FINALLY! Successfully installed NEW drivers for SLI Laptop

Don't complain. If you want to see how long it can take to get an m9750, take a look the first 50 pages of the m9750 owner's lounge:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=123724

 

Saw there was a 169.13 out on their boards today.

 

@Alienware_fanatic - I'm not sure why yours is taking longer to build. It may because of a processing issue that they had to overcome, or it could be because your laptop is more customized than others. Honestly, I'm not a tech so I have no idea.

I ordered my M9750 on Dec. 4th and it is already at Stage 5 on Dec. 6th. The only problem is that they NEED to ship it out on the 11th (est date) or before. If they don't I'm going to have them keep the laptop longer because I'm going to be going out west to ski and I won't be home to accept the laptop.

Good luck getting yours man.

Oh and nice post man.

 

Good luck with that.

 

got mine today n messed up bad...had a nightmare disabling the raid and had to talk to the AW tech guy to get it done....but now its fixed and WHAT A BEAST!!! love this baby...gonna get tests done and everything now...looking for the 169.09 drivers now before i start gaming man oh man im the happiest guy

 

ok a quick question...the zip file the guy from laptopvideo2go has attached in the nvida forum does not contain any folder for 7950. or does it have another name or something

 

Nvidia uses a Unified driver which, in a nutshell, means one driver for all their video cards from gForce 5200 to 8800 (possibly 9800 now?) and up so just select a driver by revision number now, put the modified .inf into the setup folder, and begin.

 

Hey man great tutorial. I've linked this thread to many other people to help them out when they had trouble with their M9750, so Rep+ for you

 

Thanks and much appreciated! ^^

 

Yepp no problem.

 

/bump for people with new laptops

 

has anyone tried out the new 169.13 i guess.....how is it performing in xp pro sp2??...any performance increases??

 

Mine was close roor... Pretty close indeed.

 

^^ installed the 169.09 drivers lastnight, completely forgot to renamble sli and it showed when I started running lost planet. Once I renabled sli in the nvidia control panel I had no problems playing on max settings on native res

 

Mine was just shy....

 

Just updated to 169.21 (from 169.17)....still works, but 169.21 was giving me some work control panel and external monitor issues. Did a fresh reinstall and all is well, now. I suppose it was just random.


As far as performance goes, I noticed that 169.21 plays Crysis a lot smoother, but overall framerate went down 1-2 FPS. COD4 increased 1-3 FPS again, and Kane & Lynch is not nearly double for me (proper SLI profile???).

(btw, XP 32-bit, Dual 7950 GTX)

 

Thanks for this - great tip.

For some reason the driver issues always occured after updating kaspersky anti-virus. Probably co-incidence but worth a mention.

I'm using 169.09 drivers but I only seem to get a 3dmark06 score of 7800 with sli enabled. Anyone throw some performance hints my way?

Cheers

 

What's your OS? Sounds like a Vista score. I have Vista HP 32 and I get 7600 with the same driver.

 

I'm using XP sp2 - i've run it again after a re-boot and disabling things like norton/back-ground processes. Unfortunately the systems not hooked to the net back here at home just yet so i need to find a way of reading the 3dmark06 score that's been saved to a file. it seemed to run a bit smoother though so will post back with the score in a bit ...

 

Much better - obviously a reboot and some service turn offs did the trick!



Happy man

 

Hehe nice, I'm going to go test out my laptop with all the background services turned off.

 

needs to be done - especially with norton hog running in the background

 

Heh, I still couldn't get above 7800. W/e though, I solved my sound + I think the gray screen error, so I'm happy.

 

thats the same range my score was around with vista, gained another 900 points moving to xp. ; ; already miss my laptop just sent it in for repairs today...

 

Hello ,

First, thanks for this forum it helps me a lot !

I have this configuration:

Alienware M9750 : 2.16Ghz : 4GB : 160GB 5400RPM : 7950GTX SLi and xp sp2

I have updated video drivers to 169.09 using Grey 728 quick guide

Everything ok with drivers but if I enable sli function I still have only one card showing :
7950gtx 512 mb ram on display panel.... when using alienware drivers 1024mb ram ..... I'm a little bit disapointed

Do I need to set up other things to have the video card with 1024 ram available ?

