*Official Alienware M18x AMD CrossFire Discussion Thread (re: Dell/AW Conference Call)*

Yeah I used the tweezers meant for it and they still broke.

 

Just checked my MB revision, it's:

F2 1136 - I'm not having any thermal shutdown or fan issues.

I ordered from Ireland so mine was assembled in China.

Running BIOS A03 and Catalyst 11.10 WHQL

 

Sorry. I spoke to Louis briefly this morning in the hallway, and a bit more in IM. I totally forgot to ask for an update on the driver posting. He's in a couple of back to back meetings now, and I'm taking a half day for Veterans' Day. Hopefully I catch him between meetings or before I leave and get the latest word on the driver.

My bad.

 

Updating the cold boot issue:

The factory team has reproduced the issue for the first time. They are looking at BIOS EC code to figure out where the failure lies. We should know more over the weekend, and I should have a more comprehensive update on Monday.

 

Thanks for the update Bill, glad they were able to reproduce.

 

Heard back from Louis on the driver. Due to factors unforeseen, we will need a little more time to test the latest driver. Sorry for the delay.

 

No worries Bill. If they arent available to test out prior to our conference call, I am sure that we can provide feedback afterwards via the thread I set up.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...md-driver-release-scheduled-dell-shortly.html

 

Want me to cross post on the new thread, or do you want to update the OP?

 

Feel free to pop a post on the thread Bill, It will let people know your active on that baby too! - I have updated my initial post regardless, FYI.

 

Hey Bill, by latest driver are we talking 11.9, 11.0 or 11.11?

Thanks.

 

Just did a fresh install of win7 and i had to install the intel gpu driver by doing the fn + f7. After that i changed back to the ati with fn+f7 and it restarted and booted up and the fan did not come on. So it looks like it has to be restarted after the ati gpus are turned on as I had done at lease 5 restarts when installing the OS and drivers.

 

I was wondering , is this my 6990m problem or bf3's problem , my fps reduced badly , down to 15~5 sometimes....

Driver 11.10 , CAP 11.9

 

It is a bf3 problem my 580 after the patch randomly would stay at stock clocks forever. Playing now to see if fixed but it just came after yesterdays patch, and happens occasionaly on map switch.

 

I just received my replacement machine with dual AMD 6990s. Motherboard revision G2 1147. Second cold boot, temps on primary card went to 105 degrees before fan kicked in on max. Brought temps down, fan stopped. No fan activity until temps rose above 95 degrees again. Same story as original machine. No thermal shutdown or BSOD as yet, but this is only my second cold boot with the new machine. Everything is stock. This is FYI.

 

That's a real bummer. Do you know what revision the motherboard was with the other system? If you haven't returned it yet, please check and advise. I just added your current system and revision number to the list, but it would be good to have the number from the original system in the list as well.

 

I just got my laptop wensday, and had my first thermal shutdown today. Im a sad panda, i thought i was good.

 

chillbill - if it is a new one (not a refurb) you might want to set up a return and opt for an M18x with 580M GTX SLI instead. Even if you have to pay the difference, it was only $150 as of yesterday. It would be worth the small price difference based on what is currently happening with AMD-based systems. You need to make this decision quickly (21 day window on returns) or you will be dealing with a different set of rules.

 

F2 1131. Thanks

 

Not sure. I'll check Monday.

 

Thankk, gderreck. I added the additional information to the list.

 

FYI for Mr. Fox and all. I just got off the phone with tech. Apparently, the issue has wound its way up to level 3 and engineering (we know that). However, it has now found its way to level 1 tech support, in such a way as they can now mention it. They are saying it is regarding a downgraded GPU (maybe that's just Dell-Speak). About time....EH? I am Canadian I will be getting a call next week regarding the road forward. I am anxious to get this resolved. However, it would be unfair of me to insist on another replacement machine until more is known. That may well just waste more of Dell's money and my time. I will still be within my 21 day window when I discuss this further. However, I don't think I need to worry about Alienware's motives. I am certain they will take care of all of us.

This thread has, IMHO, pushed things forward. Props to Fox and all contributors.

