M15x 7970M throttle FIX !

I just modded my laptop case by cutting a nice rectangular slot over the GPU/CPU sinks Now they can be passively cooled!

Just with normal fans the air is now also being sucked in past the heatsinks. This means not only am I helping keep the heatsinks cooler but also keeping the case temperature cooler too. I think I need to test this out!

 

Hmm ok so I re-read this entire thread to try and solve my throttling issues in Bioshock Inf.
I tried stock 7970m at 1.05v with a small 20/20/23/25 65/65 cpu OC.

I ran render tool for 30 seconds then immediately exited and started bioshock. I then sat at menu for around 30-40 seconds (3d clocks), fans fully spooled the whole time.
Then loaded into game. It doesn't throttle like normal and can go like 30 seconds without throttling but then can throttle heavily at certain sections.

Its pretty irritating because its very close to being playable even when throttling but it just ruins the overall gameplay experience. Any suggestions? I've tried cpu at stock but this game definitely benefits from a cpu OC, if only it didn't throttle

 

How much of a difference does the overclock actually make? I was able to play almost all max settings, some lowered without any overclocking of either component, except I got throttling occasionally.

 

ssj92 I've played a decent amount of B-I recently so can report back. I found with any cpu tweak at all I got pretty bad throttling. With everything at stock I get intermittent throttling but it doesn't affect overall gameplay too much.
I actually found the longer I play the less throttling I get, as evident from gpuz. First 15 minutes I minimised to look at gpuz clocks, showing numerous little 'dips' in the graph where the game has throttled. After an hour I minimised again and saw a solid block of 850Mhz clock speeds with no throttling at all

Everything is still on ultra but I'm trying to work out if framerate limit (v-sync) is better on or off. My current thinking is its better on.

 

Better to have it on. Crysis 3 worked MUCH better for me with it enabled. GPU usage just didn't go beyond 70% and little stutters occurred. With it enabled the game ran butter smooth.

Shame the game still throttles. I would have a go at sorting it out but I am not a bioshock fan so I won't be getting that game

 

I only ever had a passing interest in previous Bioshock games, never actually played them but saw flatmates playing them, but I can assure you that the story and gameplay is as good as everyone says.
First play through on hard using the hand cannon and making people's head explode with headshots is endlessly satisfying. Also the rail system for transport is epic. Give it a go!

 

Alright I can confirm one thing for us for sure. The 7970m doesn't cause shutdowns, even at 90C on the M18xR2. The M15x is doing this so we need to keep temperatures down. Also without throttling and the 3630QM powering my 7970m, it's a whole new world! The games run so much smoother! If we can get this throttle fixed while running a modest overclock on the 920/940xm, the m15x will be the perfect gaming machine. I'm hoping the 8970M has lower voltage so the m15x will better support it. If anything maybe the 775M will work fine too.

Just wanted to throw that out there.

 

I have had some great ideas for my cooling mod. Once completed it will cool the M15x more than adequately stay tuned!

 

Has anyone tried a good notebook cooler blowing in air into the gpu vent? I would think that would make at least a 5C difference, maybe up to 10C. As long as the max the card reaches is 70C the temps will be fine and so will the shut down problem.

 

I've pointed a 12v PC case fan directly at the gpu intake grille, mounted on a cooling pad, and it didn't seem to make any difference.

Think cooler pad will only give big benefits when hear sink is exposed directly to air flow as per KoI's mod.

 

Why would blowing air in the intake vent make any difference? The laptop fans can only move a certain cfm depending on the RPM they operate at. Blowing air into it won't increase airflow only perhaps will cause strong air currents that will make the laptop fans motor work harder and hotter.

I am thinking of using magic tape (Velcro) and attaching the coolers fans directly to the hole I have cut. The Velcro will allow easy removal and I can choose to have they blow in or suck out. If they are to blow in I will try taping the intake vents in the casing shut so that the original fans act as 2 case exhausts. So long as all 4 fans are operating from cold boot the system will never get hot enough to make the normal fans inefficient.

