AW ATI 8.761 BETA Driver - M17xR2/M17x/M15x (August 2010) - Discuss Here...

Are people still having issues with FPS on the new driver vs 10.7? I need to know which to install when I get mine.

 

Sweet they're here! Going to install now and as Grimfan pointed out to others, the release notes specifically mention that disabling Crossfire will result in a lockup. This logically should apply to booting from battery since Crossfire is disabled when you do so. For those with low FPS in SC 2, that's a known issue with 8.761 on the desktop. Make sure you also install the latest AMD Crossfire profile if you have Crossfire.

 

Thank You, good to know

I think important is, that there is absolutely no entry left in Device Manager from anything ATI Mobility Radeon, so the Drivers are completely gone and the 2 GPU's should be listed as unknown, so they will only be identified by the ATI Install Manager.

 

Windows may still install its default driver for the ATI GPUs but that is fine. Yep, a clean install is important with this one - especially considering several have used the 10.7 workaround method. Who knows what is left over from that. Just a thought of course. Wish I could be there with you all testing away...

 

M15x/5850 -- Using AMD Clock Tool v0.9.26.0 for HD 5870 to overclock card causes a hard crash/BSOD (even when first increasing voltage before applying increased clocks, which avoided the problem when using the 10.7 reference drivers).

3dMark06 ran fine with mild overclock (700/1000). Will test with decent clocks later today.

 

Hmm so if I run a benchmark on a single card, the drivers will crash? Just evaluating options before I take the leap.

 

Just tried sleep and it was a no go. Just as a heads up, this is what you should see in the device manager once your existing drivers are removed and then once the new ones are installed:

 

in-depth discussion on the AMD Clock Tool should take place here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/508352-amd-gpu-clock-tool-discussion-m17x.html

Thanks.

 

Oh, i totally forgot the ATI Profiles to install.
The Performance went indeed up in Starcraft2, aswell as Loading Times seem to be shorter.

 

Actually, disabling CrossFire only doesn't work on Battery, you can indeed Disable it in CCC and run a single-gpu benchmark if you are on A/C.

 

FFXIV Benchmark runs smoothly, with speed appearing to be about the same, but quality somewhat improved over the 10.7 reference drivers. A number of people reported being unable to run FFXIV at all with the 10.7 drivers, but others (including me) had no issues.

 

Link seems dead???!!!

 

This may be a totally stupid question but... there is powerplay inside the CCC then there is windows native power management and finally Alien fusion. Just wondering if we should be unchecking Enable PowerPlay or leave it alone. Has anyone disabled the other two and simply used PowerPlay?
I was going to go through and see if the battery issue / lock up is tied into any of these power management programs. With three variables there is a lot of combinations.

 

I could 'run' it but the scores were abysmall for the hardware(<1000 I think @ high quality). What specs and score did you manage? 2000 seemed to be the general area for CF 5870s.

 

Try this Link:

ATI Catalyst™ 10.7 Profiles Update

 

I notice the same with the FFXIV Benchmark, it used to run quite fine and scored like 2500 with previous drivers on high resolution.

As i have access to the beta, i can tell that the Beta Program is working, and as soon Beta continues tomorrow it should run just fine aswell, as previous drivers 10.6+ already worked, where with previous Dell drivers i could not even load the Updater.

 

yeah, the general concensus is that the benchmark is useless or is comparing specs to something like 40man RAID performance, which comprises very little of the game play (if such large raid's still exist from XI)
still, it would be nice if it could manage 30FPS..lol.

 

With clocks at 750/1050, I got 2214 for high and 3929 for low, both with full aero, the Norton Internet Security packages, Everest Ultimate, etc. running. That's about the same as I get with the 920/5870 combo in my Sager 8760.

 

I know my GTS250 and 3.6ghz 1090 with regular HDD manages 1966, and a 1600 Shader system should score much higher, espically when the limit is 8000 points. Completly illustrates that the whole benchmark is wack. The only reason I can think of is that its not working in Crossfire mode, although though both GPU's run hot during the benchmark.

