Dell XPS M1730 Owner's Lounge, *Part 3*

Do you have a name or a link? I'm willing to pay a little extra if it means getting my 8800M GTX working for at least another year.

 

Guys i got the LED's working on the Alienfx now i'm so happy, now i can choose what colours go to what freq and also get an awesome strobe effect with my backpanel light

i did it with this http://ftp.us.dell.com/app/R225195.zip

 

See, this is the kind of thing that makes me never want to buy Dell again, and tell all my friends to do the same. This is pure bs.

 

If I wanted to hook my Beast up to a plasma tv and get audio through the TV, how would I do that? My tv has HDMI inputs and component cable inputs... And S-Video I think. Thanks.

 

if it has HDMI, then it`s simple

but the xps doesn't

you need the Svideo cable to connect the image
and RCA cables for the audio, like this :

 

why go to an analog signal? Isn't there a way to get a DVI to HDMI converter?

 

Is there any reason I can't use a DVI to HDMI adapter and then just use the RCA cables for sound? I really don't want want analog video...

 

Would anybody to be as so kind and read this.
Recieved a call from Dell, in the Past Month Dell has Replaced my Motherboard 6 Times, the GPU (DUAL Nvidia GeForce 8700M GT SLI) 5 Times, the Ageia Physixs Card 2 Times, the Keyboard, The TRUSTY Samsung LCD, and the Speakers.

They have offered to replace my system and will send me an email with the 2 preposed sytems. I was told as the XPS M1730 has been discontinued they will have 2 find another system either from Alienware or their smaller XPS Range the Manager hinted the ALIENWARE M17x , and that the preposed systems will be to equal to or better than my current system. I will upload my System Details and when i recieve the email i will upload the preposed config system and would like your advice to see if i am getting a good offer.

Something is going on with Dell Customer Service because this is happening when im 3 years out of warranty its great will definatly get another dell or alienware. When its time . Never have i had such great service.

My Current M1730:
Windows 7 Home Premuim x64
Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 @2.8Ghz (Bios OC 3.4Ghz)
4GB Ram
2 x 160GB 7200RPM (RAID CONFIG)
Dual Nvidia 8700M GT SLI Cards 256
Ageia Physixs Card 128MB
DVD R/RW
Dell Wireless 355 Module with Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR Technology
Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Ethernet
Intel Wireless Wifi Link 4965AGN
Logitech LCD Gaming Panel
SD/MMC-MS/PRO - xD
Brand New 9 Cell Dell Battery

Thankyou

 

well you can, of course
i don`t even think our xps has an s-video output

 

as soon as they offer you a new unit, post the specs and we`ll let you know if it`s on par with what you have

 

keep this posting confined to the correct thread -
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...s-m1730-problems-dell-replacement-issues.html

 

The tech out to replace the defective hardware - keyboard, motherboard and heat sink. Will be back another time for a broken LCD screen. Tech support wouldn't let me add the broken part. The tech had to come out and order it. Oh well.

Anyway, turns out that along with the motherboard and heat-sink, had replacement dual 8700M as well. Wasn't expecting that.

My X7900 Extreme CPU was moved over from the old motherboard to the new one.

Question about the replacement dual 8700M video cards....not to be a smart- but how do I know that they are valid/work cards and not ones that are defective models that will die on me at some point?

Is there a batch of 8700 that DON'T aren't defective or is dell just hoping that they won't fail again while under warranty?

Thanks!!!

 

The technician came out and replaced my broken LCD screen.

When I fired up the LCD and logged in, the first thing I noticed is that the colors are not as vivid. They appears washed out.

I pulled out my system configuration when I got the system, and here is the LCD description:

NX693 Module, Liquid Crystal Display 17WU, W/CMRA, M1730, SHAR

Here is the part information from the repair sheet:

YU241 Module, Liquid Crystal Display 17, WUXGA, VESA, TLF, V4

I did some searches but I can't seem to find just what the difference is. I can see a difference. I have my laptop connected to a 2408 WSD and I see the colors like they should.