 

Thanks for sharing the info, gderreck. And, you're absolutely right. Their motives are good... Dell/Alienware is an awesome company that had made a few mistakes here and there. They're working hard to make it right for us and I believe they're going to accomplish that.

 

@gderreck - that's actually good news regarding L1 tech support. I know when I first called in bout the problem it wasn't in their trouble database. Tech remotely monitored my service "after" reboot and saw gpu temps fine, thought everything was ok. That was frustrating I told him problem was occurring at cold boot, lol. Needless to say that wasn't going to be my last call to tech support.

@ Mr Fox - Your right. Dell is doing the right thing. They have admitted there's a problem. That in itself is refreshing. A lot of times getting a company or government entity to take responsibility is so hard, because the moment they admit fault the public pressure rises and someone becomes accountable/responsible. This time Dell was out in front and with us from the beginning, never denying the problem, having a rep here on the forums and agreeing to a conference call. Good idea Mr Fox.

@ Dell
Kudos on response so far.
However it must be said quality control should would have caught this though, there's no excuse for that. Sadly any gpu burnin stress test would have caught this and I hope that's done going forward. When a $3000+ laptop is defective straight from factory it's bad. I'd really like to know if when the last component is added to laptop if it's benchmarked and stressed. (seems not). If that were an option I'd be willing to wait and pay extra.

@ NBR
I'm glad to be in the company of people so willing help. I'm really impressed with some of the knowledge put into responses in these threads. The willingness to help others is contagious here. In other forums I've seen the elite users unwilling to help new users. I've seen new guys post quoted and clowned for pages after. Its has the effect of people not wanting to ask questions. This forum is different and I appreciate it. Us posting our experiences did push this forward and helped Dell a lot.

 

Hello people:

I think I have the same problem as all with the 6990M. I have the following config:
2960XM
6690Xfire

It arrived last Thursday, and since it arrived I noticed the graphics were not working as they should.

For example, in the GTAIV all goes well at first but in a few seconds the FPS go down to 20 or less and becomes unplayable.

I think I have a problem with the graphics fans, because I do not listen all the fans working faster when playing games.

I reinstalled the drivers as follows:

Uninstall from the Control Panel
reboot
safe Mode
driver Sweeper
CCleaner
reboot
Uninstall from the device manager all graphics adapters
Install the 11.10 drivers from AMD website
Install the latest drivers 11.4 cap profiles

After that I managed to play Battlefield 3 with everything on ultra least antialiasing, with an average of between 55-60 FPS.

I'm very happy with it, but I'm not happy with GTA IV is not as throttling occurs.

I've been reading your post and what I had read dell is preparing the launch of the solution.

Not long ago I had a M17x R3 which had the same problem with 6970. I managed to fix the VBIOS flashing on and turning off the ati powerplay Which fix the throttling.

How can i flash both GPUs? Are there any manual or guide?


Thank you very much to all and sorry if my English is not quite correct.

 

[Nikos] if you would like to have your motherboard revision number added to the list, please review the information in opening post and let me know. At this point it might be a good idea to hold off on "home remedy" fixes involving vBIOS flashing, etc.

As you noted, a fix is forthcoming and if rebooting, resetting BIOS defaults or controlling fans manually will allow you to circumvent the overheating issue while we are waiting, that would be my recommendation. You will find more information about these workarounds in this thread and other threads within the Alienware M18x Community.

 

I'll post my mb number as soon as I can.

Which program is the best to control manually the fans?

Could someone tell me how to extend the margin of Overdrive with Radeon Bios editor program?

Or do you not recomend me to flash my gpu until the fix has been released?


PS: When uninstalling the gpu drivers and re-install the drivers I did not install the drivers first, then Dell official drivers. Instead of this I install the official 11.10 and nothing else.

Now when I start the computer with the Intel graphics I get an error message saying that the catalyst is not compatible with this adapter, but still works perfectly. Should I do anything to avoid this message?

Thank you.

