So, uh, my GPUs failed. Again.

Its a Ubisoft game... Of course it is.

And yeah I had many more issues back in May, and didn't have the reboot issue. Go figure.

Anyway I think we derailed the OPs thread enough although now at least if OP gets 880M, OP knows it can be tweaked lol.

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What's a NBR thread without a little derailing here and there? And yes I know it's an Ubisoft game. I would call Ubisoft by the name I reserve for it when I'm in Teamspeak, but the forum would censor it =D.

Anyway, you're right, he should know the 880Ms aren't stuff you throw in a dumpster. They could (and should) be better, sure, but they'll do him fine if he gets some.

 

I can hazard a guess at said name haha.

And yeah I've been involved in quite a few derails lately. I incurred the wrath of Cloudfire twice... In the last week lol. >_>

They aren't as bad as I was believing they were. The modded vbios killing the throttling actually made everything smoother even though my overall clock is lower because it got rid of the microstutter from the clocks not being in sync.

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Yeah, that's a gigantic sacrifice. Running 880M at stock 780M clocks and voltage isn't really a solid fix considering that 780M still overclocks and overvolts like a banshee, and doesn't overheat or throttle, with the svl7/johnksss vBIOS mod.

 

Well it is I'm sure. But hey, if he's happy, then cool. Who knows? Maybe with a cooling mod or two and the Gelid paste he'll be able to keep it 954/6000 constant without cracking the 80 degree barrier at the least.

That there would be a pipe dream for me at my ambient temps thus far XD.

 

Its much lower than 780M stock voltage, it uses 1v for 849MHz but yes it's a compromise but I also care about fan acoustics. I spent hours testing and while it will do 993MHz at 1v and 92C max, 954MHz @0.981v and 82C max, 849MHz doesn't even require max fans or even the auto step because on low it doesn't pass 84 and the curve for high is 87C.

If I need the gaming performance, I'll change to another profile but I see no reason to stress them when everything I play is having no problems. I dumped 5k into this machine, I want to get 5 years out of it. That's going to be much more likely if I'm running the GPUs so low.

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Well, this thread has become quite derailed.

Got an email back today, the manager wants to speak with me on the phone when I'm back in the UK on Thursday. Not sure if that's a good or a bad sign, but I'm going to be annoyed if the possibilities don't involve a replacement 18. After seeing the state of the motherboard that was meant to replace mine, there's no way I can trust any repair they do to last.

 

Best of luck man and my apologies for the major derail.

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Your joking right? I have had this same shell since July-2011
Started out with a i7 non extreme 4gb ram and 6990M's. And has seen every possible upgrade in between.
I wish I would have stuck with them 6990M's. rotfl! 4 years later.

That cooling mod will not work since it will be cooling the wrong areas.

Indeed.



Side note:
As to thread derails. I think mine holds the record. the 880m and the benchmark 3 thread. This one has a very very long way to go.

 

I would try to actually tweak the voltage more if it wasn't for the ticking time bomb after so many crashes that has been reported. I haven't tried to undervolt @ 993MHz, I was using the stock voltage tables from my observations of the stock vbios and writing down the values then inputting them on the mod.

I already crashed a number of times because of a bug between the vbios and cloud gate physics benchmark plus the crashes when I was trying 849 @ 0.875v.

In an ideal world I'd have 780M cards and not have to worry about this mess but I'm not willing to spend more money when I have a desktop with a 780 Ti.

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No love for your desktop?

I am right at the point of being fed up with nVidia and AMD's shenanigans in the mobile market so I'm eagerly awaiting a reason to go back to a desktop (the last "real" desktop I had was in 2004 lol) I just hope the rumored performance and price of the desktop 880 is true, otherwise I will be one very unhappy camper. :/

 

To bad those cards are under warranty with the whole machine. I might have worked something out with you.


Ok. I'm done with off topic now.

 

I love the desktop and if I had a decent monitor rather than having it hooked up to my 55W802A, I would use it more. My laptop screen is just too nice.

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If you're looking for a 120+Hz panel I hear the BenQ XL240 is pretty nice. My Asus does the job but it pales in comparison (pun intended) to the 90% gamut laptop panel. And yeah all those reviews bashing the color reproduction of the Asus it's all true.

 

I'm just severely space limited.

Spoiler

I mean my laptop sits like this

Spoiler

And my chair is also my bed (futon)

That was the whole reason for getting a laptop in the first place but I decided I wanted to build a desktop too after anyway.

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I'm never complaining about not having enough room again. No but seriously from this angle even my grad student dorm room looks bigger.

 

Yeah man this room is freaking small. I could put a little desk all the way in that back corner but that would drive me nuts being so closed in ;/

And I'm at a loss how Johnksss got 993MHz @ 0.950 - 954MHz maybe but I just hard locked again and I'm at 0.975v

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What if he did most of the mods in this thread? And I believe n=1 also did something where he added a backplate to the master GPU, to help support it on the board better, but I can't find that link right now, unfortunately.

Would most of that still be ineffective at cooling it correctly?

 

The backplate is this one.