Thanks for your answers

I have done this update because I have some troubles to run old game mmorpg everquest( characters don't move smoothly ) and was thinking that was the video drivers......

 

Go here http://portables4gamers.forumpro.fr/vos-benchs-f14/quel-choix-dans-les-drivers-nvidia-t44.htm and get a look at my benchmark list !

 

as i asked in some other threads, are you guys sure your cards are showing as linked in 3dmark06? i know my cards are setup properly and sli is enabled, but in 3dmark06 / System / Details, it shows the Display Adapters Linked as false.

what are you guys showing in yours?

 

I haven't taken a look at mine yet as it's still in my laptop bag at work, but a single card typically gets ~5500 in 3DMark06.

The Display Adapter Linked report might be a bug?

 

yeah i don't know if the DAL issue is a bug or not, after running 3dmark06 and submitting my results, i started checking the all the results pages, everything matches my system config just fine other than the videocard info.

on all results, it only shows that only 1 8700m gt in my system with 508mb of memory, nowhere shows that i'm running 2 8700m gt's in my system. i've got 4gb of system memory (only 2.8gb available, we all know why).

both cards are showing in system config, nvidia control panel sees both cards also.

but its maddening that 3dmark06 doesn't see the cards correctly. in vista, my 3dmark score is 7591, and i think this is only with one card being identified. i'm gonna remove my second 8700 and run the tests to see what happens.

 

I also get a 3dMark06 score of 7600 with SLI (5300 without) but how do you explain such an increase in score if only one video card is being used? It is using both cards. Whether they are being used effectively or not is hard to say.

 

PLEASE don't remove your card Just disable the SLi option in the nvidia control panel and run 3dmark06 again. This will save you a lot of time

 

it wasn't too much trouble removing the second card. with just one card installed, my 3dmark06 score dropped considerably to 4367, but with both cards reinstalled, i get between 7555 and 7625. i also installed nhancer and ran 3dmark06 with the sli load balancing graph turned on, it showed both cards working about the same. i went ahead and removed all the factory heat sink compound and used my arctic clean system (1 thermal material remover, 2 thermal surface purifier) then applied some arctic silver 5, everything seems to be working fine. i've used this stuff on all my pc's, my wii, 360 and ps3, it's some good stuff.

but what i don't understand is the .xml file on my desktop from the factory states a 3dmark06 score of 8531. that is almost 1000 points higher than i get currently. my score of 7625 is at 1280x1024, default settings in 3dmark06.

the .xml file doesn't state what res the factory ran the benchmarks at, also i'm using the factory drivers 156.72

i'm gonna update the drivers one step at a time and run different tests. i'm not dissapointed, it's kind of nice to have this kind of 3d performance in a laptop.

i'm hoping that the 8800 gets available soon, i may just upgrade my 9750 if it works with it.

one real problem i'm having is with my wireless on my 9750. i've got a dlink dgl-4300 wireless 108g gaming router, and i have my ps3, wii and 360 connected wirelessly and they work with no issues at all. i have 2 nintendo ds's and 2 psp's that also work fine wirelessly with no disconnects. my iphone also works fine connected to my router with no disconnects.

my wife has her dell laptop (running vista) and its working wirelessly with no disconnects, my daughter has her acer laptop (running vista) working fine with no disconnects either.

my 9750 will drop signal and disconnect and have to reconnect. i'm running vista and haven't really had a chance to install xp yet to see if it drops signal in xp.

my desktop pc is connected to the router via a wired connection. i have 10 devices connected wireless to my router (not including my 9750) and they all work fine with no issues.

i have my router set up with no encryption at the moment and i have it configured with mac address filtering enabled so i can control what mac addresses connect to it. other than my 9750 issues, i've never had any problems with my router or other devices connected to it. i've got a hawking technology external hi-gain antenna also hooked to my router to increase range, it works awesome with all my devices and i can get great reception even about 80' outside my house. so i know it's not a range issue, right now my 9750 is like 10' from my router. i tried the factory antenna and everything works fine other than my 9750.

has anyone else had any 9750 wireless issues? i'm running the factory alienware / intel driver, version 10.6.0.29. i may try updating the driver and see what happens.

 

I think Alienware cheats on this and sets the 3dmark06 resolution to 1024x768. My .xml file was also 1000 points higher than it really was.