 

Your questions are off-topic for this thead and answers to your questions are already posted in other threads. You can find answers in the 6990M CrossFire guide, as well as other threads. We need to stay on topic in this thread, and posting answers to these questions would be a distraction.

The decision is yours, but with the current unresolved issues, you may find that tweaking things will exacerbate the current issue in ways that produced no problems on older systems that were unaffected.

The forum search feature does not work well. You can use Google to search this forum very effectively. I recommend this for finding information and it helps avoid starting new threads that are redundant. Please look at this post by BatBoy for tips on using Google to search NBR Forum. (The full thread contains a lot of useful tips from BatBoy, so after reading the tip about using Google, please browse the other posts in the same thread. It's a short read.)

Since our Community is full of folks that are eager to lend a hand, don't be surprised if you received a PM or two from folks with answers or links to the answers.

 

I'm not saying [Nikos] doesn't have a problem but, GTAIV was poorly written for the PC and has serious performance issues...just thought I'd throw that in there.

 

My 6990m is driving me crazy , I was playing bf3 just now , with low setting , the "lowest", the fps suddenly reduced to 5-10 fps , then my screen just frozen , (i went to shower & it still frozen around 10min , i forced restart it.)

I'll see what my rep says on Monday , it really pissed me off.

 

Hello Nuroo! Thanks for putting into words my own thoughts!
Just add my Kudos to Dell-Bill_B...

 

That's EXACTLY the kinda behaviour I was getting.....I havent bothered much with my M18x at the moment, I clean installed windows to it a while back with the hope of fixing the issue....I didnt even get around to installing the drivers after the OS as I didnt wanna damage anything with these random shutdowns. Its just sat here like a £5000 paperweight.

Currently just getting about with a cheap laptop......what a farce.....

 

I did clean install , not working at all...been tested all the driver , same result.

You can see my score in bf3 , i only played 15~20min...per day....

 

As mentioned on the original post, rebooting usually solves the overheating problem for me.

I hope Dell is working on resolving this issue ASAP.

They shouldn't be selling the 6990's at all at the moment IMO.

When the system is working as it should, it's outstanding though.

The symthom when the overheat shut down occur for me is the left fan BLASTS as hard as it can, while no fan activity on the right.

GPU-z sensor's primary card/1st card on the drop down temp keeps going up until shut down even with the maxxed fan.

The 3dmark 06 score is only 18k while 24k is the norm score for my system.

It works as it should usually after a reboot or 2 in my experience, but I'm feeling the system dies a little every time this happens lol.

 

Well, after realising that a clean install would NOT resolve the problem, I have left my M18x as a giant paperweight for fear of causing irreparable damage....as Achilles mentioned below. Like I said before, havent even bothered to re-install any drivers....its just sat here with the OS installed and I dont use it........

Quite sad that I have such a powerful system sat here and yet I am running a crappy old laptop without issue.......no problems - cant game on it mind, but its ok for surfing and mail.

 

Hi All,

First post on the forum, heya. I just bought an m18x and it arrived 3 days ago. Laptop was shipped to Australia from China. The laptop is having the same issue discussed in this forum, left fan works right does nothing, playing CoD the FPS can drop to like 10fps. Should I wait for drivers or send back requesting the Nividia card upgrade?

When it works it's amazing.. Shame about the defect,

 

I am still using my old dell studio for my work stuff but I can use the m18 for games. I don’t have any very new games but have tried GTA4, The Witcher 2, NFS hot pursuit, Batman Arkham Asylum and BFBC 2. All of them seem to run very well. I just have to restart after a cold boot or the thing overheats. I also noticed that if I switch from the Intel GPU to the AMD ones I have to reboot after it reboots to the AMD GPU.

I hope they find a solution soon as I need to start using the m18 for work.

 

Interesting about the iGFX - personally, I never used it as mine was intended as a true DTR.

 

I've been using the HD 3000 IGP for close to a month now because of the situation with my dead AMD cards. It's great for everything except for the latest games. It actually runs most older games very nicely, including classic OpenGL titles that the 6900M Series cards don't support all that well... i.e. Quake II. It also does some recent games OK if the settings are put on low or medium. (Even played Left4Dead 2 on lower settings.) This has forced me on a trip down memory lane, LOL. I'm ready for that trip to be over now. The "Good Old Days" cliché applies to many things, but gaming... not so much.