Before I call support up and give them grief, can someone tell me what the difference between the two displays is??

Thanks

 

sorry if cant help but one way to tell > open properties of Monitors an under Hardware lds to see if got LPL0032 (LG) or Samsung SEC5443 (Samsung) or SHP13D9 (Sharp)....do u know which Brand screen u had Originally???? HERE

they all have design flaw , no way telling how long they last, Only one Not sure about is the K650M 9800mGTX SLI..but maybe there are to ?

Dell is well aware of "Nvidia Issue" , bad business to replace faulty cards with other known faulty cards

they should atleast give u K650M

 

K650 is 9800m gtx part no.

 

So i did a few more tweaks today.
First ive enabled hpet on the xps using this command:

bcdedit /set useplatformclock true

Then i used this program to check if hpet is working:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/att...inmod-overclocking-methods-examples-hpet2.zip

After that ive upgraded throttlestop to v3.00.1 available here:
Downloads | Tech|Inferno

Then ive upgraded the gpu drivers with yesterday whql verde available here:
NVIDIA DRIVERS 270.61 WHQL

When you install them, be sure to select customize and select clean install. A word of advice: dont install both 3d driver and profiles since its no use on our 9800m gtx. Just plain drivers, uncheck anything 3d related as it eats up resources.

After the usual reboot, ive use gamebooster to kill some processes, and kept it running. Then i tried to benchmark some games and programs.
So heres my results

3dmark06: 15,209

Good news for sli scaling in NFSHP. now sli works proprely and it stays 60fps from car selection to ingame itself.

Also Crysis 2 seems smoother and gained a few fps in min fps area @ 1200p in Extreme mode. I had a few multi sessions and i think the lowest i seen was 29 fps in a map only, otherwise above 32 all the time.

Assassin creed brotherhood with ac2 profile now maxes out everything with 2xAA while retaining an fps of 28 (lowest in crowded areas) up to 45. Average even in rome is 32-35.

Black ops unfortunately seems broken as always. Theres a good fpa gain, tested in WMD, the lowest was 50fps, but its kinda unstable. That may be me as i forgot to set single display mode and prefer max performance in nvcp, so i have to retest it. Also i was at 4xAA, i may need to lower it.

Well thats about it. If you have time to spare give my tweaks a go, but you need gamebooster now. also dont forget to set those options in nvcp as i forgot to do, maybe it leads to better performance.
Let me know some feedback guys

 

Hi Kingpin,

Your favourite student here.. (uh-oh)

I thought I'd try your latest tweaks, but as usual, have questions....

1. The command to enable hpet is from the 'run' command as Administrator, right? I checked with hpet2 but get a reply: Seem to be using the CPU clock. :-( . I get the same message if I disable HPET on the command line too, so something must be wrong...?

2. I updated Throttlestop and am currently updating the GPU drivers, but do I still need to run Driver Sweeper (DS) and CCleaner (CCl) first, or will a clean install of the new driver do the same thing? I was never really able to remove nvidia drivers with DS and CCl; on reboot the machine goes to archived drivers and uses them. However, I don't think I have any 'residual' driver issues when I do a 'clean' install on the nvidia setup.

Too early to say how my setup will improve, as I'm not running much in the way of SLI enabled games, but I might as well know I'm running with the latest tweaks, anyway!

Thanks again, Andy

 

Hey kingpin, thanks for the input, I've always been using gamebooster, I've noticed resident scanners were to blame most of the time, as they ate any available resources while gaming.
I went on Wikipedia to learn about the hpet thing, but I still don't understand what the hell that thing does

@Fortune7 you have to reboot your pc to have hpet reported as working by hpet2

 

I don't believe the 8800M GTX has the defective gpu...should I ask for that model to replace my 8700M instead of the 9800M GTX?

Or should I press on them to replace the system all together??