Reading it again, I cannot BELIEVE I went the "long, verbose, dramatic" style on that one :/ What a fail. If I had the will to edit that I could probably cut out half the wordage and it would still flow really well.

 

^ whoop, see. I meant to say heat spreader and not backplate. I knew I was mis-wording something. See, it's only 11:24pm and not 2am, so my mind is only operating at ~50% efficiency.

 

What are the exact dimensions now I'm curious. If you have a measuring tape could you do a measurement lol

This is what my room is like (drawn to scale; 1 cm = 1 feet)

 

Ah yes, thread derailing. #FeelsGoodMan

 

I get that feel, really love the Alienware 18 pls screen even compared to my u2713hm which is currently at my moms place with my desktop

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Roommate is asleep and the tools are in his room, ask me tomorrow lol. I can tell you its long, its just narrow. Which is a really inefficient use of space.

And my cards won't do 954MHz @ 0.950v, only 0.968v which is still too damn hot (hit 89C looping the first scene of fire strike extreme in about 15 minutes). 928MHz @ 0.950v, however maxed at 86C.

Still think I'm gonna stick to 849MHz @ 0.893v though, maybe I'll tweak the RAM a bit.

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Its hard to go to a TV after staring at a gorgeous matte 120hz display.

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If you like the 72% gamut 120Hz panel then the 90% gamut one will absolutely blow your mind. Honestly it's been about 4 months since I started using this external Asus LCD, and sometimes (especially when playing Crysis 2 and 3) I still go back to gaming on the 17.3" panel just because that 90% gamut is simply too gorgeous. Apart from the 95% gamut 15.6" panel that used to be offered, I doubt I'll find anything that comes close to it.

 

Well I'm coming from the Inspiron 17R with a glossy LP173WD1

Horrible, horrible, horrible screen.

I still miss the screen in my M17xR1 though. 1920x1200 > 1920x1080

 

Honestly I think the 90% gamut panel has completely screwed up my color perception -- now everything looks washed out or undersaturated and I keep wondering why the colors are so dull.

When I go back to my horribly washed out pos 15.6" 720p Chi Mei screen in my Toshiba, I honestly think the panel is malfunctioning thanks to the 90% panel -_-

If AUO made a 24" version of this 90% panel I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Oh did I mention the 90% panel (AUO B173HW01 v4) could be overclocked from 60Hz to 110Hz. Talk about best of both worlds.

 

I could make babies with 1200p, but as a streamer 1080p is my nice spot, at least for my gaming screen. If I could get a 1600p second screen though I'd die happy XD. 16:10 should be more of a thing.

 

Yeah, you can run with no heat shield or spreader or how ever you choose to word it, on the back. Those chips do not get as hot as people think they do.

Ok, so here is the problem you need to figure out.

See component R22 and it's twin?
Well these two parts get hotter than the gpu. It causes the card to heat the heat sinks up very quickly and keep it very hot. Which in turn heats up the vram which can give vram errors over time. And before you go passing it off as not a fact. you will need to go test it for your self. And the only way to do that is to have a copper block. You can boot into windows and run something very light. And see how fast them components heat up The vram will not over clock well when this is going on. Now doing this same test on the 780M those components are no where remotely close to as hot as they are on the 880M. And this is not me looking it up on the internet either, it's what I found out from my testing. So....unless you can figure out cooling those parts, you will never be able to gain any real ground on stock cooling. And that's all i'm going to say about that. The rest you'll have to figure out.

 

And so begins the wild hunt for cooling. Tune in at the end of september for n=1 and ethrem's cookbook of "Cool! That! Clevo!" where they will (probably) have figured out the mystery of nVidia not understanding how to cool stuff!

 

Well that explains why the RAM doesn't like to be pushed. The Samsung chips on the Clevo cards struggle quite a bit.

I'm waiting to see what happens with 980M before I do anything else. If nothing else the price on 780M should go down a touch when 980M launches so I could just buy a pair and sell the 880M to recoup however much of the cost I can. Alienware machines can cool them without crazy mods between 2 and 4C more effectively than Clevo so I've also thought about buying a base 18 and swapping parts and selling the newly lower configured Clevo and keeping the Alienware with all my upgrades.

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You will not regret the 18 believe me

 

Its a bitter pill to swallow another 1800 bucks though. I'm on disability, money doesn't just come my way this is my disability back pay and once it's gone who knows how long before I will have money again. That's my issue.

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So the inductors are at fault, interesting. Do the edge VRMs run hotter as well?

Ha sorry to disappoint but that's not happening. Right now I'm just waiting to hear from X99 and destkop 880 and once that's done I'm probably going to start building.

1800 bucks for 2-4c?!

 

2-4C and being able to run my MX @ 4.4GHz...

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I thought you said it was the chip and not the heat.

 

I thought it was the vrm's at first as well. But while testing them out...They didn't heat up any where close to how hot them conductors were. I could still put a finger on them. Not long mine you, but still could.
And this was a quick test. nothing longer than maybe a minute or two. then I would just pull the power plug. Sorry, can't be waiting for this thing to shut down on it's own. lol.