 

Hang in there Fox.

 

Oh, yeah. There's light at the end of the tunnel.

But, it's nice to know what the HD 3000 IGP is capable of. Had this not happened, I am almost positive I never would have explored its capabilities. It's actually a respectable performance advance for Intel, which has always had a pretty lousy IGP solution. Gaming performance is similar to the AMD 4250 IGP in the M5030 listed in my signature. There is no DX11 support on the HD 3000.

Every cloud has a silver lining if you look hard enough.

 

mr. fox how did your card die, 3dmark eh?

 

Nope, I was not doing anything taxing when they gave up the ghost. I attempted to switch from the IGP back to discreet graphics one day and my M18x would no longer POST with them installed. My assumption is that ongoing overheating conditions killed them. I had 3 or 4 episodes of thermal shutdown and screen dimming during gameplay about 48 hours before this happened. A number of other times (at least a half dozen, probably more,) the system was left running and idle at my desk and I returned later to find it mysteriously turned off (not in sleep or hibernation, as I always disable those features). This all happened shortly before this issue started surfacing in frequent posts on the forum.

Unfortunately, I was not monitoring GPU temps during ordinary use at that time. I also don't remember hearing the fans spin up under GPU load like they should have. There are at least 1 or 2 other forum members that experienced the same thing with failure to POST.

 

This may or may not add to the information required for the Dell call. With my original machine (after a cold boot), I generally got no POST fan test, high primary card temps, then a thermal shutdown. Occasionally, I would get no fan, high temps, then high fan. A restart before login prevented the heat issue in most cases.

With the replacement machine (after a cold boot), I generally get no POST fan test, high temps, then high fan to bring temp down. On one occasion, the high fan lasted for about 20 minutes. By that time the primary card temps were in the range of 45 degrees. Cool EH? Pun intended.

I ran Heaven in full screen mode. Secondary card temp went to 106 degrees and only the primary fan operated...at full speed. A restart before login prevents the heat issue.

I bring this up only because the symptoms are different in the 2 MB revisions.

 

Didn't want to start another post. The new machine came loaded with AlienAutopsy. I am not familiar with the program. I do kind of like the "all in one place nature of the application. At some point, when I have a stable machine, I am going to install my personal copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. I would like to keep AlienAutopsy. Any idea where to get it? When I first booted up teh replacement machine, AlienAutopsy updated. I didn't get the name of the install file, so I can't search my machine. Anybody know where I can download the app?

Thanks

 

I haves done all kind a thing with my m18x and still going strong.lol

 

I'm not familiar with AlienAutopsy, gderreck. Did you look on your Resource DVD to see if it is there? It may be something new... could be something old that I have never paid attention to prior to doing a clean OS install.

 

Original from Mr. Fox
I'm not familiar with AlienAutopsy, gderreck. Did you look on your Resource DVD to see if it is there? It may be something new... could be something old that I have never paid attention to prior to doing a clean OS install.

This is only on the replacement machine. It has the Windows verions of diagnostics powered by PC Doctor (bonus!) and links to support resources, system information and tools. There isn't much information out there re this product, but it does appear to be useful.

 

Does integrated graphic show up in bios when CFX is enabled? my bios isnt showing it.

 

No, it is one or the other, depending on which is active. If you activate the discreet graphics cards (AMD or NVIDIA) the Intel HD 3000 IGP will not be visible in Device Manager. It will also be grayed-out in the BIOS options. Likewise, if the IGP is active, the discreet graphics cards will become "invisible" to the system. This is normal and how the M18x is designed.

 

Alien Autopsy? - never heard of it....apart from the UK film that was made with Ant 'n' Dec (for those non - UK, they are the modern day equivalent of Morecambe and Wise, Britain's best loved comedy duo) - maybe its a new name for AlienRespawn??? (just a guess)

Alien Autopsy HD Movie Trailer - YouTube