quadro fx 3700m in a51 m17x?

i ordered a quadro fx 3700m (not sure if hp or lenovo board as of yet. will need to wait for it to arrive to find out) for my area 51 m17x r1 to give it a little bit more life. it previously had dual 8600m gt cards, so i believe this will be a sizable upgrade. however i'm not sure if it will work automatically. i've read on this site about flashing the card to something else to increase compatibility. the thread i read about that was trying to get 2x 280m's to work though. would i need to do anything like that to get this 3700 card to work?

i also read on the same thread about the 2x 280s that the fans have to be forced to full speed or else they don't work at all. would i need to do that to the 3700 card or is there a workaround? i think i read somewhere that you could leave one of the old cards installed, and that would somehow make the other gpu fan work normal. is that true, and would the same apply here?

sorry for asking so many questions on this forum (i take up most of the top of the alienware legacy systems front page). i've been working on getting this old m17x back to speed for the better part of a year now, and now it's finally almost done. i just needed some advice is all.

 

I am not sure if anyone has attempted this swap. Did the Quadro have master & slave versions of the card, and if so which did you buy? You may need to play around with the VBIOS but I have bricked at least 1 card doing so. Your fan will probably have to be modded to an always on 100% power source.

If you have read my 4850 swap thread. I tried a 4870 in my older m5750 before buying the 4850. The 4870 would boot into Windows but did not show anything on the built-in display or through the DVI port. I only knew it was working because I was able to VNC into the laptop from another machine and run GPU-Z. The VBIOS the card had was simply not compatible with my laptop.

I then saw a 4850 that I tried. It's VBIOS was compatible but from all the reading I have done it seems the planets aligned for me finding a Type III 4850 in the first place, the card having a compatible VBIOS for my laptop, and only paying $100 for the card at the time.

To keep the temps down though I had to solder the power lead for the 5V cooling fan to another 5V source in my laptop so now the fan always spins at 100%. Otherwise it would react to CPU temp but not GPU temp. MXM Upgrade had some sort of software approach to fix this but I never got it to work when I tried.

Good luck and let us know how it goes. It may work fine, may function partially such as built-in display working but not external, or the system may just beep at the BIOS screen letting you know the card won't work. I have experienced all of this with the different cards I have tried.

One other note is that I have seen people flash the Quadro cards with GTX based VBIOS' for compatible GPU's. I guess the Quadro cards are great for rendering something like modeling software but don't perform as well for gaming as their GTX equivalent. Also driver support for an older GTX card is probably better with games.

Edit: I google'd and it looks like at least one other has tried the FX 3700, post #6
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...cs-cards-upgrade-options.602062/#post-7800423

 

the listing didn't say. but it's the correct format (mxm 2 with the he tab).
i'll try a few different configurations. like having one of the 8600 cards still installed or just the quadro alone. also swapping their places to see if that makes any kind of difference.
i've updated the vbios a few times on other computers, but never flashed a completely different vbios onto a card. so i may need some advice for that. mainly just where to find the 280m vbios like how the person on the other thread did.
i've tested a quadro fx 3800m in a dell precision notebook to a gtx 285m in an m17x r2, and they were pretty much the same in gaming performance. any differences there were could be ignored since both computers had a different amount of ram and different processors.
i only paid $35 for the 3700. so if it doesn't work it'll be no big deal. i just want to see if it will give any performance increase if it works.

 

This the Master / Slave thing you may just need to flash a master VBIOS if your card is running a slave one.

This site has the best collection of VBIOS', just may be hard to pick between the desktop / mobile versions of the card. You usually have to compare memory, clocks, etc. to match. https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/

For $35 I agree it's no loss if it doesn't work. When I was card shopping around 2009 I remember seeing an auction for a 3700 and the going price then was just under $400.

The only other thing I saw in the thread I linked was while the 3700 worked for him he lacked the appropriate 3D clocks. He mentioned finding a VBIOS that allowed the clocks to work.

 

the card arrived today! it turns out it's an hp card. not sure if that changes anything or not.
i took apart the 8600 gt heatsinks and cleaned them off. i used the old heat pads just to do a quick and dirty test to see if it would even be recognized. i had to remove some of the black tape on the heatsink to let all the memory heatpads get full contact with the cooler (modified on left, old one on right).

