Upgrade a G73-jh to 6970?

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Amm take a look at a few posts back

@tilla is now #3 6970 success And it seemes that the fans work ....sort of... Not like me and Thanatospy with 4000+ RPM

 

Did you enalable it to read the 5xxx card with Radeon vbios editor ? (have to load random bios to enable the button)

 

I have to reassemble all the stuff. Then I will see in some undervolting.
680/[email protected] now.
I have put some copper heatsinks on the upper parts. Will take some pics.

@DH48
You can see the vBIOS string in the first pic (CCC). It's from 2011/2/14.
I could make a RBE screen later.
The fans are working normal. This 19000 rpm is just a reading error of HWInfo.

 

@tilla have you done any major mods to heatsink?

 

Working on it.

 

Thanks for your help DH48

@DH48

Lookup Entry 0 60/32
Lookup Entry 1 70/43
Lookup Entry 2 80/53
Lookup Entry 3 90/64
Lookup Entry 4 93/75
Lookup Entry 5 95/86
Lookup Entry 6 97/96
Lookup Entry 7 100/108
PWM Mode 0
PWM hysteresis 0
PWM ramp on 0
PWM ramp 0
Duty cycle 100% 125
Duty Cycle min 24
Spinup cycle 80
Spinup time 2
T min 40
T max 95
T slope 24
T hysteresis 4

 

THX Inferno1217. It seems a bit different at the moment but ill be 100% sure after it get home


@tilla thx for the info. I did look for the latest bios and tought that the one i flashed was the latest. Seemes i was wrong. Do you have a link for the bios or were did you get it ? Dell homepage ?

 

It's the original from this Clevo 6970m. Saved with GPU-z. I can send it to you.

Just did a 3DM11 run with stock 680/[email protected]. 2977 points.
Temps 75, 75, 78, 80
Cools down pretty fast after the run. Till 48°C and then the fan stops.
Like it should be. I've seen ~125W while the last 3DM run.

The clocks don't jump. Idle is 100/150. Starting 3D it goes to 680/900.

BTW. How do you overclock? ATI Tray Tools or Trixx or...?

 

I think i found the vbios on Tehc Inferno forums. The date is off by two days. its 02.16.2011.

ATOMBIOSBK-ATI VER013.010.000.011.039257
and its from:
Clevo_X7200_Blackcomb_XT_SAMSUNG_2GB


Ill try to flash it. Hope i dont brick it :S

Well i have tested most of them but i would say use what ever you like the best. All of them work. I personaly now use Riva as i can set a profile so it clocks at start up



Amm i think you can send your Vbios as i got a missmach for the vbios :/ hmm a bit odd. Did not allow to flash it.

 

I have an other one.

ATOMBIOSBK-ATI VER013.010.000.011.039 419
and its from:
Clevo_P150HM_Blackcomb_XT_SAMSUNG_2GB

Edit:
Played around with ATI Tray Tools. Overclocking and voltage adjustment at it's best.
Brave test.
3DM11 at 800/[email protected] - 3401 points
Temps: 76, 76.5, 79.5, 81.5 - fan max 3744
max 140Watt

Had also run Furmark for few minutes at stock clocks
this let's the temps raise near 83°C, where the fan starts to spin full (~4500rpm)
Don't forget, the G73 sits on the NC3000 at low speed. The backcover is closed now.
On idle with 100/[email protected] the fan is OFF for almost 2 minutes to turn ON at 51°C for 20 seconds till 47-48°C is reached.

No problems so far.
Will sort the pictures and post it later.

 

nice results guys! congratulations! what are you using to see the watt usage? i got this metter: http://www.amazon.com/Energy-Meter-LCD-Display-EM100/dp/B000RKVK52/ref=sr_1_36?ie=UTF8&qid=1327055135&sr=8-36

I forgot about OC the card, ill try some, 750/1000 looks good for me

EDIT: 3dmark2011@750/1000: 3307, temp goes only +1c

 

Thx. It's the way to go.

