Calling out to Alienware Support Where are our Official AMD 7970m Crossfire drivers ??

well you don't have to say I told you because if I remember correctly you didn't purchased 580's but on the other side I understand your words is because you are safe already and we are crossing the river

Thanks for your suggestion I already write to those websites and I encourage to all the affected M18X owners to do the same

don't call DELL for support I have wasted 3 hours yesterday without any solution they want to send graphic cards and motherboards lol

 

I didn't mean my post to sound like a "I told you so", more like when will we all realize that crossfire just isn't very good, least not on the mobile front.

Anyway, post your issue in Dells fb and twitter as well. Someone will eventually have to help.

Sent from my GT-N7000

 

I can't understand why anyone continues to support AMD.....
AMD's primary focus is on the eighth generation of consoles, where they clearly remain the market leader.

On paper AMD's GPUs look tasty as can be, but the harsh cold reality of it all is that this is the same AMD that we've all come to love or hate.

I personally think it is worth the difference in cost to go Nvidia than to sit here on notebook review bickering about crossfire performance and the lack of AMD driver support.

 

got you, remember we both purchased the M17XR2 with 5870's and the day we received the machine was flickering all over the place I said this this crap is going back but some way you hold tight and they kind of patch the problem that's why I was waiting for them to fix crossfire this time but nothing

guess I have to open a FB account lol

 

Yup I sure do remember those days. 5870M was a gigantic headache, from the initial flickering to the need to hound AMD/Dell to release a proper vbios so we could use newer drivers. I still didn't learn my lesson and bought 6970/6990M until I finally had enough and pushed for 580s. Not ever going to look back unless AMD decides to support their mobile cards.

Some might interpret my posts as biased but if you check my history, aside from a brief stint with 260M, all I've had the last 2-3 years are AMD cards. It took a lot of time to finally break my patience with them.

I think AMD's biggest problem is they don't really care enough about the mobile market to support it fully. nVidia is somewhat guilty as well since they took a while to ramp up support for the mobile kepler but at least they did which is the point. When 680M SLi is released, I'm 99.9% sure it will work out of the box.

But just to remain on topic here - while AMD is largely at fault, ultimately the blame lies with Dell. They should not have rushed M18x-R2 to the market with 7970M Xfire if they had not received a working base driver from AMD yet. Dell keeps using its customer base as guinea pigs and they get little to nothing in return. I don't want a conference call with some Dell engineer of why Crossfire is broken, just fix the damn problem and have it work from day one. That's not too much to ask for any customer that pays $2500-$3000+, especially in this economy. Still a big fan of AW and the reps here are awesome but the guys in charge of product development need to do a better job.

 

made an account just to respond to this, on the website i found this "http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/19/DriverDetails/DriverFileFormats?DriverId=JH9P7&FileId=2972259120&productCode=alienware-m18x-r2&urlProductCode=False" isnt this a normal driver? or is it beta?

 

I think that's an outdated driver base and doesn't fully support Crossfire. BTW check out this earlier post by an AW official here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...md-7970m-crossfire-drivers-3.html#post8638019

 

Well i just purchased my first alienware laptop and i can say im not impressed that there is no official driver for the 7970m in crossfire.

I can say that i was unimpressed with how it was packaged either as from the videos ive seen of unboxing what i got was not the usual packaging so seems that dell have changed the packaging.

i think that dell should offer anyone that has purchased the 7970m cards as part of the alienware M18x a upgrade to the 680m cards if an official driver is not available by the time that they come out and are available.

Does that seem a fair option to us, can someone at alienware come back to us?

 

do you guy remember that when nv released the 580m, nv did not provide drivers the only driver compatible was the dell driver?.
you amd owners just need to push more. lol

 

sounds fair to me but not to DELL basically we pass the return window and that's it, the guy told me on the phone yesterday "I prefer Nvidia because AMD seems to have more issues" I said yes but what we can do now

he said well you can return your machine if you agree to purchase another one and then I got transfer to other 5 people the last guy controlled my machine for 2 hours and after multiple driver installs and reboots he decided to call me back he mention replacing graphic cards and motherboard but I disagree to that maybe that's why he never called back

 

well there is alienware representation on this forum inst there maybe they can do something for us?

 

if you post your problems like what games are running bad and all that to add more info.

 

It happen all the time sir, that why many people purchase the advanced warranty. So people can abuse it.