 

Replace the whole system man, go for the m17x

 

Thanks totostar...gonna wait a few days before I start to complain...hahaha

I see you have the 9800M GTX 2GB video cards...and 8GB of memory

How smoking is the system??? Before all the hardware woes..some my own fault...i was looking at upgrading to 8GB

 

Thanks, Totostar! Working fine now, though what it's doing is beyond me.......

Cheers, Andy

 

@phoenix1972
The system is pretty good.
At first i not only wanted to increase the ram capacity but also its speed by replacing my 4gb 667mhz with 8gb 800mhz.
Turns out the motherboard can't handle faster than 667 so i'm only left with a capacity upgrade.
I can't say I feel a difference, but I imagine the pc can remain on much longer without the need to reboot.
Also memory hungry applications should welcome it although apart from gaming i have no need for high capacity memory.
I did at some point turn off paging (virtual memory) thinking it would give a boost, but forums were giving inconclusive results, some saying it would hinder performance, so I turned it on again.

 

I have a Seiko screen. Didnt know that there were different screen types?
Thats explains why my screen seems different from other users, hell, sometimes its even better than mu fullhd tv.

 

Same Samsung SEC5443 here.

 

So the KM650 is the best 9800M GTX.

Glad I have it

 

Sooooo...back for some news.
Some sad and some good ones.
First the sad: my xps is dyeing.
It started to overheat out of the blue when playing games under xp. I noticed that the cpu overheats easily even if i keep the same as always TS profile.
No bsods, just plain reboots. I guess i can fix it by repasting, since from the last time i did it till today i heavily used the laptop for benches and gaming.
Anyway the behaviour is hard to reproduce, sometimes it works sometimes it doesnt, so i guess its not an heat related thing, maybe partially.
I dont exclude that the gpus are involved as well. Or maybe, ths mobo itself.

As for good ones: since nvidia dropped support for xp starting with 270.xx driver branch, i took the risk and tried desktop 270.68 wqhl with laptopvideo2go modded inf.

Results (gamebooster running, xp sp3):

Cod bo actually runs more smoother than i remembered. This is maxed out with 4xAA, with an average of 70fps,sometimes even higher, but not below 60.

Crysis 2 with no tweaks, vanilla, holds an outstanding 35 fps of average in multiplayer. I did a few games and actually closed them in positive and i didnt had any hiccups of any sort, even in intense maps like wallstreet, city hall, rescue point. This is in extreme settings.
I noticed a good increment in SP as well. The worst was 29 fps.

Ac brotherhood: well this is good. Actually theres no really a huge gain, but the framrate is more consistent and much higher. Also ive created a custom sli profile with Ambient Occlusion working. Guess what: same framerate but with added eyecandy which is stunning. So to recap: maxed out, 2xAA, AO enabled, the lowest being 28, the max 45-51, the average 32-35.

Test drive unlimited 2: i managed to get sli working with a custom sli profile. Maxed out with 2xAA and a framerate of 32-35, max 39. Which is great. Actually i can enjoy the game now in 1200p ^^.

Nfshp: sli is working perfectly, but i tried to force AA and AF to see how much the hit would be. Turns out that even with boosted eyecandy the game keeps 45fps with 2xMSAA and 2xSGAA on transparencies, plus 16xAF. Plain sli shots to 60fps stable, no matter what happens on screen. Talk about sli scaling

Homeworld still sucks tho. Average 35 fps with a few stutters, this maxed out even with AA. I didnt bothered to tweak it, so maybe ill be able to achieve better results.

3dmark06: 16,304. A bit of increase here, nothing major.

So all this writing prolly will not be of interest for anyone, but as long as i got time ill be happy to report my results. And beside the fact that my beloved xps is on death row, im happy of the performance.

 

Wow, sorry to hear about that
How long after buying the CPU have you started having these issues?

Hope it won`t happen to me also ...