This has been an occuring issue here with several people. I'm not sure how any of them have fixed it so you may want to start another thread about it or do a search on it.

 

thanks grey, i'll do a search and see what i can find. i haven't had a chance yet to try new video drivers or different res settings, i'll try that in a bit and post my results.

i agree, i think alienware kinda fudges the benchmark numbers in the .xml file.

 

Check your wireless card if it's the intel 4965N !
The black antenna must be on the white pin and the grey antenna on the black pin !
I've had same problem on my M9750 when I get it !

 

my 9750 has the intel 3945ABG wireless adapter in it.

i guess i'll have to make sure the card is seated properly or something, cause it'll work fine one moment, then drop signal, take a few minutes to sync back up then work fine for awhile again.

then i guess i'll try to find the latest driver update and see what that does.

thanks!

 

Ive been searching for an answer to this problem for MONTHS!

Alienware support were pretty much useless, and so was nvidia's tech support.

Thankyou

(This is the kind of moment id blurt out "I Love You" and feel foolish )

 

Are any of you guys having issues with 169.09, I'm getting a BSOD at random, usually after 15-20 min of being on. I'm on dual 7950's & XP... any help would be great... its kinda disheartening as I haven't touched my laptop much being that the drivers Alienware provides are so old. From what I've read... 169.09's are the best at the moment for us... the beta driver's that Alienware provides now on their site - for some reason doesn't support 1680x1050 which I need to run my dell monitor with. Any help would be greatly appreciated..

By the way, after running 3dmark05, do you guys get an error? I always do for some odd reason after submitting my score, even on fresh reinstalls of xp... and on stock and diff. drivers.. its odd - its starting to piss me off.. anyways... the error I'm getting is related to nv4 mini.sys & driver irql not less or equal... any insight would be great..

 

The latest drivers or not necessarily the best driver for your system. I finally rolled back to the 163.69 driver, released in September for best overall performance. A driver that works well for someone else may not work that well for you. Try the 163.69 -also it's a certified driver whereas some of the later drivers are not.

 

I have 163.75 installed on my system since it was the last WHQL driver for XP that doesn't have serious issues like the new 169.21 do.

A problem I've been having lately is weird noises comming out of my system when an external mouse/keyboard are attached. Not sure if it's driver related yet though.

I'll be upgrading my driver when I'm done playing Bioshock.... just haven't had much time to play it lately =(

In regards to your issue, have you tried uninstalling your driver, use a utility like driver cleaner in safe mode, then reinstall the driver? Do you still get BSoDs? You may want to get Alienware to check it out since I've never had a BSoD on my system yet and I f*ck it up pretty often.

 

Yeah, in regards to the BSOD, this has only happened with the 169.09 drivers, so its isolated to that... however the error I get with 3dmark05 is of a different kind, i'll reproduce it again and let you guys know - its not a BSOD - its a memory error I believe... I'll update you guys and also try a diff set of drivers, how do the 163.75 ones perform so far? thank you in advance for you reply.

 

I realize that I'm megabumping a thread - sorry.

I've tried thrice now and I keep getting a black screen after the final reboot. I'm trying to install 169.04 since people seem to be having trouble with 169.09. I decided to open windows under its last working config and that is right after I installed the first video card. My device manager says I have a 3d video controller. In my attempts to manually install the driver on the second video card I've right clicked, update driver, manual, told it to search the folder the driver is located in, and the installation proceeds naturally.
I don't understand the problem.. I've followed all of the steps.

help anyone?

I own an m9750 with 7950gtx x2 512 - 2gb ram - xp sp2.

 

Follow my SLi guide again. I just added the newer 174.76 drivers and am going to add the 175.xx drivers.

 

i would like to add two pieces of advice for all those struggling with SLI driver installation:

1. Uninstall in SAFE MODE, restart in SAFE MODE, install one card and restart in SAFE MODE, install second card in safe mode and then restart in normal mode. so when you restart each time, press f8 when it restarts and choose safe mode every time.

2. Re-install flash player (preferably before you have done step one)

hope these two items of advice help others because it took my a long time to figure out what was wrong and to successfully install drivers every single time without any blank screens or BSODs whatsoever.