 

Ok Look If You Think Its Amds Fault Go Ahead Get Them On The Phone And Get Them To Fix The Damn Problem.. This Is Dells Fault For Buying And Offering The Product Up In The First Place...

Who Buys Faulty Products And Resells Them And Says Or Its Not Are Fault.. No One And For You Guys To Sit Here And Pass The Buck Off To Amd Is Bs Plain And Simple Bs..

WHAT DO YOU GUYS DEFENDING DELL THINK THEY GOT THIS CARD FOR FREE? OR WERE COMPLETELY CLUELESS AS TO HOW THESE CARDS PERFORMED OR THAT THERE WAS SOME THING WRONG WITH EM? PLEASE... THEY KNEW THAT THERE WAS A PROBLEM... OH WAIT LET PASS THE BUCK BACK TO AMD... DELLS NOT AT FAULT THEY DONT TEST THERE PRODUCTS BEFORE THEY SELL THEM..

 

no sir on this case advance warranty is accidental warranty that means if you drop coffee or liquid on your machine they fix it or if you drop the actual machine and something get broken they replace it

people don't buy warranty to abuse they buy it because is necessary also most of electronic components don't last to long sometimes just 1 or 2 years

 

+1 speedy! +1!!!..

 

I understand if people use it for the right reason. I saw plenty of members on here who purchase amd or even nvidia at first then all of a sudden a new tech come out they either get a free card replacing or even an whole new laptop. I understand computer part due brake sometime but it funny how it only brake exactly when new tech start rolling out.

 

yeah I also understand your point but on this case we just want a working machine AMD or NVIDIA the brand don't really matter if it works correctly and we purchased the machines last month so is not like a year or so

 

Totally understand, I been following your post since you first got your M18x r2 and I know you have problem with xfire since day one. I would be off too if I would to cash out $3000 and get a system that only can use half of it power. I hope dell would resolve this problem soon.

 

Thanks for the support guys if you don't speak no body will hear you so please post your findings about crossfire and driver issues here this is the place

now we have a known website who write a well detailed article about us and the problem we have so this is a good start and hope other websites like engadget and the verge will follow us too

special thanks to Brian K Co-founder of Tech Inferno here is the link
A Consumer Nightmare - Alienware M18x-R2 + AMD 7970M Crossfire | Tech|Inferno

 

Beautiful article. AMD or Dell needs to read this ASAP.

 

I just got off the phone with Alienware, and had to get a supervisor involved. He will be giving me a call back no later than this coming Friday with information regarding proper AMD drivers. I paid for a working computer, darn it! If the desktop version works - then the laptop version better work a month+ after release! Or, don't sell the darned thing!

So, we need to put the pressure on Dell/Alienware to get AMD off their butts and get us a real, supported driver. Please take the 20 minutes and become a squeaky wheel until Dell/AMD greases us with proper drivers!

Until then, my beloved Skyrim remains unplayed

 

Good job,good sir. If AMD releases good support for crossfire, gurantee you will see good results in SkyrIm and Batman AC.

 

Why didn't Brian come interview me? Haha... owner of 6970M/6990M CF M18x R1's. Tries 7970M CF for a day... SWITCHES to a DESKTOP and nVIDIA-based PC. I literally spent $3900 just to avoid AMD's drivers. No regret and not looking back at all.

 

Well, ive gone through further with my AMD inquiry regardin to driver issue. This time, i had on hand some basic driver issue with few games that ive played so far, which ive explain to AMD support, AT end of my inquiry ive just put a note that if i wont able to play game with AMD cards after payin almost more then 3G, then better for me switch Nvidia cards. Ive got reply from AMD (Im not postin whole conversation cosz i dont like to criticize )

Response and Service Request History:

We do not create laptop drivers we only have reference drivers that are used for display purposes only. Dell will be the one to provide the optimized drivers for your specific laptop. Unfortunately at this time there are no official drivers for the 7970M but the next driver release will contain the reference drivers for the 7970M. When this is released Dell will take the reference drivers and optimize it for your specific laptop. Unfortunately there is no release date on when the next driver will be released.

The final decision is up to you. If you want to take the offer from Dell to switch it for an Nvidia card to play your games then it’s an understandable reason."

