M18X R2 - NEW 7970M - Crossfire issue - Both cards work on there own? Please Help.

Hi Guys,

Just to cut a long story short, one of my 7970M's died and a Dell engineer turned up and replaced it with another. However, he left without It actually working the 3d mark was appalling after checking the "crossfire enabled" it was greyed out and not available.

We have tested 2 crossfire cables, both 7970m cards work on there own. The engineer had a very poor knowledge on the laptops he didn't even know how to switch between the dedicated or on-board GPU. He also left a lot of screws out of the laptop upon putting it back together, not what you expect on such an expensive machine. To top of off, he even left without inserting the keyboard ribbon back in, leaving the keyboard defective.

I have noticed, that the hardware ID's do not match at all, the Bios's are different versions. Could this be the problem, im tired of the engineer coming out and doing all he can not to actually fix it and carry out he's job.
I have attached the screenshots, if you could provide any assistance it would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,

 

Device manager screenshot please. If you have an unlocked bios, it may be worth trying to set gfx to SG, then switch back to PEG and reinstall drivers.

 

I'm surprised that he had a 7970M to throw in there, honestly. Which card died, primary or secondary?

When you say both cards work on their own, does that mean that the new card the Dell tech brought was installed into the primary slot (under the WASD keys) and a benchmark was run?

Also, what did your system do to indicate that one of the cards had died?

Your Dell tech is not that out of the ordinary. They get generic training due to the fact that they have to respond to so many different types of calls, for all types of Dell desktops and laptops. Some will do their homework and watch some tear down videos, and some will show up and say they've never seen an Alienware product in their lives. I don't let the Dell techs touch my systems, I just let them 'supervise' while I do the work. At the end of the day they aren't the ones that don't have a working computer, so they don't have a ton of buy-in. Most of them are happy to just sit and watch me work anyway.

 

It could be because of the vBIOS version. Can you try flashing both to the same one?

 

I would suspect that he did not install the crossfire cable back in correctly. AMD tend to be much less picky than Nvidia when it comes to Xfire.

 

Apologies for the long delay guys, both the cards show in device manager perfectly fine. I have tried 2 different crossfire cables neither worked and both were brand new. Both cards work perfectly solo on the primary slot, the secondary slot was working prior to the old 7970m failing and showing artifacts in both slots it was tested in. Could it be the video bios requiring flashing then ? im nervous to do this , is it risky?

 

I think that you should contact dell because you still have warranty, don't you? I don't recommend flashing vBIOS on your own if you still have warranty because that may cause the GPU be out of warranty. vBIOS flashing is not super easy but it's not hard, you just have to know what to type and use USB drive with NVFLASH on it but it's risky as the card may not even boot if the vBIOS is damaged or not designed for this card.

 

What does GPU-Z show for the vbios on each card?