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

I just wonder if you checked for dust buildup inside? Safe mode boots with minimal drivers and put a lot less stress on the system.
It may be just a simple case of overheating.
May be not but it does not hurt anything to make sure.
Just a thought.

 

In my opinion the dedicated Ageia Physx is pretty useless. I removed it from my system. Last year I did some tests with Cryostasis with these results:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...-lounge-take-2-a-post5004908.html#post5004908

 

Do you have the Aegia chip driver installed or are you just using the Nvidia driver?

 

Thank you all for the replies and sorry for not replying earlier to various responses.

I did the following checks:
- device manager: reports no faults
- pre-boot diagnosis tool from Dell: reports no faults

I have tried various recommendations found on the net:
- windows recovery options:
- repair did not identify any problem
- rollback to previous restore points did not help
- maxing up the min-cpu usage
- registry clean/virus check: all done no luck
- powering down the pc for some time
- reinstalled gfx drivers => no luck
- disabled non-ms services => no luck

I will check this mbr and try to sweep the internal clean of dust..
and then if it does not help, reinstall OS
otherwise it will head for dell-switzerland if I can identify how to do that

 

Please keep us informed about your progress. I always want to learn.

 

I think the 8800 GTX SLI on my M1730 is dead. I was just playing mass effect 2 today. I am using windows 7. The computer froze and I had to manually shut it down. After I rebooted, the login screen was at the lowest resolution and both the cards were shown to be disabled. It reported error code 43. I went to safe mode and reinstalled the drivers (using the driver sweeper procedure). It managed to go back to the native resolution until the login screen and then crashed again. I have done the Dell Diagnostics (using Function & the power button) and I can see the colors displayed properly. Is it that Windows 7 has a problem or my graphic card is dead?

 

ouch. sounds like (at least one of) the GPUs is dead.

if you have warranty, call dell. they're going to go through the whole windows drivers uninstall/reinstall to try and blame the drivers to avoid having to either send a new part or do a system exchange because they have no more 8800s.

if you don't, try the disable one in DevMan, reboot and see if it works trick. then swap them. That got me a stable system last year for a couple weeks while I waited for replacement parts.

 

I'm also afraid your GPU went to the eternal hunting grounds.
I hope you've still warranty. Good luck with dealing with Dell. Please keep us informed.

If this will go on this way, this string will end one day.

 

I have my original 8700 GT SLI. I will swap them for the time being. I have warranty until 2011. So I hope I will get a replacement. Hopefully, my 8700 GT SLI does not die too.

 

actually, you do hope it dies. because dell will send you an M17x to replace it.... {lol}

 

I definitely think the 8800(s) are dead. In safe mode I am getting only one Standard VGA adapter. Yesterday, both the cards were showing. Hopefully, I dont have to go through dell hell.

 

goodbye 1730 hello m17x

 

I have windows 7 installed. I hope Dell does not say it may be due to the OS.

 

once dell tried to pull that one with me; saying it was XP that caused my GPUs to die and they'd work fine with Win7. So, I pretended to put a Win7 HD in and described the same problems over the phone. Of course, you can't "have an internet connection" while doing this because they'll want to remote in and destroy your PC hacking at the drivers and installing things...

if you get one like that, either bluff or hang up and call back.

 

I hope my m1730 dies when there is CF 5870's in the m17x

 

Good luck, the reps tried to give me 260ms for my 9800 GT x2... they said it was a like comparison.... I owned them showing that the benchmark was 3000 points lower and that is not 'equal or better.' It took a while to get there though... 5 days of calling

 

Wrong wrong, your 9800m GTX SLI is not faster than the GTX 260m SLI. You know why? Since they are the exact same GPU´s, so Dell could definitely have given you the GTX 260m SLI.

I think it´s strange the GPU´s die for such many people, one start to wonder if it is intentional from the users side just to get a better system replacement, go figure.

 

its not the same card... it has different specs... look it up....

 

thats some heavy statement, dude ...