 

Actually, with the last beta and the last drivers, the beta was capped at 30 fps and most of the time it was around there. I noticed that since the FFXIV Benchmark is run in Window Mode, it doesn't utilize the second GPU, aswell the primary card might be throttled, it doesn't go beyond 90% GPU load in GPU-Z.

 

So any other 5870 Crossfire users try it? I get the same problems as far as sleep/hibernate as I did with the 10.7a release from AMD. I didn't have 10.7 on this system prior to installing these latest Dell beta's either.

 

Is it just me or is this thread getting off topic??? - the title says NEW BETA DRIVERS and not 10.7 discussion.......people wanting info on the new beta drivers dont want to waffle and wade thru pages of people talking about non beta issues unless thhey are directly related to the new drivers.

Sorry for the rant.

 

I'm using the High Performance Profile for Energy Savings and sleep is working for me while connected to A/C, maybe try to reset those profiles to standard again.

 

Can you double check your drivers and driver date in the device manager?

 

Driver Assembly Date 27.07.2010 02:00
Driver Assembly Version 8.761.0.0

I'm pretty sure i'm running a correct driver, as the difference for me is clear, since i had the Official Drivers from ATI installed before where sleep didn't work at all, not sure about the disabled CF on battery. Also i don't have any other issues found so far, as only those described in the release info. Also, i have installed every other latest driver from Dell's Support site i could get.

 

I just left the room to eat and as soon as I came back the computer had gone into sleep mode. It is currently locked up. Going to reboot and try to make sure only one power managment program is running.
Question remains, with this issue and the Beta driver... which program should we use? ATI, Alien fusion or windows.
Though I'm not sure it will make a difference it typically isn't a good idea to have more than one program trying to control the same function. Even opinions on which is best is most welcome.
Wavy lines are gone thus far.

 

I tried turning off the Powerplay option in CCC but didn't help. I'm pretty sure the Alien Fusion and Windows share the same settings. Meaning if you change it in one, it'll show in the other.
It's the same way with the Synaptics Touchpad and Alien Sense.

 

What i did in CCC is set to Factory Default. What else you could check, that could have probably an influence is if you have the latest OSD and Alienware Command Center installed:

Alienware Command Center, 2.5.54.0, A07

Alienware OSD Application, 1.13, A03

also, i'm running Bios A06.

 

I'm pretty much running the same thing, though I did update to Bios A07 last night. Didn't seem to change anything.

This is crazy because we have almost the exact same specs even except for the hard drives.

But it does seem like a lot of others are having issues. Somehow you're not plagued with them.

When I try to sleep mine, the monitor turns off but it leaves on all the lights and is frozen after that.

 

I will test it with Bios A07 tomorrow when i get home.

Yeah, it's weird, that it is working now, i had the 10.7a drivers 8.753.5 i guess, installed yesterday, and today when i got home i did this:

Uninstalling ATI Catalyst

and after i installed the BETA's and the sleep issues on A/C Power were gone.

Did you try to unplug battery and A/C and hold the power button for 20 seconds to power drain it, also something i did...

 

BIOS A06, newest OSD as well. I rechecked all three programs and I had turned off sleep to Never before I even installed the Beta Driver. I do have the setting to turn off the display after 20minutes. I also had all the lights on and yet a black screen that no key combination could change without a reboot. Very curious situation as mine wasn't in sleep mode.

 

Works for me, just installed it

 

I've had this happen to me also. I had to make it so the display doesn't turn off... This might be software but someone earlier said they did a fresh install of Windows and still had this issue.

Wonder if it's something with our hardware. When did you get your Alienware? I just got mine a little over 2 weeks ago.

 

I think so far all of us have this problem except Grim. Not sure how or why yet, we'll need more user input.

 

Mine arrived on July 30th. And Joker is right we have to figure out how Grim's laptop is different than the rest.

 

Mine is approx. 3 weeks old.

But i just noticed, i didn't test it yet to let it sleep after a time, i just changed the setting either to sleep when i close the lid in energy profile settings or when i 'force' it via Start-Shutdown-Sleep-option.

