

Someone was showing pics of a screen with missing lines and high temps. My "smoke" reference was to this:

Code:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_smoke

Homer

 

Ah that's what I figured you were going on about. See my last post, I am loving not having to worry about my R2 going up in literal smoke! Load temps dropped 10C!

Yeah Imest is correct, the vbios doesn't care one way or another what driver youre using, the performance issues youre describing are most likely because you've changed drivers without completely removing the remnant code from the offending driver. I've experienced the same so frequently that now I never assume that updating a driver is going to go smoothly, I ALWAYS use Display Driver Uninstaller in Safe Mode now.

NGreedia slipping!

NGreedia board meeting Q4 2013:

"Why are we paying programmers to ensure quality with drivers? That's less profit for management!!!

Rule number 1:

Profit before all else!

Fire half of them immediately!

Us 1%'ers always could use a 15th vacation home on some remote island! Oh youre living under an overpass eating cat-food? Youre not unemployed, you've "stopped looking for work!" Unemployment is only 4.6%!

TOO BAD. You don't have superior traits! Capitalism rewards those with superior intelligence and fitness! That's why we are fracking the planet into extinction! We're so intelligent!"


http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts