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

I am also pretty convinced that your GPU is dead, I hope you can scam the indian after sales rep into giving you an M17x, anyway, don't let them push you into something lower specced or something you don't want. you are the customer and they must satisfy you.

A great advice is to prepare your conversation, think about all possible scenario's that could happen on the phone, make notes of arguments you would like to use, then call, be polite but firm, don't shout or swear (that would lead to nothing). if the man is not very cooperative ask him to escalate your case to a responsable (you will never get a dell responsable on the phone, or i never succeeded in that)

I hope you will be out of misery swiftly !

 

As of a few weeks ago, DELL still has some parts available for the M1730 (here is the US) because I went through 3 motherboards, two screens, 8800 graphic card, a few plastic parts, screws, among other small parts in two weeks (DELL tech. kept breaking parts and messing it up).

On the side note and question: anyone have any idea how long for DELL to process the system exchange? Specifically the M17x? One thing that I kept getting from their CS in common is that it takes 7 to 21 business days to get the replacement and times up. Every CS I talked to gave me a different answer about the status of my case. I wanted my M1730 fixed but unfortunately I can't.

Thanks in advance for any information.

 

Just thought I'd share my findings here.
Was installing new NVidia's driver today (196.75), and have run into the same problem I have run into 196.34 driver. The driver would install just fine, computer would work as normal. However, when I would attempt to enable SLI, I would get a BSOD. BSOD error would always refer to nvlddmkm.sys file. Just want to note that I used lv2go modified inf and used DriverSweeper and CCleaner before installing the driver.
Anyways, after a lot of testing I narrowed it down to a PhysX card. First off, new PhysX drivers don't support a dedicated PhysX card in our systems any more. PhysX menu disappears from control panel all together. Anyway, after disabling PhysX card, I was able to enable SLI (still with BSOD, but after the restart SLI was enabled). So, looks like our dedicated PhysX cards became completely obsolete at this point.

P.S. btw, I have been installing PhysX driver on top of the previous version.

 

Yeah, DDT5, Nvidia shafted our hardware. It's their way of rendering the dedicated PPU hardware obsolete in favour of their own, home-grown GPUs.

Hell, there's reports flying around that the new PhysX drivers don't run with ATi hardware. (You know, in a scenario where you have primary ATi GPUs along with an Nvidia card just for PhysX. New PhysX drivers prevent this from working.)

 

When i install a new graphics driver, i also use driversweeper, and since a few driver revisions when i turn on SLI , i dont BSOD, but my system hangs for like 5 minutes with a black screen and then i get a "graphics driver has failed and recovered" message. After that everything works fine (sometimes i have the same error when i open the lid after closing it when the computer is still on)

too bad about your dedicated PhysX card though, i'm glad I did not buy one now ...

looks like my warranty will run out on 15/5/2010, better renew it soon

 

I don't have that particular driver installed. Just a thought (if you are still running Vista): have you look into Control Panel/View 32-bit Control Panel items? That's where the PhysX icon would be for me in the past.

 

I'm using Win7 x64. And yes, that icon is gone from the control panel.

 

1) Delete current PhysX driver (from Control Panel -> Programs).

2) Install PhysX v8.09.04.

3) Install current PhysX version, 9.09.1112.

Now you'll see it in the control panel.

 

Indeed, this will work. However, it wouldn't let turn SLI on with PhysX driver v 9.09.1112. The latest version of physX driver is v 9.10.0129, and it comes with new 196.75 driver.

 

Face it, PhysX card owners are fooled....not a good strategy from the green team i'd say (Though I still prefer the green boys over the red due to beter drivers, better control panel and better (HD) video rendering, although they are pricey !)

 

We still could've made use of those cards, but Nvidia are now eager to push PhysX on their GPUs/CUDA, so our PPU hardware is done.

 

Also, 72Hundred, would you mind sharing some ArmA II benchmarks or frame-rate averages with us?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=5967334#post5967334

People in the thread posted above are really curious abbout performance issues pertaining to the game, and since you're running it very well on your hardware, maybe you can share the information with them and provide some hope in resolving ArmA II performance related issues.

 

It took them around 25 days to get the replacement to my place; luckily my machine was still usable except for gaming and 3d stuff

 

Yea can do, will put on the list.

 

Okay, can anyone help? My prob is the adapter not being recognized by my m1730. I've determined that it is either the adapter or the battery. Would a replacement adapter or battery be covered under warranty?

 

Yes indeed, I guess it is time to turn my PhysX card off for good now.

Edit:
@81288
I need someone to back me up here, but for most of the people who have had this kind of problem, it was cause by a failing motherboard.

 

Does it say "this is not a dell adapter" when you boot?
I seen this before, but with acer laptops, and in those cases it was the motherboard like DDT5 says

 

Ah crap.....it DOES say "this is not a dell adapter"...so it may be a mobo issue....

Should i call Dell support to replace the mobo or try another adapter?

 

So you still have warranty, battery is not covered, the adapter is normally (they changed mine under warranty once)
but it surely isn't the battery, so you should call dell, they prolly first send you a new adapter, if that fails you call them again and they prolly change the mobo

 

Cool, thanks.

 

I had that similiar problem once after when I upgraded to the 9800M GTX. It turns out the adapter was fried. Changed that and it was fine.

 

thanks, helped alot to be cleared up and will have a "on site" tech come over if i can't convince them to just send the adapter over after having a live chat with Dell CS.

The conversation went well and i was surprised to actually have a good experience...

Of course, the other experiences were with "Over-the-Phone" CS support with another company *cough*look at sig for more info*cough*.

Will keep in mind and extended warranty after being told it will run out this month (in 3 weeks actually.) Knowing things might take time or probs may reoccur i think it was a good choice.

Again, thanks for the info and advice... Now onto to see if i can hook up my PS3 controller via Bluetooth lol

 

Just ran Arm II benchmarks;

Test1; 28

Test2; 15


Not particularly huge fps but I've to say it runs brilliantly. The iron sights are perfectly snappy when dropping the bead on a target, running through heavy detailed areas is perfect... etc.

Actually as a side note firefights in Arm II are amongst the best I've encountered. Having never been in actual combat, I can't say that the game emulates as perfectly as possible, but its damn good in my opinion. Usually you're walking along doing a sweep of an area, so literally 15-20min's of just scanning the terrain looking for movement or something that sticks out. Next thing you know you've got ricochets everywhere loud as all hell with a distant muffle of muzzle blast. So you're dropping and rolling trying to avoid getting hit (2 hits ~ usually death), while commanding the team to find cover, eventually finding the offensive enemy, returning fire with Arm II amazing ballistics engine which is based on OFP's which was the best of its time. But by this time you've not noticed the other offensive enemy team that's flanked you and then they open up! Its simply brilliant, graphics are great. Not Crysis, oh-look-at-me I'm so pretty graphics, more a graphics engine that allows you to see a silhouette at 500m's in the distance and engage it with a few early well aimed shots. Its a military sim and damn near perfect at it (only in 64bit! )

 

Well, just a quick update here.

I rang Dell on Wednesday night to report the failure of my graphics cards (as you guys so helpfully pointed out to me). They agreed to replacing the cards... like-for-like unfortunately - no upgrade to 9800m! . Looks like here in the UK they have parts aplenty for the M1730??

Anyway, I was surprised to see the engineer appear this morning (Friday) and I got 2 new 8800m GTXs installed. So far they seem to be working fine... Installed the 195.62 drivers from nVidia's site (thank god I didn't grab the "card-melting" 196.75 ones!! http://www.incgamers.com/News/21293/nvidia-19675-kills-video-cards).

A rare case of customer support fixing an issue in 2 days? I hope I'm not jinxing myself here...

Thanks everyone. A million internets for all!

 

Those are desktop drivers does not apply to lappys

 

Indeed, I have seen no change in temperatures with 196.75 compared to previous drivers.
NVidia is really starting to mess up with new releases of drivers: first a 196.21 WHQL driver that didn't allow over clocking, and now this....

 

nono, I had issues solved by dell a lot in that time period, you could be unlucky if they don't have any parts, but in general their support is great (in europe although, dunno bout states or other). thats why I stick to them

about those NVIDIA drivers, should i be scared or does the laptop control the fans of the gpu, I didn't notice any overheating since I use them and I am reluctant to go revert to an older version , because if I do i can't play Avp on the beast.I will monitor my temps with HWmonitor though the next time I play.

Also I have a question, should I buy Operation flashpoint:dragon rising on steam for 6.99€ ? I like shooters like Crysis, Modern Warfare 2, Avp (obviously), bioshock, battlefield 2, Counterstrike, Day of defeat, half life, .... I dont like the super realistic things like Red orchestra where you have only iron sights and die from one hit. I am reading mixed reviews about this game, some ppl say its realy realistic and difficult with a lot of menu's and stuff, others say it's dumbed down because they made it a console game as well (which i probably prefer over the super hard, super realistic)

oh and how about clive barkers Jericho for 4,99€

Thanks in advance

 

OFP2: Dragon Rising @ €7... interesting, even though its meant cr^p.

