260m GTX flashing thread (need some people :p )

Yes, I have seen cases where people tried to flash their 9800M GTX's with a GTX 280M BIOS and their system BIOS recognized it as a Quadro. However, your case is worse; your system BIOS doesn't support the Quadro.

Fire up nvFlash and blind flash the original BIOS back to your GTX 260M's while running on the 9400M G.

 

I feel that I am partly to blame for not emphasizing this earlier, but flashing should never be done in Windows. But then again, I did firmly state in my flashing guide that it must always be done in DOS.

From my knowledge, Nvidia has always locked out additional shaders on the hardware level ever since the 6 series, and most likely earlier than that. I am not surprised at all that someone tried this.

 

yea thats easy i've done it .... i just wanna see if i can get this driver to work....

I disabled the 9400m in vista it crashed i rebooted with the 9400m disabled it worked ....

But it says the 280 is disabled now to ....

What GPU am i running on

P.S i like a challenge

 

Wait, do you have two GTX 260M's or one?

 

i only have 1

 

As long as you got past POST with either of the GPU's, now is the best time to attempt a blind flash so that we can start back from square one again, the right way, haha.

 

Hey soviet NVflash recognizes both GPU's when i flash with hybrid SLI on

What command tells it to flash it what GPU ?

0
1

those are their addresses


or i could just do a blind flash

 

I don't know, haha. This is the hard part. I am not familiar with the M17x, or with flashing a notebook with three GPU's, so I'm going out on a limb on this onw. Usually the master slot is 0, the GTX 260M, and the secondary slot being 1. But in the case of the M17x, there is a third GPU, the 9400M G, so on a fully loaded M17x it would be 2. My gut is pointing towards 0 as the GTX 260M.

 

i know how to find the Address

-a

I am asking how to assign the flash to a certain GPU?

 

You only have a single GTX correct Moo ?. so 2 cards.

 

O BTW my 270 driver is crashing due to a internal conflict ?????

so imma try a FX 3700 driver and if that doesn't work ill just flash the 260 BIOS on and then edit it and flash it with a OV and ill test stable clocks then flash those on

 

Oh, okay. http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5096459&postcount=17

 

OK just double checking like i told you in the PM

If i flash the 9400m ....well there is no going back

I though the i assigned it ... i ran through the program trying to find it but ...

 

I accidentally deleted your PM, The_Moo™. I thought it was the earlier one you sent me, so I never got to read it.

If you accidentally flash your 9400M G, you can easily blind flash that it back. Just make sure you memorized the command sequence and have the original 9400M G BIOS in your boot stick.

 

if it won't boot with the 280 like it is now and i accidentally flash the CHIPSET ...i might have issues ...

 

ok im back to my 260 bios

Still gonna edit the name and make it a 280

 

the shaders ar laser'ed.... and ther is no way out of this Moo... try to flash with the 260 bios and use more vcore then flash the clock's all way up till max

good work with your OC .... bguards

 

lol

i have already overclocked

I OC'd to Mandrakes clocks he Ran for the 12k GPU run

I can go higher on stock voltage ...

I would of never ever in my life done this if i would of known i would have this kind of trouble installing a driver now !

i install the 260 the 9400m uninstalls !!!! vice versa !!!

 

Your knowledge on the subject just went through the roof. Congrats Moo.

 

Why do you wish to keep the GTX 280M name if you have a GTX 260M? That's like trying to call my 9800M GT a 9800M GTX when it really isn't.

 

because i like being different and why don't we call these 9800m GTX +

??? they are the same card....

We had this discussion already Soviet

 

Ok - i'm going to reveal something totally newbie here.

why would you want to flash vbios? reason behind it is?? cuz you can? cuz it does something magical?

 

because i was seeing if they laser cut the SPs

Because it makes your card faster ....

you can give it more voltage

then it goes even faster....

 

And you get to rename your card to a GTX 280M, haha.

GPU flashing is just a more stable, flexible, and long term method of overclocking. For us laptop users, it is no different compared to conventional software overclocking. However, desktop users get to see the real magic.

 

congrat the moo. i couldn't stay up any longer. i'm glad that you got the flash to work, and it seemed that you got the back the 260m as well. that problem now is to get the drivers to work. i believe that's going to be hard if you were to just change the name to 280m alone. because when windows is trying to read the 280m, it tries the device id and doesn't work. so i think you are better leaving it to 260m.

 

Nice work man, too bad it didn't "fully" work for ya . I have a question though, you flashed the GTX 260M with the 280M Bios to give you 280M clocks (minus the shaders), would that be the same as just overclocking the card manually using a program?

 

Same as using the program basically but just a more permanent solution but in the end not really a good idea with using the 280 bios.

Once you find a healthy overclock you can dump your own Vbios then use nbitor and make your own with the correct 260M bios and not have any issues.

Alot of this stuff might look abit daunting to the average person but in the end its really a no brainer if you just follow Sov sun's guide as he has broken it down very well.

Hardest part for me will be figuring out the flashing commands for the 2 cards without touching the 9400m. Since ill have 3 cards in the machine.

Last time i flashed my video cards was on my desktop 8800gtx but i havent bothered with my SLI 260s in my desktop since i didnt need any more power.

 

but flashing the bios would void the warranty right?

 

To force it, you use nvflash -4 -5 -6 NEWBIOS.ROM (NEWBIOS.ROM is an example)

 

At this point of tweaking we aren't worrying ourselves with warranties.

That and you can just flash back the original if you need to get it worked on.

 

As long as its not a brick before you can reflash it...

 

well there is always that.....I will personally just use a software that loads clocks at windows start up but that's me. Same end result.

 

I'm waiting utnil more people try to flash theirs before i try mine, I just want to up the voltage a bit.

 

As long as you dont get stupid with the Overclocking you should not have any problems . I guess technically you could say your voiding the warranty to some degree but its really no different then software overclocking . Its a grey area is the best way i can put it.

 

Exactly, and it is reversible, so they will never know!

 

Anyone notice that the video cards in the M17x are not running at x16, but are running at x8. Even though the cards are x16.

-Jason

 

Nope but ill have a look tomorrow for sure. Is that what yours say now ? you dont have your cards listed in your Sig btw.

 

I loaded up GPUz and what it showed. PCI-E x16 @ x8. Sorry to the OP about the little highjack.

-Jason

 

It shouldn't have any real world effect, although I am sure the benchmarks will reflect that lower bandwidth, and is it pci-e or pci-e 2.0? Cant imagine Nvidia would have not used 2.0 in these chipsets.

 

It could be the card is dropping to 8x when its not needing it . Try firing up a game then alt tab out and fire up GPU-Z and see what it says.

 

That shouldn't happen quad. It is hardwired into the chipset/motherboard. When there are 2 cards, it should split to x8/x8 like the intel p(m)45 chipset, and then full x16 for single card. That is, if the chipset cannot provide the full x16 to each card simultaneously, and I REALLY hope there isn't one of those horrible hot and expensive nf200 chips on this notebook haha

The benefits of coming from the desktop world where (no offense) people know more about the hardware.

 

It does say it's a Dell branded gpu, I'll post a screen shot when i get home.

 

Notebooks have power saving features built into them that desktop's dont thats why i asked him to check . it should be 16x on both lanes like my i7 desktop but again this is a laptop and its not the x58 chipset.

 

True. The x58 is pretty dang nice (the d900f actually has it - although sadly only 1 gpu). But I have never heard of throttling down the pci-e bandwidth as a power saving feature. And cannot imagine a tangible power saving effort as a result.

What is the northbridge chip? I can try to dig up the chipset specs on nvidias site or somewhere else online. But typically nvidia doesnt choke cards out like Intel will, they always seems to have ample pci-e lanes for dual card configs (750i 780i 790i desktop boards).

 

I almost positive that the M17x uses 1 x16 lane and when split it runs at x8/x8.

The chipset is MCP79, FWIW.

 

what is the full name, Apparently there are letters after MCP79 to further designate the model.

 

I don't remember but it is the only one that supports SLI.

 

I'm on break at work right now, and decided to see whats going on here on my iphone, I looked up the chipset and found it is called MCP79-SLI. lol

 

So from everything I read, the MCP79 chip is capable of up to 20 PCI-e 2.0 lanes, meaning it is safe to assume that there will 8 per GPU with others left for peripheral components (gig ethernet, hd sound, storage controllers etc). Someone will need to verify this, but it may send x16 to a single card if that is all that is installed. I know that the whitebook had a hardwired x8 x8 so regardless of config (single or dual gpu) you got x8.

But don't forget that PCI-e 2.0 is twice the bandwidth of 1.1, meaning that you still have the equivalent of PCI-e 1.1 x16 to each gpu, which for this architecture (G92), will never be saturated as it is. The first generation PCI-e bandwidth is only an issue for monster desktop cards like the 4870x2 in a quad crossfire configuration.

Hope this helped, was something I had been wondering about anyway.

 

That sounds good, looks like we will have some nice PCI-e bandwidth to handle the next gen Nvidia GT 200 based mobile chips and the hopefully upcoming mobile 4870's.