I'm using a cheap but exact one.
Heitronic Energiekostenmessgerät 0,2 bis max. 3600W (46901) (4002940469011) | eBay
Payed 8€ in local store.

 

@tilla so far you got the best results till now.
I got few questions.

1- what mods have you done to your heatsink?
2- what vbios you got in the card?
3- what card you got ? clevo , dell, or other?
4- is there any additional things you did to make the card work normally?

 

Well my Dell card does not accept the Clevo vbios. Says its a missmach :/ will look for dell one.

 

did you try to force it?

 

lol and risk bricking it ?

 

I think it wont accept flashing it with another brand without force not like clevo one that accept flashing to dell with no problems and dont risk it I am happy that we got 3 working 6970m in ther world

 

Here is a funny thing

Was looking at the clevo vbios i found on the net and ....well the picture talkes for its own.



Also im looking at my vbios and the clevo

Its the vbios version string
Clevo : BR39257.008
Dell: 113-C29604-101

 

Ha ha and my old 5870m coupled with 720qm went over 160watts at its best. So much noise about how g73jh couldn handle amd beast of 6970m inside itself. Its asus that made one big ugly beast that look and heat like hell

 

thats weird cuz i berly hear my asus fans even while gaming.
maybe you got some thermal issues with yours.

 

Not more than others replaced thermal paste many many times now. But after two hours with crysis gaming it goes upto 80 at max. Anyway I didnt complain about noise but how asus managed to produce proprietary 5870m that draws more power for less performance than bigger brother 6970m.

 

1- what mods have you done to your heatsink?
Cut a bit here and there to sit plan. I will show some pics soon.
For "cooling" the parts not covered by the heatsink (vrm...), I just put on some small copper VGA heatsinks. Imho it's better to do something than nothing.
2- what vbios you got in the card?
3- what card you got ? clevo , dell, or other?
It is a Clevo card from a P150HM.
ATOMBIOSBK-ATI VER013.010.000.011.039419
Clevo_P150HM_Blackcomb_XT_SAMSUNG_2GB

4- is there any additional things you did to make the card work normally?
No. Proper swap and pushed the power button.

Edit:
This 140 watt was at the last bench scene of 3DM11 (combined test).
Missed to look at while running Furmark. Furmark isn't my aim now. I'm happy the card works, so I don't want to brick it after 1 day.
IMO the heavist I've measured with the 5870m was about 145W (Furmark on overclocked GPU 800/1100 + Prime)
This 6970 gets warmer, but not that much.
The only time I was able to get the fan to fullspeed with my 5870m, were while overclocked to 825/1100 and running Furmark.
Then it hit the 83°C.

It is strange, that the fan now start at an entry temp of 51°C instead of 47°C.
Wouldn't the EC read one of the GPU sensors and then handle the fan?
The top spin temp seems to be identically at ~83°C.

 

Good that it works


Ill to some more test today and see if i can get the fans to react to the commands i send it

@tilla im starting to think it is the value the GPU generates for the EC. If you look at the info then the GPU fan works at a odd RPM but the EC says the RPM is xxxx and that is correct. With the 5870 the GPU RPM and = EC RPM on my JH just so it might be a value thing. The Dell cards might be sending different value signals to the EC then Clevo is. But ill look into it after work. Maybe i can shed some light on it later.

Did you manage to look at the vbios i sent ? it is for clevo and fan options are open. My question is is the duty cycle the same as on your card ? That is does the fan speed up at the same temp as on the X7200 vbios.

 

Have looked at it.
Umm...I don't know how it's controlled differently on the X7200's.
You know, this beast has 4 fans and is more like a handy desktop.
It supports the desktop i7-990X. IMO the only mobile parts inside are the GPUs.

What do mean with fan duty cycle?
As I said, after booting (below 51°C) no GPU fan is running. The temps raise till 51°C, where the fan starts (~2600rpm). This is the entry rpm for GPU fan. (I wish, we could modify this). Then the temps decrease till 47-48°C. The fan stops. Temp is raising and so on.

 

I ordered my Targus 180w AC adapter with a L1 tip. Hopefully I'll be able to get the 920XM shortly if I can sell some things on eBay. Then I'll save for the HD7xxxx series card and get one later this year. When that time comes I'll be picking everybody's brain.

@ DH48 Do you think that vBIOS will give you fan controls on a limited basis? Maybe the auto setting will work even if the fixed setting won't. It would be great to be able to set that where you want. It seems like my 5870 never goes above 30% fan speed but the cpu fan will really kick in.

 

Rivatuner is more powerful then the other OC tool as i can fiddle around with more settings and also low-level settings but....fan control does not work. It does change the value. Even HWinfo register the change but it does not effect the fan.
So back to the drawing board but something in the vbios does effect the fans. I can see rivatuner register some RPM and temps values that HWinfo does not but at the moment have no idea were they from or for what they are for.

Ill try @tillas bios but i think ill get the same error.


@tilla Duty cycle as in what temp c = % fan speed.

Strange thing about the bios is that they have it in a M17x forum guide http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/585064-guide-installing-amd-radeon-mobility-6970-6990-your-m17x-r2-single-gpu-crossfirex.html and ppl are saying that it works :S
Winflash gives bios string error but i think i will not test it via dos as it might brick it :/


Good reading about vbioses on the 6970m Adding AMD Radeon 6970M to Alienware M17x-R2 | Tech|Inferno

 

LOL Got bored and .....I need more power

Maxed at 75c and i cant go over 825/1130 as i get driver crash. Might be form the 150w power brick. But damn ......75 c I bet it could go upto 860/1200

 

Nice score. Have you run any games or are you just having fun with it and working out the bugs?

 

nice score DH48!! congratulations! i told you the vga is not the heat problem good to see your 740qm can handle the card, thinking on downgrade my 940xm :S

 

Why would you downgrade? The Passmark score is nearly double that of 740QM when overclocked. Not to mention more future proof.

 

Thx Inferno and Thanatospy. The GPU i think can go on and on as the driver crashes. I get no artifacts just crashes to the desktop and shows the driver stoped responding.

Time to look for the 180W power brick


Inferno i have only tested some games for a few min. No hard gaming but ill try batman arkham city on 800/1100 today for 30min to 1 h to see how it handles.

I am testing as i try to find the fan problem.

 

inferno1217 may ask what OC program you use to get those numbers?
I barely can get my core to 780 and mem to 1050 without crashing to desktop and give me that driver stopped responding.

 

I use vBIOS od2, 11.12 drivers, setfsb for the cpu and MSI Afterburner. CPU @ 1.84GHz on all cores and 860/1135 on the gpu. Keep in mind not all GPU's are the same. I had another that would not go past 775/1075 without becoming unstable. Also kill any processes that are not needed. I still leave my antivirus on (MSE). I think I could get a higher score but I don't want to damage it.

 

I just flashed the OD2 vbios and oh god its amazing the battery life is jumped around 45 mins to 1 hour more thats is cool.
but i could not get over 2.5 in 3dmark11 even with setfsb at 2k all core if I am not wrong and 800 core + 1100 mem , but so far was happy to get the battery life.

 

That's not a bad score for the clocks you are using. Your right on track. Your CPU should be higher than mine. If I try 2k it freezes and crashes instantly and 1.9GHz doesn't last long. What drivers are you using? I am not using Power4Gear, I am using windows default High Performance.

 

Hi there!

Im an owner of a G73JH from the UK (had it imported) and i've spent about 2 hours reading through this whole thread!

Quite a process you guys have gone through but the end results seem worth the wait

I can see a gpu upgrade coming in the near future for me as I would like Battlefiled 3 to run a little more smoothly on higher settings

I'm very interested to hear megaX05's thoughts if he goes get a 6990 and gets it working ok as their is little price difference between the two cards as I would have to import either from the US, although I must say I'll be holding out to hear if the 7970m might have a chance of working

Anyway ill keep my eyes on this thread

Oh and btw the bios editing tool somebody mentioned a few posts back, I downloaded that and made a few settings editable (cpu / power and SATA config), hoping for proper overclocking and the ability to run RAID 0, alas there are only the options for IDE / AHCI and so far as I could find nothing useful for overclocking, but more to the point - it didn't brick my laptop

Anyway, see you all around I guess ^^

 

Welcome to the forum. I like to call this a sleeper laptop as it has so much potential. We just need to figure out the GPU fan and we are golden.

 

Here are the pics I'd taken while doing the job.



I forgot to take some pics from the backside. But the top priority was the swap itself.
First was to cut some parts with a dremel. I'd looked long time to get the most out of the heatsink. Maybe some parts can be cooled anyhow.
So I left a little part for one of the grey cube (vrm? IDK).

A heavy part was to get off this X-cross mounting plate of the 6970. The srews are smaller than the Asus ones. I already known, this can be very hurting to my fingers (MSI 5870).
I used a hair dryer to warm up this tape. Then lever it up somehow.
I attached the original one from the Asus 5870m. Remember, the holes of the card are too small to fit the cross plate like it was with the 5870. You can see this at the picture with the thermal pads. But I know, the screws of the heatsink are long enough. Yes, you have to do some pressure. Always be careful. You see, it can work.

Earlier I buyed some thermal pads ( link). But after closer watching I have seen a really small gap between the memory and the heatsink. So I decided to use the old ones. (You have to be very careful with these elastic thermal pads)
This wasn't a real problem, because I also wanted to see how good the heatsink and thermal paste make contact. I used Shin Etsu and dot method (like here). IMHO it was perfect. All parts of the DIE were covered.

As you can see, I attached some of this 'chinese' vga copper heatsinks. I had some spare ones. They are self adhesive at a small level. One fall off yet at the 2 small black parts. I will see to swap it later for better tape.
Because I don't have the tools, knowledge and time to build an own heatsink from 2, I thought it is the best alternative. And as I said earlier, IDK if the unproper cooling of these parts was the real cause of the death. Remember, the 5870m of my X7811 has no cooling at these parts too (just DIE and VRAM).

 

Nice job @tilla

So how is the card holing up ? Temps are good ?


I am starting to get a idea why the GPU fan is at almost 100% RPM i just need to test it with a A/C or just take it outside as it -10c

Found a program that show the status of the GPU and 50C is shown as the card is overheating....49c is the last critical temp. So if i am right then with a AC i might be able to get the temps down to 15c or so and if the fans turn down then it is the problem of wrong values from the card or from the mobo. Ill have to test this.


Lucky me i got a week of work so got time to test

 

its very simple and clean so far so close to my current plan of the vrm cooling but i made some changes to make them connected to the main heatsink to transfer heat to get the cooling benefits from the orginal cooling system so sodering some small cooper sticks to make that kind of connection between the vrm ramsinks and the the same to the aluminum heatsink.

soon i will start just need more time to finish some RL things.

 

Thx DH48

Didn't had much time.


And I'm still checking for undervolting. Seems, that 0.9V is the same as 0.8 or 0.75V for idle clocks. Maybe it is because of ATI Tray tools.
But also checked 100/[email protected] to see a difference. And yes, there was.

Also weird, that my modified vBIOS with 100/[email protected] still shows as 0.9V.
Have to ask in the undervolting thread.
Might be a hardlocked "lowest"-voltage.

@megaX05
Yeah, I thought about "connecting" the copper heatsinks to the main heatsink too ( Arctic Silver Thermal Epoxy). This was the plan while cutting at the heatsink. But you can also mess up with this.
Time will see.

 

Some further testing.
The GPU works like a charm.
Stressed it now for about 2h with benchmarks.
I found out, that this card can run at stock clocks with only 0.95V!
This might not be an end result, but had no problems with it.
0.96V results in same temps as 1V. So I tested with 0.95V, and there was a measureable difference.
Also done 750/[email protected], but this results in a driver reset.