 

Hi,

I've had my XPS M1730 for quite a while now but to be honest I've not made much use of it due to various issues. I've listed the spec below, the main change I've made is get rid of Vista Business which was horrible and replace it with 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate.

I had a problem with the screen in that the white sections had a yellow tinge to them and no matter which drivers I tried they were all the same apart from the ones that came install, which gave horrible performance. I got around this by installing a new bios that was released for the cards.

I'm currently running the 195.62 drivers which are a good performance boost over the originals but I was wondering if there are better drivers than these ? I've only tried World of Warcraft so far and it seems to run pretty decently. I just feel though I should be getting better performance overall from the system and wondered if there was any other tweaks/changes I could make.

Base: XPS M1730 CORE 2 DUO T7700 2.40GHz
CD/ RW: Fixed Internal 8X DVD+/-RW Drive
Hard Disk Drive: 160GB (7.200rpm) SATA Hard Drive
Hard Disk Drive: 160GB (7.200rpm) SATA Hard Drive
MISC: MS Vista Premium Logo Label NB
MISC: Primary 9-cell 85WHr Li-Ion Battery
MISC: Bone White
MISC: Image Restore - Vista
MISC: Uk/Irish Internal Keyboard (QWERTY)
MISC: Integrated Stereo Sound
MISC: Mini Express Card Remote
MISC: Wireless 1505 Wireless-N Mini-PCI Card EUR
MISC: 8 in 1 Multicard Reader, PC Express Card Slot
I/O Port:

4 USB 2.0 port, Firewire1394 port, DVI, S-Video, RJ45 Ethernet port,

Headphone and Microphone connector
MISC: Integrated 2.0MP Webcam
MISC: Ageia PhysX Processing Unit Card
Memory: 4.0GB 667MHz DDR2 Memory (2 x 2048MB)
Network Card: European Dell TrueMobile 355 Bluetooth
NoteBook Screen: 17" Ultrasharp Widescreen WUXGA TFT Display (1920x1200) Truelife
Video: Dual 256MB Go 8700M GT graphics NVIDIA SLI Technology
Operating System: Windows Vista Business SP1

 

The biggest draw back you face are your gpus there not the greatest for gaming. Until you upgrade that your probably maxed out.

 

Yeah I realise they aren't the greatest. Do you think it's worth trying to upgrade them and roughly how much would it cost? I've got plenty experience upgrading PCs but I've never done a laptop before.

 

http://computers.shop.ebay.com/i.ht...t=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&_odkw=8800m&_osacat=3667 or http://cgi.ebay.com/K650M-DELL-XPS-...emQQptZPCC_Video_TV_Cards?hash=item563a00cd18 and
http://computers.shop.ebay.com/Comp...=x9000&_catref=1&_fln=1&_trksid=p3286.c0.m282 (+oc). Of course U can change graphic cards only and games should run much faster.
It's little expensive and after it U will not have upgrade options. New Alienware supports quadcore CPUs and faster GPUs - maybe better sell it and buy m17x?

 

ZeroG, say if you upgraded to 9800mgtx's then your current cpu's will be the limiting factor by alot, then if you consider to also upgrade to X9000's > will still be a limiting factor to 9800mgtx's by a little(unforunatly best ya can do)

its only worth it if you upgrade gpu's an cpu's but thats gonna cost more money!.....Yeks!

 

I looked around for some upgrades and I didn't realise quite how expensive they are, if I were to spend a bit more I could get a new laptop. Shame really as I quite liked the M1730.

A friend bought an Alienware M17x for about £3,200 a few months back and it looks nice but not sure I want to spend quite that much on another laptop.

 

From what I've been reading, some people have indeed been getting those drivers to work. You just have to monitor your GPU temps *very carefully*. Nvidia's monitoring tools are good for that. Any spikes over 80 and stop what you're doing!! If you've oc'ed the M1730 and have the fans running on full blast, that helps too.

