M18x-R1 with 7970M CrossFire

Maybe a Team Viewer session would be helpful

 

hope you can make it work with John drivers

 

would love to help get this going. would save me and brother fox some time later when we upgrade..

 

hey im all for a team view session!

pm me if your up for it.. ill send you my info if you are..i have it open and waiting.. also i should dl your file then huh lol

 

pm sent...

 

OK, so what happened to your laptop, Dumbdumb?

 

well here is a worlds first.. ill just show the scores lol and by worlds first i mean running mark06 on the 7970m single card..

ill let john explain the what was going on and why this is special!
thanks to his help we have gotten farther with this.. hopefully we get further!

Spoiler

 

woohooo another bench ran from southern california to northern california.

we still need lots of work though. seems that they can run under single card mode for some benches and dual card for others. we tried everyones drivers and for the most part...they didn't work. we added in our own strings and tried adding them in to different parts of the inf. what it's looking like is that there are missing dll files that would help the driver perform better. (this is speculation of course) because just modding inf is not really doing what we need it too. might need to flash the cards though.....


and that bench we ran with nothing working no over clocks or ccc changes, while he and i were talking through teamviewer. he had everything under the sun running in his taskbar.. and we got off a single card run for the first time. about 50 reboots trying different things. looked at reg entries for clues, but nothing really jumping out at the obvious. still testing for single card stability, but crossfire is up in the air for anything older than 06. but we only tried a few games and 06 and 03 which all crashed under crossfire. some wouldn't even start. some ran when we told it it was running in single card mode...but about a minute later it crashed. so far it seems stable with ccc working, but no over drive working yet. had problems with xtu so that's why no cpu over clocking at the moment....

but i will say this...40k+ looks to be well with in reach....

 

here the test you wanted me to post john..
all stock with your help..lol
Generic VGA video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2960XM Processor,Alienware M18xR1 score: P29547 3DMarks

Generic VGA video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2960XM Processor,Alienware M18xR1 score: P9724 3DMarks

 

You mean to say that the CF7970m can reach 40000 on the 3d mark benchmark??

 

he means in 40k in Vantage.

With some overclocking, 40k is very doable. They are already up to 33k GPU score stock

 

I just got my cards installed and I am having the same issue as you Dumbdumb, I can't find any drivers. They are both showing up as standard VGA adapters.

 

Wow, that's almost 2x than 675 m gtx sli

 

Sometimes the GPU score and overall score are significantly different, especially if the CPU is not powerful enough and drags down the overall benchmark score. (My 2760QM used to drag down my benchmark scores.)

Be sure you are looking at the GPU part of the Vantage score and not the overall 3DMark score. DumbDumb is getting 33k even though his overall score is only 29k. That is not almost 2x the 675M... not an accurate statement. My GPU score with 580M SLI is 33k running a similar core and memory clock speeds as the 7970M core and memory clock speeds; so DumbDumb's current 7970M GPU score, notwithstanding poor driver support, is roughly the equivalent. (See this LINK.) With proper driver support it should be substantially better, but probably more like 25% - 30% better, not 200%, LOL.

 

to be fair, your 580's are heavily clocked to score 33k

If dumbdumb overclocks his cards to something high but not extreme like 980/1450, we will see new records set

To DUMBDUMB, JOHN et al.

have you guys tried these drivers?

http://download.benchmark3d.com/AMD/Catalyst/8.951.1/8.951.1-120305.7z

i know that Panda was able to see both 7970m's in his device manager with these drivers. i don't know how stable they are though

 

the drivers are installed and show 7970M. all is well there. it gets tricky when a game or bench is started and the cards don't know how to render the game or bench while in crossfire mode.
ccc is working fine, just no overdrive yet...but i thought that could be enabled by registry hack or something...i forget. let me know...

 

I see. So games are running in single 7970m mode? or does it just crash in Xfire mode?

 

Yes, but my overclock is very similar to the stock clock speeds on the 7970M, so I don't really look at it being an unfair comparison. I look at it as being a more leveled playing field based on clock speeds. If the 7970M were downclocked to stock 580M clock speeds, I suspect it would not be scoring as high as 33k. I would expect nothing less than 33k from the 7970M based on the fact that it is newer tech and running at higher stock speeds. If that were not the case, the 7970M would be a fail and we would not have any reason to be impressed by it.

 

so far he was able to play his games in single card mode. the new stuff runs in dual card mode. but he will test more games today. also, radeon pro seems to work as well. we sort of got to that part late into the night.


edit:
If dumbdumb overclocks his cards to something high but not extreme like 980/1450, we will see new records set <--- don't need to over clock anything. i can beat my (33.6k gpu) record with his cards on stock.

with just cpu over clocking...maybe 34k to 35k

 

You guys are making want a m18x

 

You should get one, bro. Join the dual-GPU and aluminum chassis troops. We'd love to have you in the ranks.