If I configure the fans to suck air out then I will use circular rubber seals around the laptop fan intakes so as to make sure they suck air in from outside the casing. Otherwise the suction from the 2 new fans might cause a negative air pressure within the case and starve the laptop fans of any airflow thus making the cooling mod ineffective.

I am thinking blowing air in is better as the heat will ultimately all be expelled out the back. Sucking air out will slowly heat the space under the laptop and warm the air the laptop fans ultimately suck in to cool the sinks.

These are all my thoughts on the subject so far

 

DO NOT and i repeat DO NOT tape the vents on the chassis (behind the fans). It will literally make the laptop much more vulnerable to throttling and much more unstable. Also reversing the airflow will cause issues with throttling.

The power circuit for GPU is under neath the keyboard and the way chassis is designed, its to help cool the circuit. We are pushing it past its design (75W) specifications, and starving the cooling will only make it worse. We need to cool these components better, not cripple the tiny amount of cooling these gets. I might post few images explaining this later.

 

I believe I explained my approach above. My ideas will not starve the cooling at all. I also think you misunderstand my taping. I am not taping anything behind the fans. Rather the main intake vent on the removable plastic door. Also this will only be temporary initially to test my theories and ideas.

Anways the ram sinks arrived today. Once the cooler arrives I will complete the mod and start testing. I will try all manner of configurations (I am kinda thorough!) and report back with all results in the proper thread.

 

That's what I thought, hence why when I benched 3DMark11 using that house cooler, my temps never went above 58C? Something like that.

 

I'm thinking of trying undervolting at stock clocks. What can I expect if this isn't stable? Thanks


Sent from my cm_tenderloin using Tapatalk HD

 

I'm not exactly what I did but I managed to run Bioshock Infinite on ultra with 7970m at stock and cpu at 27/25/20/20 @72/62 without throttling.
I exited another game and while fans were still spooled up I ran the render tool for at least 40 seconds. Exited then immediately opened Bioshock.
This small cpu OC made a tangible difference to stuttering! Gameplay was overall very smooth!

 

Anyone tried with the M6000, seems like it would offer a nice performance per watt option.

 

Has anyone been able to fix the throttling with involving the card ?

 

wow kinda wish I had my m15x to try and replicate what you did fbslim. The 7970m at sock and a decent OC on your XM for even 1 non-throttle Bio Inf play is impressive. I think I had throttling unless I undervolted and went with only a mild OC the entire time I had that combo.

 

Dav I've recently flashed to 875/1400 @ 0.975v and can run Bioshock with that same cpu OC without throttling but some scenes will throttle regardless of OC or not,
usually big explosions or lots of bad guys all firing rockets at you.

Card runs so damn cool with that undervolt and I got a graphics score (3dmark11) of 6500 with that OC

 

Nice GPU score there. yah UV gave some easy to control temperatures. Its the only laptop I've ever had where I felt I didn't have any worries over temps even on the CPU OC.

 

Oh no! Had a BSOD today while playing an older game. I finished up Bioshock Infinite last night with the 0.975v BIOS and temperatures did eventually climb to around 71-72 but still not bad (probably need to repaste anyway since last job was in a rush).
Old game never taxes gpu but for some reason caused a BSOD. Will try again before possibly reducing clock speed a bit.

 

I have been trying FC3 again with cpu at 27/25/23/23 with gpu at 900/1400 at 1.025V and it is ALMOST throttle free. I think if you want/need to push the cpu to the max maybe 1V on the gpu is your best bet as 1.025V is right on the edge. In fact I did try 24x and that will be my next testing round with the voltage at 1V.

Unfortunately for me once I get past 875mhz at 0.975V my card gets VERY power hungry.

Oh ya with cooling mod and in ambient temps or 25C or so the card maxed at 69C 1.025V and 900/1400!!

 

Ooh I forgot to mention. I also unvolted the 7970M to 0.8V and took the core down to 200mhz.

I calculated that in order not to bottleneck 300mhz the memory would have to be close to 500mhz lol. As we all know it is set at 150mhz. Anyways I have noticed no difference in performance at idle while the card runs a solid few degrees C cooler at idle!

I actually tried to take the voltage down to 0.75V but 0.8V was all I got down from 0.825V. Still an improvement though. Do it do it

 

I've not experienced any throttling at all (except very intermittent throttling in Bioshock but this happens without any CPU OC) since undervolting gpu whilst running 27/25/20/20.
Seems like a nice stable OC. Would there really be any noticeable difference in fps or latency in increasing the CPU OC from 2.66Ghz to 3.0Ghz?
What temps were your cpu and gpu getting up to (max) during FC3 at that OC

?

 

As noted above 69C on GPU. Cpu no idea

 

Seemingly disabling alien fx and running no usb devices helps to stop throttling big time. Unfortunately this means if you want to run cooling fans externally you need to run them from an external power source.

 

So no USB mouse? Interesting though.

Also I bought a cheap 12v ac/dc power adapter off eBay and wired up a 12v PC case fan that fits perfectly in the brackets for the U3 cooler.
Works very well but that particular 12v case fan is extremely loud. Thinking about picking up a couple of Be Quiet Silentwings 80mm fans instead.

 

usb mouse is ok as it uses very little power.

I had yet another driver crash after my bsod even though no throttling so I believe drivers are at fault. Updated to 13.4

Will post update soon.

 

So my UV and OC were rock stable when playing games like Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider but had quite a few BSOD on other games (and a hole barrel of disasters with Call of Juarez: Gunslinger) so I've gone for 850-1350 @ 0.975v.
Unfortunately 3d Mark11 graphics score gone down to 6350. Hopefully this is more stable though.

 

that is still stock with memory boost. perhaps we should shld be content with what we have ;P

of course i will try the 8990M haha

 

It might be that those clocks (875-1450) are stable at 1.0v. In the end I want games to run smoother and actually the best cooling mod I can make is to have the window open
Will try other clocks at some point. What are other people's experiences with undervolting?

I'm going to run Bioshock and Tomb Raider benchmarking tools at different cpu OCs to identify the contribution of the cpu to fps. Hopefully find a general sweet spot.

 

Is there an issue with using dell 7970m vbios on a eurocom/clevo 7970m? I think svl7's pack are dell, I have been using modded of my original vbios, but was wondering,..

I looked at the thread on techinferno dedicated to the pack but I only found 1 post actually addressing eurocom cards w/ dell vbios and it was quite vague, only said it worked

 

I don't know. Perhaps you can blind flash back if it doesn't work. Unlikely to brick the card but blind flashing is a pain to do.

Hard thing to decide to do. Luckily that decision is yours to make lol

 

Well I really dont want to do a blind flash lol, too much preparation, have to have both files on the usb and their names written down, lol. I will wait until somebody else does it.

 

Blind flashing is easy. Just set the first boot device to be your usb drive or cd drive (wherever the boot dos os is) before flashing the card at all. Then if you do need to blind flash all you have to do is restart and enter the command. In this case atiflash -p 0 biosfile.rom

 

It is indeed very easy. The risk here is whether or not the card will brick or not. That I don't know. I simple blind flash is easy enough. A dead card is an expensive mistake.

 

Damm, my m15x just started crapping out on me today. Basically it turns on but on display shows this garbaged display, instead of black its red/black mix static.

 

vs3074 it sounds like a graphics card issue. Have you tried re-seating or removing CMOS battery...i.e. standard fixes.

Just tried some benchmarking using undervolted 7970m (850/1350 @ 0.975v) with cpu OC (27/25/22/20 @ 72/62) and managed to get no throttling in the combined test. Previous combined tests with larger cpu OC yielded a weak 5011 score due to throttling but I just hit 5733 with that OC in combined.
Total score was P6130. That is better than when I ran 7970m @ 875/1450 @ 0.975v and cpu at stock.

Not sure if this would translate to better gaming performance though.

Anyone got a better combined score?

 

Has anyone tried playing Metro Last Light?
I get heavily throttling @ 22x multiplier and 850/1350 @0.975v.
Will try render test again but initially it didn't make any difference.

 

Metro is a highly demanding game right. Perhaps it stresses the cpu and or gpu more than previous games you have tried. This means higher power consumption which in turns leads to throttle.