Dirt3 stats
4xMSAA
all HIGH, except Post Proc. on MIDDLE
-----------------
680/[email protected]
Temp max: 74-74-76-80
Fan max: 3600
Watts: 115-118
-----------------------------
Run max FPS avg FPS
1-----61.9-----43.5
2-----62.4-----49.9
3-----62.0-----49.3

680/[email protected]
Temp max: 74-74-77-80
Fan max: 3700
Watts: 115-118
-----------------------------
Run max FPS avg FPS
1-----63.8-----49.1
2-----61.6-----48.4

680/[email protected]
Temp max: 72-72-74-77
Fan max: 3500
Watts: 111-115
-----------------------------
Run max FPS avg FPS
1-----61.4-----49.5
2-----61.8-----46.1

800/[email protected]
Temp max: 79-79-82-85
Fan max: 4400
Watts: 131-135
-----------------------------
Run max FPS avg FPS
1-----67.4-----53.7

in comparison my 5870m (this was benched in june 11, driver may be a factor)
-----------------
700/[email protected]
Temp max: 72-74 (???)
Fan max: 3600 (???)
Watts: 100 (???)
-----------------------------
Run max FPS avg FPS
1-----47.7-----35.1

3DM11
-----
680/[email protected] - 2974 pt.
Temp max: 69-69-71-74
Watts: max. 115

 

Damn would realy like to flash to Clevo bios but have seen to many bricked mobility GPU and standard GPU that have ended up dead after that :/

Or has anyone already tried to flash to clevo bios ?

OK DO NOT try to flash Clevo vbios to dells GPU !!!

Clevo:Green and Samsung chips.
Dell: Dark brown and Hynix chips.
Eurocom:Cyan and Samsung chips.

You will just brick it if you do.
Found some info on it at http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/633084-6990m-single-card-vbios-required.html

Soo it looks like Clevo and eurocom cards are the way to go until Dell card owners find a way to get the fans to work But if you do not mind 4300RPM fans then dell cards work too lol But im working on the fan speed + will try to take the clevo vbios appart to see what is made different about fan control.


P.S i think we should make a new threat (something that does not have a ? at the end) that a moderator might be able to sticky ? or at least add under the Good to know link list.
We could but all the info and mode option all into one thread and let ppl see it is possible. This thread is well... you have to look for the answer as it is all scattered
What you think ?

 

Important info. But there are problems on M17 r2 and M15 too. At one a clevo card works flawless, on the other not, but a Dell one.
Could the fan thing just a "whitelist" of SUB Vendors? But changing this might also brick your card. BTW, your CPU fan is running fullspeed too?

IMHO the GPU fan control of the G73 isn't optimal at all. This start/stop interval in 2D is stupid (5870m too).
Better would be to run this fan at lowest speed but permanent. Like the lowest speed of the CPU fan. Almost unhearable. But no, the GPU fan must start at 2600rpm.
Asus may thought, this ATI never goes that cold. Are we smarter? LOL

+1

 

well it shows 4300 RPM on mine :/ and if 4500 is max then I am almost at max. I do have some fan control but like I said before only 4200-4500. 4200rpm is when the card is cold. That why I need to test the fans today outside if I can get the temps down to about 20 or so and the fans turn off. Then i can do some more tests on the vbios.


To bad there is no program that can read the Vbios just like AMIBCP and well using a hex editor is ....well i need to find someone who understands it a bit more then I do.


Ill try to gather all the info in the thread and make a summary for the new thread

 

Does it just show it, or is the fan really running at that speed?
This can't be silent.

 

Well it show the RPM. All the programs i have show fan speeds the same.
I have no idea what they sound on full speed to me it sounds the same as with the 5870 when it hit 73C and the fans turned up a bit. Only thing is now bought fans are almost the same speed

 

Wow, why you get so low watts consumption man? ill buy another watt metter maybe mine got something wrong because normally im close to the 190w on my metter, ill get another one to test

 

It might be your i7-940xm?
Prime on CPU gots sth. of 85 watts. (edit: with my 740QM)

 

indeed that beast is a power hungry cpu but the performance boost is freaking great and will keep the laptop on the top for another 2-3 years easily.