Upgrade a G73-jh to 6970?

Im sure bro there are better solutions for it, for me right now this is working, i have the ir thermometer that i use in my RC cars and thank god the vrm never goes over 70c just like the gpu, like i said before this is a good start, for me and for all that are reading this post, now i can say IT WORKS, now we only have to find how make it work BETTER im pretty happy, this machine had been dead for many months and now it rocks!!!

 

All depends on if you have a pressing need for the extra power in the type of games you play at the moment. If you can wait till the 7000 HD series you will get a far bigger jump than seen between 5870 and 6990Ms. Around sometime in May-June 2012 period in terms of availability. Or maybe in March-April 2012 Dell will have some parts for supply.

Moles in the know are sporting nothing less than 1400 odd shaders the WLIV4 Caymen die shrink and this is with the dual tesselator engine over the bart's single tessellator.

 

"Moles in the know are sporting nothing less than 1400 odd shaders the WLIV4 Caymen die shrink and this is with the dual tesselator engine over the bart's single tessellator."

IF that's true for the mobile solution we are looking at 6950 performance.

 

Exactly, a die shrink of the 6950 and once its out in the market for about 6-8 months they will come out with the 6970 desktop die shrink.

Beautiful world of marketing and financial cunning.

The clocks on GPU wont be like the desktop, it will a bit lesser on stock.

 

the performance difference between the 5870 and the 6970 so far good around 30% to 50% in some games so i think i will just get the card and see if it will work with the stock 150w brick also I may consider a UV if its possible i dont want to overclock anyway. so i think so far the 150w with the 740qm will do just fine with the current laptop spec.

so the leap that i will get from the gpu maybe enough more than enough to run most gpu demanding games in market right now on high to ultra.

hmm interesting Dallers and mharidas really convince me to change my mind but still think I will get the higher GPU 6990 will just draw almost same amount of power and will perform better and much more future proof. that will depend on the price.

 

The price difference between a 6970M to a 6990M is hefty you need to decide if the gain is worth it though. Stick with your 740QM most of us upgraded to the XM because we did not know at the time a GPU upgrade was possible and its most certainly the next best thing.

Even so if the 240watt brick mod works as it seems to then you can still consider it down the line. It just depends if you can wait until Wimbledon thats all but considering I will be waiting until the 7 series drops in price later in 2012 I will probably go for the 6970M in a week or two as well.

 

Poor old asus branded 5870m`s . Nobody wants them anymore

 

This is the greatest day of my life.... next to the day I learned about but thats beside the point lol.
I've been reading this forums for months now hoping for a break through.
Still got my JH with stock parts.
I want to do this.... 30 to 50 % improvement, wow impressive!

 

Sad thing is the resale on these is crap the upgrade is not going to recover any of the loss.

 

True but it can cover some of the cost of the upgrade or be used as a backup GPU.

 

The 5870 should sell for atleast 200 USD why not? Its still useful for those who have failing ASUS cards.

Only problem is your wait on ebay maybe long until someone in need comes along, maybe if you lucky someone might show up tomorrow needing it.

 

BTW Dallers do you think this GPU i mean the AM 6970 can be under volt?

 

Im in the UK dont think so. There will be a very small amount of people that have JH in the UK you rarely see 1 for sale on ebay, and then you take away the even smaller amount of people that need a replacement.

One of the guys that have one already working should be able to answer you that, again not my field of expertise and it will depend on what is available in the Vbios although as its not hardwired like the 5870M I would say yes

 

Yes you can with RBE Radeon bios editor. Dell cards have a max of 1.1V set by default. No overvolting possible, only undervolting.

 

Continuing with the tests, in home without a/c, 33c ambient temp, runing 3dmark 2011 and monitoring the heatsinks over the vrms to see if they work, gpu temp 76c (20min of runs):



this is teh hotter part of all the card

 

50C and below is the ideal temp for those VRMs, but 64C will do if you have the cooler blowing from underneath. Should be closer to 55C if like you said are running the laptop cooler from below.

Infact given the ambient is 33C that is pretty good.

 

Thany did you run 3dmark06 and vantage benches or not yet?
if you did pls post some numbers and if can do a UV for the card that will be awesome.

 

agree, that temp is from 3 coils that the card have, the vrms are arround 42c

Yea i didnt't forget it give me a few minutes and ill post the results

EDIT: i forget my psu at the office >.< gonna post the results tomorrow :s

 

Nice work with the 6970m guys! No issues with the clocks? What are the idling clocks?

Actually not... you seem to completely miss the point of what I've described. What else is the cause for the symptoms I mentioned above?

True, I'm not an expert when it comes to voltage regulations on GPUs, or control and feedback control systems or whatever it's called in English, but I know the basic stuff and I'm familiar with the physics of electricity. At least with all the stuff you mentioned. I might not have been very accurate, due to language barriers and lack of time yesterday, and I'm sorry for that, but you still miss my point.
Your whole introduction to EE was nice and correct, but fact is, the 6970m on the M15x does not perform up to the expectations when heavily overclocked, overvolted or when the CPU is heavily stressed. That's a fact. Now you might be able to tell me why the performance drops at a certain level or why the GPU voltage and clocks drop when the CPU is heavily stressed?
I thought the voltage supply of the GPU wasn't sufficient and dropped, but this can be forced to a fix level and the card still won't perform up to the expectations... so what's the matter?

Btw, the same happens with the 5870m in the system when the CPU gets overvolted and heavily overclocked, it won't get to 3d clocks anymore.

 

You are confusing yourself, your problems not related to how devices that can draw power, will draw power.

Yours is an M15X board, I doubt alienware will cut corners to have supply regulators in such a way the CPU rails pull from/share the MXM power lanes. this will be not reference to what Intel would advice on board designs. No I would bet on its not the case.

No such issues on the G73JH, this is is after all an ASUS thread, we are not concerned about other boards having an issue. Look at the numbers posted by Mr Thanatospy, Power draw easily goes well above 200 watts because there is a card and a CPU now that needs that much to be stable when pushed. They are able to draw it.

Dallers is having some issue where he feels his board is tripping the moment he gets past 176Watts, this should not happen. But perfectly working boards may not be upto scratch when pushed. Its a fluke just like overclocking mileage varying for everyone despite having the same spec machine or part. You could say slightly low on over all built quality of that particular board.

Your case may just be that odd duckling board, but we have to be happy with that as we cant claim dell didn't give a board that above average for your overclocking needs. No vendor sells an overclock guarantee or stability as such in those conditions. Those who do get a great part are the fortunate ones, Its the nature of this beast.

Designs wise all these boards are MXM 3.0b compliant and it will not trip or limit artificially on the power draw until it reaches around 150 watts which no card is going to reach anyway with their inferior VRMs, random fabrication imperfections aside.

 

Someone is going to need to post a detailed guide for the 6900 GPU upgrade

 

I have to agree here, a tutorial how to upgrade the GPU with so less modifications as possible would be useful

 

I will be making one after i start the swap

 

NICE!!

So it survived the test
Well ill go ahead and start my build today after work

Thanatospy did you cut a hole under the notebook? The pic were you are monitoring the GPU temp. The lid looks cut.

And Gz! on a nice build

 

Thx DH48 yes i make a hole under the vga section to ensure more air are coming to it, ill try to make something more "stetic" there.

Im playing Crysis 2 (dx11+hdr textures patch) it works great at 1920x1080, everything on high, the gpu temps keeps 72c, my problem is the cpu, it is stepping close to 90c im a little bit scared about it :s gonna try to make something or look for something to lower the cpu temps

 

cool its running extreamly well i think i will get one within a week or 2 Just hope that i will find one who will ship to my country and i think thanatospy mod to the vrm heatsink will probably better that attatching the heatsink with the core heatsink cuz core is getting much hotter that the VRM so i t will effect that heat on them so i guess one row of heatsink attached together for the VRM to cool them down with sone UV will do the trick.
cuz as thany reported the vrm with the heatsink temp was 62c and the core in the same time was around 70c that is 8c more.
i just hope that i will get one for 250$ and manage to sell the old one for 150$ or such so i can cover the upgrade cost at least some of the cost.

 

Rep to you too Thanatospy, great work!
Tbh i didnt expect it to work that well. If only fan control would work normally it would be perfect.

 

fan control works perfectly thanatospy did mod to the fan just to make it run full blast
actually there is no issue at all with the upgrade only figuring a way to get over the extra heat that come form the VRMs to make the card last longer otherwise the upgrade is just a simple plug and play application.

 

my iddle temps and max temps getting from crysis 2@120mins of gameplay@extreme settings, here in my office the ambient temp are arround 24c

 

That can hardly be called perfect. What i meant is fully working fan control that adjusts depending on current GPU temperature instead of having it on full all the time. It works and its great dont get me wrong, i just said thats the only thing missing.

 

This must be throttling surely as its only 650 points more than my 920XM and 5870M ?

The 6970M should be getting nearer 18/19k with that setup at the 3.5ghz you ran the test at.

 

I know what you mean and that was my point as Thanatospy reported few pages before that the fans working normally without full blast but he was asking for a software solution to make work on full blast but he didnt manage to get one so he make a shortcut by modding the fan connector by unpugging the sensor wire to make it work 100% just in case things go hot.

then he asked

that was my point.

 

16.6K sounds about right when the base clocks are still at around a slight overclock of 2.2-2.3ghz, That 3.5ghz seems to be turbo speed its reporting. When all the cores are at 3.5ghz (if its possible) then you will see a rise in the score to about 17.4k range.

3DMark 06 and below are not good benchmarks for DX11 cards to show scaling. In many cases vastly superior architectures just show miniscule improvements in 3Dmark 06 when they show big differences in 3DMark 11. 3D mark 06 can only test DX9 feature sets anyway, DX11 is where these cards really start to flex muscles.

 

i was terrified when i see the 16900 3Dmark score which is as high if not more than mine overclocked! But then i see its 3DMark 06...

 

how much do you get with the 2860wm and 6990m? in the 2011? i have no idea about other systems

 

Processor doesn't count for much in 3Dmark 2011, its very GPU bound. Single GPU 6990M gets about 3600-3700 depending the latest drivers used.

You are looking at an extra 160SPs compared to the 6970M so the difference isn't so great. But in a Xfire setup that makes it about ~320SP so makes for some tangible gains.

 

Oh i see, thx mharidas, well im happy with the results, I bought this machine 18moths ago and i think there is no need to move to other system, yea i can get a liiitle bit better performance, but i prefer to wait and finish my desktop, im waiting for the new sandy and the new vga line from nvidia, if any1 need something just let me know, thx for your time guys

 

Well it done. I get the vbios version nr. and it booted fine
But as i have no network connection at my county house i was not able to get the driver. Next morning i just loged in and the rez. was fine just like with the 5870.

I tested a movie worked ok (device manager showd 6900 but was missing driver. Then i but one movie into fullscreen and 10 sec later i got GSOD or WSOD...looked like a white screen ...now im not able to log in to normal windows....safemode works fine. Installing the drives via that. Hope i get back in.


The fans are constant 40% well at leat at the moment. Did try chess without the drivers. Used MSI afterburner to monitor temps....43c a bit ood but ill be testing the system. If the card would be dead then safemode should not work to ?



OK it seems to be driver or missing file related as the windows load screen takes forever and it freezes for a sec. Might have to do a fresh install.
Odd i get the mouse but no display and then after i can see the password tab. After i enter the password nothing. The HDD light works and i get wifi light so its in but thanks to something no picture lol.

 

The Card is not dead, not sure why you have a windows problem now. safe mode works so card is not dead.

Just make sure your heat-sink is sitting properly on the card.

Clean install should be good in this case.

 

if stuff is shown on your screen that mean the card is recognized and working.

@Thanatospy: here is my score on vantage and 11 for your reference:

 

Ihh this is what i get for working long hours. I finished it at 3am. The soldering was a real bi... The heatpipes started to expand. The pipe needed to be about 500c for the solder to stick to it. Other then that everithing whent smooth. I might have been in to hurry to but it back together.

I think the screen connector is lose or it might be stuck under something as after i closed and opend the screen i now have 2 vertical red 2 cm stripes on the screen even at boot. First repaste i did with my 5870 one cable cot stuck under the a screw and i had horizontal white lines had to reopen it halfway and problem solved. Hope its the same. I will have a better repaste and solderind done on the weekend and will see how it goes. Might have to mode the heatsink abit more as it is realy thin ....got room for copper fins

Today i will not be able to test it as i got work from 8-17:00 and then 19-22:00 exams:/. Might take tomorrow off from work. We will see Id upload some pics but they are all on the computer and do not want to use it in this state.

 

The M17X R3 heatink is very good, thickness is not the measure of heat transfer its the actual material's conductivity.

Take your time don't rush it.

 

Well, finally last night have been playing BF3, the card works amazing, my problem was the CPU, it reaches temps like 98c, im worry about it, gonna think on install another heatsink over the cpu and drill the back of the laptop to make it fit or something like that, this machine cant handle the 940xm , if any1 got an idea plz let me know

 

What TDC/TDP do you have the 940xm set to as I can assure you it can handle the 920/940XM I can run BF3 with 27/26/25/25 at 96watts and I do not see over 90oC. 60-70% load over all 4 cores at 3.33ghz.

I would recommend checking that your paste job is spot on and the heatsink working correctly. Unless the 6970M is affecting the CPU which I cannot see why it would.

 

im just using the default settings for the cpu were i change that values dallers?

 

So your 940XM is running at stock? You have not changed the throttlestop settings for it?

That is really hot for a stock 940XM I have mine running flat out and I still do not see those kinds of temps. How was the CPU running before putting the 6970M in? how is your paste job?

 

Thanatospy did you notice that after the swap bouth fans ran at constant speed ? Mine bouth run at 40%


You are hiting 98 and the fans are at full speed ?

 

I would recheck the CPU heat-sink seating, there is definitely a lack of heat dissipation.

You can place your hand and actually feel the air flow of the fans for the CPU, it should be very hot which would indicate that the heatsink is shifting away the heat from the CPU as intended. You can also monitor CPU fan rpm from HWiNFO64 in sensor read mode.

 

the air coming out is reaaaaally hot, DH48 yes, my fans was also at 40% thats why i make the mod to them to run full speed, well i dont know if this is full speed they dont sound loud but work much faster than before, the repaste is fine im sure of it, well, ill try to do something about it