 

i just put the heatsink back on. it fit good and without issue.
as soon as i get the new thermal pads, i'll put them on. i put the old ones on just to see if it will work.

 

it's plugged in. seems good so far. 9800m gt on right, quadro fx 3700m on left.

 

it got to the bios ok, and both cards are being recognized it seems.

 

it just got to the desktop. i checked device manager to see if i could the drivers to automatically install, but i couldn't. oh well. just have to wait and download from the nvidia website.

 

it's finally done downloading. and it seems like it's installing ok (it's not saying it's incompatible or anything).

 

after restarting, everything seems to be recognized as it should! i can't wait to see how it does with 3d applications to see if it'll need to be flashed or not.

 

i just tried swapping the 9800 gt and the fx 3700m's places to see if i could get the quadro to be the master. doing this caused no display. i would guess that this means that the quadro has to be flashed to the 280m bios.

 

how would i flash the 3700m with it in the slave port? i can't get the computer to display anything on the screen with it in the master port. i've only ever flashed a gpu with that was the main card.

 

Next time I would suggest you just do one update post and edit as needed with further updates. You bumped all of your other statuses right off the current page by doing so many posts .

As far as the cards go, I am not sure if there are any windows tools for flashing an Nvidia card. You could always do a "blind flash" which I have seen a few including myself do on here. You of course risk bricking the card since you can't see. It's basically flashing everything and running through the tool with no display.

I have not tried using Nvflash in windows but there may be a way to do it.

 

topkek.

i found out how to make sure to select the slave card to flash.

so i flashed it with multiple bios's, and came up with some very interesting results. when i put the 280m bios on from the techpowerup database, it made it look like it was a quadro fx 3700, not 3700m. it still had its 1gb of memory and stats of a 3700m, but it it looked like it was being detected as a desktop card somehow.

i then tried the bios found here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...7x-dual-gtx280m-project-thread.563923/page-13

same thing. it looked like a quadro fx 3700 desktop. i tried to run furmark to test, as it had worked before when it was seen as a 3700m, but this time the display driver just crashed. so now i'm going to try to see if a 9800m gtx bios will work.

with the 9800m gtx bios it booted up without installing, so i'm now doing a fresh driver install to see if that'll fix it and make it show up as a thing.

good news! with the 9800m gtx bios, it actually displays as a 9800m gtx! i can even have it in the master slot and have it show video on the screen! but should i now try to get it to be a 280m, or should i let it rest at the 9800m gtx?

bad news! i tried to run a game with it set as a 9800m gtx, and the driver crashed and the computer restarted. so the 9800m gtx bios clearly didn't work. i'm going to try to put the 280m bios on it now and see if it'll work this time. if not, i'll return it to its stock bios and just use it as normal.

i tried to flash it while it was in the master slot, and the computer just restarted again. i'm going to put the quadro back in the slave slot and try to flash it again.

it's back to normal now. that was a fun adventure.

 

good news! i tried putting on the 9800m gt bios, and it seems to be working so far! i can play games stably at stock 9800m speeds! i'm currently testing it with the quadro fx 3700m stock speeds right now. there's a little bit of instability when changing resolutions to, so i may put it back to stock 9800m speeds. i tried putting 280m speeds on it, but it crashed the driver again. not sure why. if someone could spread some light on that matter, please do. i'd like to get it up to full speed if possible.

 

You are kind of in uncharted waters with this these days. The community behind mxm cards is almost nonexistent these days so unless you can dig up old posts from 5 years ago or find a guy with the same setup you may have to just play around.

 

well with 9800m gt speeds it seems to be stable. i can run it on its own and it never gets hot. always in the 80s under load. the fan issue from way back when seems to be fixed with the latest 341.96 or whatever driver it is now. the fan ramps up and slows down as it should without needing to use a second card as the temperature sensor. if you can pick up an fx 3700m for cheap like i did, i recommend you give it a shot. you just need to have the correct bios to flash it to. you can find a 9800m gt bios over on the techpowerup gpu database. if requested, i can upload the exact bios i used if anyone is having trouble. it has been a fun adventure. and now i finally have a m17x that's as good as it can be. if i can pick up another 3700m in mxm format, i will test SLi. but since i haven't seen another fx3700m pop up since i bought this one, i don't know when that will be. regardless, i wish you all luck in your adventures.