So from replay, seems like Dell is the only one answerable!!! Or may be Dell gettin more profit from Nvidia cards so they are pushin ppl to get Nvidia. (Ive just thought of it, maybe im wrong or right :S)

 

The whole when the driver will be released thing and NO ETA is seriously troubling.

Since Dell will still have to get a proper driver from AMD and then do its own thing with it, that might be up to a couple months before something truly official comes out for the 7970m since AMD has no ETA .

People will be 4 months into owning the machine before they get a driver that should have been there from day 1 or atleast within the first week.

 

Yes Dell are responsible for providing drivers to end users, but AMD are responsible for supplying the reference driver to Dell. So while Dell must service the end user, I can see the difficulty in doing so when the source of the driver isn't giving them anything to work off. Dell can't create the drivers from scratch - AMD is the only one who can.

It may have been more sensible for the card to be held back for supply to end users by Dell until which time as proper drivers were supplied. The issue here is that everyone wants the biggest and greatest and Dell's competitors would be offering those cards to their consumers, and Dell would loose business as being the only player in the gaming laptop market not supplying the latest card, due to concerns regarding proper driver support. Considering AMD's complete disregard for the mobile market, proper drivers may never appear.

AMD should step up and provide mobile drivers directly to end users just as nvidia has begun doing over the last couple of years. I don't understand the customisation for your laptop nonsense because it's their card plugged into a standard mobo and outputting to a display. What is there to customise?

AMD will always remain the powerful cheap alternative to nvidia, providing cards with more power for less money, at the expense of trash drivers and a care factor of zero.

 

I had issues today playing rift, both gpu usage fluctuated between 0-20%... I had 10-15 fps. In the end I had to disable crossfire and run it off one gpu, ran perfectly on one. But whats the point of having crossfire if we can't use it?

 

Hey Peter, I'm glad AMD clarified the misinformation they previously provided to you. At least they are getting a bit closer to telling the truth now. I'm still taking Alienware's side on this one and placing 100% of the blame on AMD for producing garbage. I suspect the wheels were in motion, orders were being fulfilled and AMD dropped the ball in the 11th hour by not coming through with the goods when they were supposed to. After the fiasco that totally ruined my first 6 to 8 months of M18x ownership being attributable to defective AMD graphics cards, I should have known better. I was willing to discount the 6900M series being a engineering abortion and chalk it up to being a fluke lemon product, but it's like deja vu with 7970M. Unless they do some sort of amazing magic with drivers very soon, I have a feeling I may regret giving AMD a second chance to win me back as a customer. I am generally an optimist and very forgiving, which normally serves me well. This is one circumstance where that may turn out to not be the case.

It appears that AMD's driver team hasn't figured out how to make their own hardware function properly. I find that very disturbing. The fact that they released hardware to manufacturing and shipped the product to their business partners (OEMs) without a fully functional driver speaks volumes about what kind of company AMD is, and it does so in an extremely unfavorable manner.

Hmm... used they word "unfortunately" twice in the same paragraph. That's not good. They are also making an assumption that Dell will or would customize the reference driver. That is not necessarily accurate. If they make decent drivers, then there will be no reason for Dell (or other companies) to need to tweak it. It would function properly as provided by AMD.

Based on this response, it seems that AMD no longer cares about their enthusiast customer base, or its own business reputation. It makes me wonder why they even bothered manufacturing an enthusiast-grade graphics cards if this is how they roll. Maybe now is a good time for Alienware, Clevo, Origin and other high performance laptop manufacturers to abandon AMD altogether and stop selling systems equipped with AMD hardware.

 

The part that confuses me the most about AMD is they are selling god knows how many times the amount of Mobile cards vs Desktop cards these days or alteast the chips to go in the cards.

You would think for that reason alone they would focus 99% of the man power they have towards good mobile drivers instead of almost acting like the mobile market does not exist.

 

Unfortunately, that would only increase Nvidia's price in the end. Competition is good for the consumer. We just need to get AMD motivated and off their behinds.

 

^^^ This. abandoning amd would pretty much give Nvidia a 100% market share and monopoly over the graphics card market, and since they are not an american company, they would not have to deal with anti trust laws. Which means they could literally make us pay anything they want for their products and not have to worry about backlash because there would be no one else to turn to.
AMD needs serious restructuring though.

 

nVidia's HQ is in Santa Clara, California.

 

I really hope AMD is listening our complaints. This cards have untapped power.