I didn't really like OFDR. Only played coop mode. The maps were HUGE, and there was lots of running around with bullets zinging past you from unknown locations. Lots of time spent circling around through trees, brush, canals, etc... trying to flank people. Yes, a single bullet would take you out, and it ended up that you'd be in a firefight shooting at a 1 pixel target over 800m away. Then, you hop in a jeep and drive to the next checkpoint... heaven forbid if you flip the jeep or destroy it - you have to either reload, or walk for 20 mins!!!

Just my opinion, but I prefer more fighting and less walking / running.

 

Thanks for the input on OFDR, I'm not gonna buy it. Thats not the type of game that I like.

I had GPU-z monitor the GPU's all night while i was playing yesterday, after consulting the log it seems everything is ok, highest peak was 80°C

 

Hikkoo,
Your point is well-taken. However, even with the CPU bottle-neck, which even a QX9300 cannot fully alleviate, the guy's machine will improve a lot with 8800/9800s.

Anyway, I've got too many gaming laptops now, and that is INSANE. One of them must go soon.

 

Send one my way and alleviate both our problems

 

would my t9300 bottleneck the SLI 9800m gt's i have? I have been looking at x9000's but the prices are insane !

so kade how many game notebooks do you have ?

 

ZeroG, with full laptops, I aim for a profit cut, and since you're a fellow forum member, I am going to spare the tactics of trying to rip you off.

Psyloid,
The 9300 is very powerful, but even out best CPUs hold back the true potential of our cards. The 9800m GTS SLi (Yes, GTS), actually outperforms our rigs when paired with a quadcore. Most of our games barely use up to 70% of our cards resources. So don't dwell on the subject. T9300 is fine. It won't crippel your cards, and they'll run fast enough. As fast as anyone elses 8800/9800s. You can run Mass Effect 2 and AvP just fine right? You win!

As for how many I have. . . heh. . . 3. Not good. Not good at all!

 

Update: I just got my 9800m Dual Sli installed along with X9000 CPU. The only thing left is to get faster RPM hard drives and install Win7.

Since overclocking is in the BIOS does Dell warranty support it in case things go wrong? The Dell onsite tech told me to make sure.

Also must I uninstall the old 8700 drivers completely and then install the new 8800m drivers? If so how do I do this uninstall properly?

Update: I just saw this. Any opinions?

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=16154

 

yes install new drivers, but first uninstall the old ones in the control panel, then boot in safe mode and use driversweeper to get rid of leftovers, after that your clear to install new drivers

 

Thanks bro.

 

yes, you have a point there, i can run anything I throw at it, so why bother upgrading I guess its just a habbit of me to have the best of the best, actually I drewl over an m17x, but why? the 1730 is sufficient to play any new title .... (it's not even a year old )

about your notebooks, which one you have besides the 1730 and the m17x?

 

http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/26255-v19686-windows-7vista-64bit-dell-mobile/ - and it works with XPS M1730. It should have SLI profiles for BFBC2 but this game doesn't run faster. And, of course - enabling/disabling SLI = restart (why in mobile drivers?). Better to get back to non-mobile 195.62 with modifed inf file.
But X9000 is waiting for me - a lot of screws too. Do I need to reinstall Win 7 after CPU upgrade?

 

Nope, it should work fine without reinstalling

 

I assume that actual overclocking is not supported under warranty, even though it is there in warranty. Just overclock it, and if something goes wrong, reset the settings in the BIOS and don't bring up the overclocking with Dell.

Chances of something going wrong are practically non-existant. My ES CPU runs great at 3.4 GHz - no issues at all!

 

Dude, I've been after an X9000 since like, forever

Now, that m17x does look indeed tempting, but a super fast CPU would make things really shine for me.
Anyhow, my biggest issue, if say I were to want to buy your alienware, is that they don`t transfer ownerships rather well, now do they ?
Alas, prices?

As for laptops, well, I myself have a 4 year old HP nx9420, and also an Acer Aspire One. Rarely use any of them.

 

@eleron911: Patience bro. Try not to drop more than you can afford. I got mine off Ebay but be careful of copy cat processors. Do your research on what to look for to determine its authenticity. Try to contact the person i got mine. Maybe he has more...

NEW INTEL CORE 2 DUO X9000 2.8GHZ EXTREME CPU PROCESSOR

Seller:heera05
99.5% Positive Feedback
Member since Aug-30-05 in United States
Location: MI, United States

 

@Kade Storm:

Thanks again for the encouragement. BTW: Do you happen to know how to activate the small display screen that give the temperature readings? I disabled it but I cannot remember where to go to enable it. It will help me keep an eye on the CPU temperature.