 

for some reason they were declined by their finanical team is this a ie trying to cover that they made a mistake in offering or are they actually telling me they offered befre getting finacial acceptants

 

Well its almost 6 months now of heavy use, so i guess a repaste is my only option.

 

Anybody getting Portal 2?

Portal 1 was a blast, loved it insane...

 

Hi guys, I'm still having problems. The other day the screen wouldn't turn on no matter what so I replaced the CMOS battery with one from the warranty replacement board. System worked just fine after that. I had one blue screen since then while gaming. Worked fine after a reboot. Now I updated Windows and it wouldn't restart. No screen. Same as before the backlight doesn't even turn on. I tried unplugging the power, removing the battery, and pressing the power, but nothing. I now removed the CMOS battery and am waiting a bit before I put it back in and try again. What do you think is the problem?

Should I replace the entire motherboard? Put in an old vid card? Old one should still boot but its this no screen problem which has me baffled.

 

Alright, I got it to boot but I don't know how. I waited a really long time with the CMOS cell battery out, put it back in, plugged it in, pressed power... and nothing. I decided to get the old battery and try putting that back in and after I came back I decided to try it once again and this time the screen came on. I re-entered all the relevant BIOS settings, rebooted again (this time I checked 'Thorough' under POST procedure... just in case), got into Windows without a problem.

This still leaves me stressed. I don't know what's causing this. Vid card? CPU? Motherboard?

I have an X9000 in there which is at 3.2GHz (for the BIOS to put fans on full). It's reasonably undervolted so temps don't get too hot.

Here's the blue screens I had been having over the last week or two:

At least one of these happened during some video conversion program when the CPU was at full so I figured it might have been because the CPU is a little too undervolted (16x @ 1.2v). Didn't have that problem again.

The other times I figured it might have gotten too hot (temperatures have gotten hotter where I live) while gaming. But since then I've gamed a few hours without any issues. So I figure it might be a driver thing (I had problems with driver crashes like crazy with the 8700M GT until I settled on 258.96) since I game with all the browser tabs open.

Whatever the case, the screen not turning on when the machine reboots doesn't seem like it's related to vid card failure or overheating. Perhaps a power adapter issue? The first time I thought it might've been a voltage fluctuation which puts the CPU into some throttle down state and prevents the screen from turning on (something I found via Google search of the symptoms), but it's kept happening so I don't know.

I'm reluctant to replace the entire motherboard because it's lengthy and messy (gotta clean the CPU and reapply the paste).

Has anyone had this issue with an M1730? Blank screen at boot, nothing on it (backlight not even on).

 

Yes it was deffinaely to do with the motherboard dell replaced for me

 

Thats good to hear, althought 0x0000124 is addressed to video related problems, being 0x000024 the gpu.

 

True, but I remember I had to have my GPUs and motherboard replaced before everything was alright again, and from what I can tell, the GPUs were still ok, the mobo was actually the main issue that made everything bad.

Either way, have all of them replaced

And Happy Easter everyone!

 

Yeah in the end is the result that matters
Happy easter everywun!

 

when tech tried to boot straight after gpu replacement got a worring nothing blank screen > tech fix by reconnecting the Display Power connector.

wondering if a connector has fault?
Touch pad connector not seated properly or faulty > cause blank screen

dont think its cpu related but likely 8700m could be the prob....try another gpu? were u getting these blank screens with the 8800m, before 8800m blew?

 

My overclocked setup has been working without issues since I installed the X9000 and 9800M GTX (I know, tempting the worst by saying that), but to be fair I'm not a heavy constant user of CPU and GPU resources but want the capacity there 'when needed'.

A Question about CPU temperatures as reported by Throttlestop 3.00: When I run the Prime 95 stress test (small FFTs) with my setup (19x multiplier =3.8Ghz, vid=1,475v, power saver, disable turbo and EIST boxes checked), the temps on core1 and core2 can be different by 10 degrees C. With the test, they max-out at Core1=83C, Core2=94C. Tests complete OK with this stable setup. Should there be much of a difference between core1 and core2 temps? If so, could this be a heatsink (pasting) issue or is the workload between cores that different? I don't see for example a 10% core-to-core difference in the CPU performance display on the Logitech LCD while the test runs - both cores show 100%.