 

Kind of missing my point guys... Dell and it's competitors removing AMD products from its list of offerings "because of poor support" would get AMDs attention immediately. There could be a path to restoration for AMD once they deliver an acceptable product. Sometimes you have to play rough with companies run by idiots that are content with producing a mediocre or inferior product. It's pretty common knowledge that a monopoly is bad for consumers. AMD needs to be motivated to stop being a crappy company, and there's nothing like a loss of business to get attention. They need to earn it. For the past couple of years of junk they have been peddling, they deserve none of it. Based on the current and past generation of AMD GPUs NVIDIA already has a monopoly on quality. If the undesirable circumstance of NVIDIA ending up with a real monopoly were to occur, it would be very bad... horrible even. But, I could see that happening if they don't get their act together.

Ha ha, beat me to it, LOL. +1

 

We cant judge whole company by assumin directly on just one rep. response over issue. Even tho WE DIDNT paid money directly to AMD so they cant be accountable. while single 7970m works perfectly on most of game so far, just problem with crossfire in some games. As far as i know only Alienware official sale Dual 7970m, might be Dell holdin AMD back not to release driver. We dont know actual reason. So its not good to blame AMD straight way.

 

I still don't see why some people are trying to place the blame solely on either AMD or Dell. Both are at fault here. Dell should never have released a product that doesn't work as advertised - the fact is, that's fraud. And yet AMD still need to get their s*** together and release functioning drivers.

If there aren't functioning drivers out soon, I'm going to push Dell for a free or discounted upgrade to 680M SLi because they have in my opinion defrauded me by selling me a product that does not function as advertised. I paid for a dual GPU configuration so I should get one that works.

In fact, I think the best solution for Dell would be to give all the customers that complain a discounted upgrade to 680M SLi - say, half the cost difference between them and the 7970Ms, so that would be $225 in the US - and then return all of the replaced 7970Ms to AMD for a refund. That would be a huge wake-up call for AMD, potentially the push they need for motivation as Mr. Fox has suggested.

 

Agreed!!!!! As before AMD said to me better for to Dell for official driver support, Well i know wht will ive get from dell front line tech. even tho i give a shout. One tech. advice me first to check for virus or malware, then asked me to uninstall driver and perform fresh driver install....ect...(we all know). None of tweak help me to resolve problem, hence ive asked him wht should i do next? blahh blahhh Then ive advice him dont you think its driver problem then he goes yes it may be, so ive asked when Dell gona release fully function driver? ive got reply there is not any fix date for it

 

But your wrong. Many games work awesome, but some games work much worse than my previous 6970m. I think that is weird! (this is on single card)

 

I would never judge a company based on something that one, or even several reps, say or do. I don't do that with AMD, Dell or any other company. Employees say and do things that are dumb and often not authorized. I judge a company, including AMD, based on historical evidence of their behavior as a company.

Dell is never, ever, going to release a "Dell" driver for an AMD product. They cannot provide a fix date for driver support because AMD has not given them anything that works. Dell and other computer companies will merely validate that a driver released by AMD doesn't break their product. Dell doesn't write drivers for AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, BigFoot, Texas Instruments, 3Com or any other hardware manufacturer. A functional driver will need to come from AMD. If AMD doesn't release one, there will never be one.

Dell and other computer companies *might* (if absolutely necessary) add something to a device driver to enable a unique brand-only feature, but people need to realize that is AMD's way of shifting their responsibility from providing rudimentary product functionality support to someone else. A computer company *might* replace the images in the driver package with other images that display during installation. They *might* add some lines to an INF file for a brand-specific hardware ID and delete the lines that do not apply. They *might* add an extra DLL file or some lines of code for something that remains broken (like display brightness control, as they did once or twice with drivers for 6970M/6990M). They are probably not going to fix a broken AMD product or begin a driver development program for AMD or any other hardware manufacturer. What Dell has done in the past, and will almost certainly do if they have to again, is exchange the defective component for one that is not defective. That's more than most other computer companies are willing to do. Most companies will just point the finger at AMD (or another device manufacturer) and wash their hands of your problem as a consumer. Dell has never done that and probably will not do that here. But, 4 to 6 weeks is not enough time to expect them to start a recall campaign or begin swapping parts out for impatient customers that complain or want free upgrades to better technology.