I did some quick tests, with small minute intervals to have it go to sleep, and... it didn't even go to sleep, just disabled the monitor, and as soon i hit the mouse display went back on.

Guess i have to test tomorrow 20 minute cycles, to see if there is something different involved, maybe Stealth, AlienFusion or whatnot. Will also test without Command Center installed if necessary

Update: I found the difference lol I was still using RivaTuner to slightly overclock the 2 GPU's to 705Mhz, works also with 825+... anyway, i think it's a throttling issue, or atleast a underclock issue i would say, pardon my english as when the 2 GPU's are more or less idle at 100/150 Mhz, the system will lock up when it goes to sleep right before it actually turns off. Works that way, sorry i didn't notice earlier.

This might also be logical for battery mode and stealth mode, as the GPU's are throttled down there aswell.

 

If there is a way to flash our cards to something higher than the minimum clock speeds of 100/150Mhz for the HD5870's, please point me into that direction, so we can find a solution, where this might not happen.

 

Ah rivatuner, no wonder. I've attempted to flash the other clocks higher but it didn't work previously. Not sure if it would do any good this time around either. If you want to try however, you will need RBE to edit the bios and atiflash to flash it. Mandrake has instructions on how to do it, I think I may have it linked in the Wiki.

edit: http://alienwarem17x.wikia.com/wiki/First_time_setup#GPU_Overclocking

 

Might actually work. I just unplugged the power cord, running on battery now, still with 705/1000Mhz cards, not throttled, CrossFire is Disabled, Display is dimmed and Sleep works on battery!

 

3 times I've left the computer for extended period of time = 3 blank screens. had to hard reboot every time.

Sleep is set to never as well...weird

I uninstalled the working out-dated drivers correctly, used driver sweeper.

Then intstalled betas.

Flashed bios to A07 yesterday. btw

 

This is very interesting news. But I doubt this explains why Brian at Dell didn't have these problems. Wonder what's up.

You're definitely on to something though.

 

Rivatuner fixes a lot of the problems but it's still not what we want to depend on. Give it a try with the bios flash though I doubt it will fix it. It seems like the second GPU doesn't respond and the driver times out when a sleep command is passed or when Crossfire is disabled. I had the exact error documented in the 10.7 thread and it doesn't look like these beta drivers fix anything.

 

im just happy I can use my battery without BSOD looping

 

So it appears powerplay is still causing issues?

Maybe we need an accompanying bios and vbios update?

-Ash

EDIT: Yeah I agree joker. Sleep/wake and clock up/down arent being passed to the second card by the looks of it. Still.

Brian, could you pass that bit of info to the dell engineers, looks like they missed it.

-Ash

 

Actually, i do run only 1 GPU at the moment, still both are clocked 705/1000as i can see in GPU-Z.

I only get the lockup when the clocks are default, and throttling.

I try another thing in a few. If it's possible to set clocks at 100/150 via rivaTuner and then see if it locks up. And then i try to increase it to like 200/300 maybe and see if it still locks up on battery...

I can also plug in, plug out power cord, aslong the clocks are not throttled.

Edit: Oh well, minimum is 350/500, and it still runs on battery, and it still does sleep and wakeup just fine.

 

Good luck

-Ash

 

so Im getting my m17x delivered in a little while and Im a little confused about this driver.

say I install the driver unplug my laptop and close the top (effectively putting it into sleep mode) open it up at school will my laptop lock up? or am i misunderstanding it?

thanks for your time guys

 

From what i learned so far is, you shouldn't use these drivers when you intend to use it on battery! It won't even boot into windows if you are on battery. Without the Throttle Workaround with RivaTuner, the system will lockup when it tries to go to sleep, even on A/C Power.

 

Grim to confirm: You get no lockups at the reduced speeds?

-Ash

 

as of right now, my computer is working *only* on Battery power, it could be the bad mainboard I have, but it was working fine on battery and froze when I plugged the A/C in, and now it won't even boot on a/c power without black-screening.