Ambient temps are about 25C, the internals of the beast are pretty dust-free, I carefully re-pasted the CPU when I installed it a couple of months ago and the back of the machine is elevated about an inch above my hard-topped office desk.

I'm not reporting a problem, just wondering why CPU cores seem to have different temps and if this is normal.

@ Kingpinzero: Mate, I hope you can fix your problems; we'd hate to lose you! I think I can speak for a few others that we're still anxious to see your 'tweaking guide' on here!

Cheers, Andy

 

My X9000 also differs between each core. It could have to do with an uneven surface on the GPU or just the paste job. However I also carefully pasted my CPU so I think it has more to do with an uneven surface.

 

HELPPP!!! So I was an idiot and decided to try and flash the 9800M GT bios onto my 8800's. It went fine on the first card and seemed to go fine on the second but after retarting - black screen! I'm now stuck on this black screen. I luckily set my boot order permanently to USB first before doing this, so I can blind boot the USB back to nvflash. But I have tried blind flashing my old backed up BIOS (backed up from GPUz) back onto the card but I have no idea if I'm doing it right as I just can't get picture back on my screen. Anyone got any experience blind flashing? Thanks

 

Thanks, Magnus. I also was very careful to do a good job of the re-pasting so I'd be surprised if it was a heatsink contact issue. I'm also not too sure about your point regarding the CPU's surface; it looked like 'glass' to me before I applied the paste. Maybe inside the encapsulation there's a difference in thickness between the (glassy) outer surface and both cores, though you'd think they'd get it right with the level of other tolerances used......Anyway, thanks for confirming I'm not the only one with the temperature difference.

Cheers, Andy

 

I have given my CPU a thought and make the surface look like mirror. This would probably drop the temps with around 2-5 degrees celsius at least, possibly more.

 

Dell is gonna replace my M1730 with this. Should i accept it?

Alienware M17x
210W/240W switchable Slim 3P A/C Adapter
125V Power Cord
Windows 7 64BIT Operating System.
Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad Processor QX9300 (2.53GHz, 12MB Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
4 GB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz (2 DIMMs)
250 GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
Slot-Load Dual Layer Blu-ray Combo (BR-ROM, DVD+/-RW, CD-RW)
1 GB Single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M
Internal 300Mbps Dual-Band a/g/n Wireless with MIMO Technology
17 inch WideUXGA 1920x1200 (1200p)
Dell Wireless 370 Bluetooth Module
9 Cell Primary Battery

 

I'VE FIXED IT!!! After trying blind flashing over and over again for a good few hours I got my 8800's back!!

 

Side question.

If I have a Internet connection, and a laptop, is it possible to make the laptop act as a wifi router or server for other computers?

 

I believe this is what you are asking for Tame Your PC: Windows 7 as a Wireless Access Point

As stated in the very beginning, there is a software for this. However, I personally prefer to do this through the command line.
Note, that this feature only works in win7. And you need wifi card that has drivers that support this feature. I haven't checked the comparability list for over a year, but back then it didn't support any of the dell cards. Most intel cards will work though.

 

Quick survey: my 8800m GTX packed up before Xmas so I baked it and it resurrected itself. Packed up again so I baked it again, and again. I am up to my 4th bake but it works each time.

Just wondering what the maximum bakes are for everyone out there?

 

Hey. It seems to me like you are getting a downgrade from your current system. I need someone to confirm this, but as far as I can tell, single 260M is slower than 8800M GTX in SLI. Besides, I find it a bit weird that you are getting a first gen M17x. Don't think they make them any more, so must be a refurb.

Check this thread on this forum for hints on how to deal with Dell service.