 

Now I'm curious... what about the 4GB 880Ms? I've seen a lot of ASUS models selling them and as far as I could see, the ASUS don't exactly smack alienware/clevo around for cooling. But they manage pretty low temps for the most part with those 4GB 880Ms?

 

Refer to review where I used a 8gb card with alright temps.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/746259-my-nvidia-gtx-880m-test-run-review.html#post9577480
The part where I actually did youtube videos of me gaming.

 

Remember how my heatsink makes no contact with the CPU at all? When I was trying CLU and purposely left bubbles to see if it was making contact and found them not to move? Yeah, 4.4 isn't gonna happen when that chip uses 1.2 to get 4GHz and runs 89C @ 3.9GHz with a cake of IC Diamond completing the "contact"

John, those gaming temperatures are extremely low. Bioshock Infinite will shoot the GPUs up to 90C in no time if I don't use adaptive vsync and I've never continued past 92C but I'm sure eventuality it would thermal throttle.

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Ah well. Less heat is better for me in the end; glad I got 780Ms and not 880Ms considering my living situation. Was just curious as to how 880M ASUS models were cooler than alienware models for cooling. It seemed to blow my mind on that part. I even checked their intake vents and stuff, technically they should be cooling far worse.

 

Yeah I remember that, but I thought you also mentioned you couldn't get it above 4.1GHz even if temps were still in the 70s. Or maybe I remembered wrong.

 

Everyone has a particular game they think will shoot temps up. All of those games tested will directly shoot temps up. Dead Island and Borderlands 2 being the least. Batman is running physics. And the Witcher 2 is known to kill off a system. I ran battlefield 4 at 4k resolutions as well.
I use vsync whenever possible. Any real gamer does, but i'm not a real gamer, but screen tearing is madness when not using it. This is just to say they the gpu was thoroughly tested and results posted. But then this is an alienware, so who knows.

 

dbl post.... grrrr

 

We have 120Hz screens, so our "vsync" is 120fps, which should be far hotter than the 60 you get (at least, I don't see that you have a 120Hz screen in your specs; correct my if I'm wrong). Also, some games (though rare) need certain FPS counts to perform properly. Like any game using the quake engine (like cod games) 125fps is optimal for fire rates/jump distance and height/fall damage/etc. Granted CoD isn't exactly a GPU toasting simulator like Paranautical Activity or Borderlands 1 (though the former is only a problem because vSync doesn't WORK for some reason), but it still does apply.

Also, ironically enough, I don't remember crossing 80 degrees with witcher 2 maxed (no ubersample) in 3D, so.. that's new O_O

 

Last time I checked, you don't OWN a 880M, now do you? So you trying to compare your 780M to an 880M will not work. in this case. We are only talking about the 880M.
And that is a single gpu not SLI. So there was no way on earth it was going to be doing no 120fps anything at the witcher 2. Not even if it was 4 880M's

This is why nothing gets done in a timely manner. EVeryone wants to dissect things without even having the right stuff to do so.


Edit:
Was in a bit of a rush.
This is not me getting mad at you or anything like that. It just to say, look things over first and understand why they are being said. Not just let just to debating everything posted.

 

First off, my original point was that 60fps and 120fps are very different as far as heat goes. You said you vsynced. I said vsyncing to 60 is different from vsyncing to 120, and adaptive vsync would allow the game to move to any fps count up to 120 but not pass 120, and not swap between 60/120 locks. I was simply saying vsyncing for you with your 880M on a 60fps screen would be different for ethrem on his 120fps screen, heat-wise. I know he has two cards, and I know the load would be shed more evenly across them and all, but some games won't use SLI etc, so there's that.

I am not trying to fight you down. Also, I don't think you understood my point about higher fps on certain games. AND I do notice a difference between 60 and 120 in games like that.

I'm not fighting down a thing about your screen being better than mine. And as for the "I don't know what this means" point you made, I was stating that I did not know if you tested on a 120Hz screen or not. You simply said vsync.

My only comment with the witcher was simply self-surprise that its temps were good when I tested it, due to your comment about it killing systems. I don't hit 120fps in it very often either. I have seen other games make my GPU far hotter than Witcher 2, however. This was the only purpose for that statement.

 

Missed it entirely....
All good though.

Edit:His comment about doing this.
ROTFL

Sorry for the render bugs.
Just a very quick video to show how much of a difference 333 fps vs 125 fps is in Call of Duty.
At 333 fps you get less fall damage and you jump considerably higher.

If you dont know how to unlock your FPS, please visit TheUberClips' channel below to download his FPSUnlocker
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpW_0A...

I will do a more indepth video at some point.

Moral of this story? Put your game settings on as low as possible for that FPS.

 

I've noticed a lot of abnormalities in gameplay during Assassins Creed Black Flag on my 880m's that I never got on my desktop computer, I was wondering if this has something to do with the drivers or possibly the fps or even the fact that I am using a dual shock 4 controller. A lot of strange things have been happening though like sounds being played of me swinging the sword when I'm running away from enemies, enemies getting randomly stuck in areas and also during one of my landings I actually landed doing the splits... it's interesting how hardware can affect gameplay like this.