 

i would love to join lol

we just found out that the 3720qm and 3820qm chips are overclockable in the m17x R4's up to level 3...so i was seriously thinking about selling my R3 and getting the R4 for pretty much an even swap.

However, i will need permission from the boss (*aka the wife) if i need another $1K to get a m18x.

I've been scouring ebay for a cheap barebones m18x, but all of the ones i've seen are pretty loaded up. I just want a barebones, put my 7970m into it, then upgrade with a second when Dell finally puts out some xfire support

 

ok on johns advice.. im doing a fresh install of the os.. and test will start back up Monday or Tuesday..

ill do some of my own.. but this is far from my area of expertise! lol..

johns an awesome dude! with his and foxs help we will get thru this!

 

I've been unable to get any games to work with crossfire cause of lack of driver support and after spending almost two hours waiting in line to speak with a Blizzard tech it looks like I won't be playing D3 even with a single card until proper drivers are released.

 

Speedy should have his machine in a couple hours and i asked him to backup the drivers that are shipping with his new machine to see if they are possibly different and then upload them for others to try.

Its possible the shipping drivers will differ from whats currently available on the web.

 

That would be awesome Quad, thank you. I am running the first set of drivers Slick posted in his guide to installing the 7970m in a m17x.

 

wait.. is speedy getting the r2? with 7970s?

 

Yeah it just has not been delivered yet. Was on the phone with him half an hour ago and they still did not show up yet.

 

Great idea, Quadzilla. Hopefully, Speedy's system has proper drivers. It would be sad if they are shipping without good driver support.

 

might help, this could be why no drivers yet?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/8531471-post333.html

 

Well guys I'll try my best all I can say now is that those drivers are broken not the GPU drivers Fedex drivers lol

Edit: just got my machine now I have to go home and start thinking with it yeahhhh

 

Grats on your new machine speedy! Keep us posted

 

upload the drivers!!!!!!!!!! lol and congrats..im semi jealous..

 

Yes, please. I can't even play d3 at this point

 

Ok guys this is what i got on the control panel let me figure how to backup the drivers


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Other then the subsystem id and the differences in PCI Express my CCC looks exactly like that.

 

awesome! pci 3.0 is going to rock! ok ill patiently be checking this thread for your driver back up every 2 minutes! lulz

 

ok here is the drivers guys Drivers MIGUEL-PC 05-17-2012.rar - 4shared.com - online file sharing and storage - download - Miguel Gonzalez

 

Speedy can you take a shot of the software page?

 

You'll have to create an account to download these and manually install them.

Not sure if this is going to even work but its certainly worth a try .

The setup file is never included in these drivers and im not even sure if the CCC is either but in the case of the CCC you can always install one from another set so no biggie there.

I pointed the driver to the single 6990 in my machine and it found the card but i didnt bother going any further since i don't need them.

The inf file is OEM78

 

So I downloaded them, what do I do with them once extracted? (Sorry if thats a silly question I am useless at this kind of stuff). Even if it doesn't work, thanks Speedy! Nice of you to spend the time doing this for us, especially considering you just got a brand new toy and I am sure you're anxious to play with it haha.

 

You have to do a manual install from the device manager.

Device manager/display adapter/7970m(or Standard VGA if you uninstalled the old drivers you were using) then click on the driver tab/click update driver/click browse my computer for driver in the box below the top one and find the driver you downloaded and extracted/click OK and see what happens.

 

Windows has determined the drivers for your device are up to date

 

Remove all the previous AMD stuff then and try again from having the Standard VGA adapter installed. Not sure if you tried that yet but its worth a shot.


If it found a newer driver when you were trying to manually install them it will tell you your drivers are up to date since you had something newer on it already.

Im sure the Dell build is older or just of a lesser version number then the ones you were tinkering with before.

 

Yeah, even after uninstalling and the cards going back to standard VGA adapters it still says drivers are up to date

 

Yeah i figured it was a long shot because dumping the drivers does not always give you everything needed for a proper install but it was a worth a shot.

Looks like you guys will be waiting abit longer till something else comes along sadly.

 

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Sorry guys I am trying to check my new toy

 

ok after looking at the drivers.. its missing the
c7136466.inf file the one you can open in notepad..
could you upload that please..

 

Thanks speedy, rep'd. I think its the same driver as the one on M17x R4 driver page.

 

but with all the dlls we need.. I just need the inf file..then im going to transfer every thing over to another ccc and it should in theory work..