 

Managed to get Metro running very smoothly with only very occasional throttling. Definitely manageable.
Running 875/1400 @ 0.975v and 27/26/24/20 @ 68/62. Nice and stable using the following graphics settings.
Quality: Very High
SSAA: OFF
Texture Filtering: 16x
Tessellation: Normal
Motion Blur: Normal

Great game but it really needs to be played with decent lighting to get a sense of the atmosphere. Bet this looks amazing on max with SLI 780s.

 

is the throttling happening in the CPU or GPU?
could it be due to power/temperature settings in the bios?
then maybe the (unlocked) A09 bios might could solve some issues
has anyone tried that?

 

Only GPU is throttling in this instance. Thermal throttling can definitely occur but isn't an issue for us using 7970M in M15x, as it can occur at any temperature.
The problem is insufficient power supplied to gpu due to excessive draw from cpu and limitations of the motherboard.

Pretty sure unlocked BIOS only adds a few options and certainly not as good as the M17x unlocked BIOS. Could still be worth a try though.

 

Starting to think it could also be power supply limitation! The M15x is engineered to run only with the 150W brick which means perhaps max 200W. Even with the 240W brick the ID in the system tell the brick to give only 150W-200W. Many with the M17x have gone around this issue with PSU mods where they open the brick and do a bunch of electronics that I don't understand. For example even with the 330W brick those running it on the M17x R2 found it was limited to 240W before it shut off.

Then this guy did this mod: 330W power supply for M17x update » imsolidstate and voila it was able to deliver over 400W before it shut off! Reading through the forums at techinferno I saw in the light of these findings even SVL7 ordering himself a 330W brick and has probably modded it by now to run unlimited. I am starting to think pushing the 7970M anything over stock and that at an undervolt along with anything over 20x multi across 4 cores and we approach the threshold of what the bios allows in terms of power from the brick. What we need is someone able to carry out this mod and then sell the finished product. I want it and I am sure there are many others too. Pretty sure this is the reason SVL7 is able to push such crazy numbers. Let's end this throttling matter together

Hopefully there is another M15x owner out there with the electronics know how to be able to do the above mod to the 240W brick (330W would probably be overkill) to allow it to draw to its limits which is somewhere around 280W-300W. I think throttling would be a thing of the past. Without the ability to move forward I am guessing even with the 240W brick unmodded we are stuck with 150-175W. I have ordered a 210W dell brick to test but pretty sure it will behave just the same way...

 

That actually makes a fair bit of sense. If you could ground the trace, the comparator output would be low and the M15x could interrogate the power supply to deliver more POWER!
Easy enough......NOT....what the hell?

Reading between the lines, that wouldn't be a difficult mod to do, you'd just have to know where the trace from the 1-wire ID line goes, and how to cut it then ground it, and how to check the comparator output was low....
Could any electrician handle that job? Seems pretty darn specialist.

I want a ID-trace ground mod 240W PSU!

EDIT: Maybe we should advertise on the forum (or on T ¦ I ) for someone to make us one.

 

Let's do it. I want one too. Start a petition?

 

It may not be possible, particularly to get 150W ID chip in 240W adapter to draw more than 180W. Read this discussion from this post onwards http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/720908-m17x-r2-7970m-crossfirex-59.html#post9300699

 

Nobody has tried it. It is obvious to me that there is a big chance the M15x is limiting the 240W brick in the same way the M17x limits the 330W brick. I would happily pay for a 240W brick modded done and dusted.

Sangemaru hints trial and error is the only way forward sometimes. If he hadn't tried crossfire 7970M then perhaps no one would have tried to upgrade lol.

 

True! Its pretty advanced stuff doing the mod though. Also shipping a 240W adapter to and from Japan maybe quite expensive on top of labour costs!
I think spending too much money getting this done may end up being pointless as the next gen video cards may start to be bottlenecked by our first gen core extreme processors!
Also if you are still planning on getting the 870M running at 75W you should be fine to run big cpu overclocks?

I'm happy for now running both CPU and GPU with slight overclocks without throttling and my P6400 benchmark on 3dmark11
I saw some brand new AW 17 scores of only P7100 with i7 4700QM but not sure on gpu (surely not 780M?).