AMD wants you to believe that driver support needs to come from Dell, HP, Asus, Acer, Clevo, Compal, MSI, Origin, Eurocom or another computer company but the truth is that none of them write drivers for AMD. All of them use AMD reference drivers, and if those drivers are good enough, they become the "official" driver adopted by the company.

Now that I have been burned by two consecutive generations of AMD graphics cards with shoddy driver support, I'm going to have some degree of personal culpability going forward for being stupid enough to consider owning a product with AMD inside, especially one that has not had time to mature and have the kinks worked out. Early adoption is always a gamble, and especially so when a company has a modus operandi of being late to the party with product support.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me" and "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" are two principles that I will need to remind myself of going forward whenever I see AMD involved.

The other thing that will need to be considered is, assuming AMD releases a driver that functions properly, it may not function properly in the future. If AMD remains true to form, there will continue to be games that never receive appropriate driver support, and others will not see proper support until many months after the game is released.

 

yes ive agree with you mr. " AMD havin bad history of their driver support" Ive really dont understand they are comin out with great hardware but they are lack of software support. First i was thinkin as 7970m chip has been made by AMD, so they obviously responsible to supply properly driver to run their hardware. now each reply ive got from AMD, mentions tht " AMD is not responsible for laptop graphics card driver support ". From AMD's last reply to my inquiry, i feel sense that they gona release driver sooner, but still like hittin arrows in open air

Well we dont know whts politics inside, like Nvdia just release beta support for 675m (which is just re-brand 580m ) , even tho there is not official final driver for 675m.

yes maybe, literary ive faced much problem with crossfire in many games tht ive played, but when ive play same game by disablin crossfire all of them worked fine except one problem that sometimes image quality get darker.

 

I thought i'd get my 2 cents in...Companies like AMD and Nvidia, don't technically support drivers for Laptop cards, they DO modify desktop drivers which they send out to manufacturers to then trim and fit into the systems they build.

This is both companies fault in many ways, AMD released a card months before software support was ready, but Dell put it into computers without properly testing to make sure that the software available would work for there customers. I just ordered an M18x it's in production right now, I got dual 7970 cards based on the recommendation of my friend who has 1 of them in his M17x. I know I have no option to upgrade right now, but I don't think it's too much to ask for those of us who have these cards to be given a timetable for drivers, OR, if that timetable isn't met, to be offered a discounted upgrade to the 680's.

I hear everywhere that Dell prides itself on customer support, I would love to see that followed through in more than these forums.

 

We are providing good points here. Damn, it's hard to find a solution to this issue. AMD and DEll needs to read this ASAP!!

 

Well said. +rep.

 

Hmmm if nvidia is an American company, and AMD were to go under in the graphics card market, and nvidia started raising prices, the government could get involved and break the company up like they did with the original phone company and US steel. Maybe nvidia would throw AMD a bone to avoid this like Microsoft did with Apple in the 90's.

 

AMD wont be going anywhere do not worry about that . They have plenty of satisfied customers especially in the single video card sector .

Crossfire is VERY much a niche thing and only caters to a very small percentage of gamers so i dont think AMD really even cares as much as we would like them to .

I believe AMD only offers Crossfire because Nvidia offers SLI and id bet the ranch if Nvidia came along and said we are done with SLI so would AMD drop Crossfire.

Also AMD will go onto supply the next XBOX for Microsoft, so yeah they are not going anywhere anytime soon .


In this instance it really is both Dell's and AMD's fault split right down the middle. AMD for selling a product clearly not ready for public consumption and Dell for accepting said product and putting it out on the street knowing they did not have proper driver support, and believe you me they knew the drivers were broken but they had to get it out the door and let the public play guinea pig once again.

 

well i tried mass effect 3 and skyrim and max payne 3 and im getting flashing textures alot of the time and the performance seem to be under 60fps.

Ive tried all the drivers and none of them have a made a diffrence.

Cant beleive iv only had this laptop 2 days, had i known the 7970m had no offical drivers i would have waited until they fixed it insted im left with a laptop i cant use.

Does anyone know what the number is to call alienware in the uk to return it?

 

Looks like this is the number you need for Customer Care.

UK Free phone Customer Service: 0800 2799751, Option 2

 

They both are american company.

 

i hope, for the sake of AMD and competition, that you are wrong. 7970m CF is their flagship product and companies usually take great care of their flagship products because flagship products are what sells the rest of their (usually lower-priced) products.

and it's a shame that it's been a month and still no official driver.