 

I found a interesting threat at NBR. Again Dell is trying to destroy something what made them so special. They now will not provide the OS disks anymore with your purchase. They'll make you burn your own DVD from your Recovery partition. I don't know if this will affect Alienware too.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...isks-resource-cds-consumer-win-7-systems.html

This is the Dell articel:
Creating Your System Recovery Discs with Dell DataSafe Local Backup 2.0 | Dell

 

OK the latest status on my problem:
I wud get black screen just before login and could only get the laptop to work in safe mode. I tried clean Os reinstall and it worked fine until i installed the gfx drivers so it definitely looks like gfx cards are dead.

I called up Dell.. think the warranty (until 2012) won't cover me.. since I bought the lappy from ebay and did not register it under my name...

communicating with dell help desk after sending them the paypal invoice..
keeping fingers crossed but do not have high hopes

 

you could try contacting the person you bought it from on ebay and have them transfer the warranty over to you.

 

Well 9800m GTX 112 SP´s, GTX 260m 112 SP´s. Nothing new here, just a rebadge. While the GTX 260m is based off the G92B and the 9800m GTX is a G92.

So the GTX 260m is a little higher overclocked than the 9800m GTX, so while you can overclock the 9800m GTX to the GTX 260m clocks they perform the same. Still the same amount of shaders.

 

They say no.. they want the current owner to be registered with the corresponding service tag; I am chasing the previous owner but do not think he will respond (He had not responded before)

so word of advice.. register with dell, while your dell is still working

 

Well, I had thought my graphic cards (8800m) had gone kaput. So i replaced them with my older 8700(s). I am still getting the same error. BSOD saying some driver kernel is crashing the computer. I looked up online with for error code. Couldn't find it. It says Stop:0x000000C4 (and a big bunch of zeroes nothing else). Is windows 7 causing the errors? I planning to reinstall just in case.

 

I installed Vista 64 fresh.. did not help

 

So both the 8800 and the 8700 are dead? I haven't used the 8700s for the past 1.5 years.

 

Sounds unlikely to me that both GPUs failed at the same time.
Since you have determined that it is not a software issue, the only other cause I can think of is a failing motherboard. You may want to contact Dell at this point.

 

Well, I decided to switch off the driver verifier in Safe Mode (dont know if it is the right thing to do) and now my system is running w/ the 8700(s). Should I try the 8800(s)?

There are some minidump files created too. Does anyone know how to analyze them?

 

Hm....that's weird. As far as I know disabling driver verifier lets you install unsigned drivers in 64-bit versions of Vista and Win7. Yeah, definitely try 8800M GTX.
I remember a while back I wanted to read some dump files too. I got as far as finding a free software on Microsoft's website that lets you read them. It was about 700Mb, and I was on dial-up at the time, so didn't even bother trying to download it. Try searching for it.

 

Well, I reinstalled the 8800(s). Now the stop error has changed from the C4 to C124. I am guessing the 8800(s) are the culprit and somehow I could not reinstall the 8700 properly. One more thing just before at the BSOD screen I can hear some noise from the laptop (probably a fan).

Edit: Disabled the second 8800 and now I don't get the error. I am not sure if this some SLI driver problem or one of the cards is dead. I will try and disable the one working and enable the other and see what happens.

Re-edit: Well, the system boots properly if I disable the first 8800 and enable the second. But, I think it still uses the standard VGA driver. Cant run any 3-d Applications. I will install standard dell drivers and see.

 

using the nvidia control panel, turn off SLI and physics (on mine, when one of the cards died, SLI wasn't even listed anymore - a sign that the drivers don't even see the second card) and then re-enable both cards. if you blue screen, one of the cards is bad. call dell...

 

I use bluescreenview. You can give it a try.

Download BlueScreenView 1.26 - Show information about blue screen crashes occurred in your system. - Softpedia

 

just upped my warranty for another year
112 euros, thats quite okay price

 

That's good to know. My warranty will end in 2 years. I hope it'll stay this cheap. If my beast will be still alive at that time I'll extend it for sure.

By the way, did you call on the phone or asked for it by email?

 

First I mailed, but there was nor response, so then i called

 

I tried one year ago to extend my warranty for my Inspiron by mail. They never responded. Cause I was busy with more important things, my warranty expired.

 

Hi all, im just wondering if anyone can offer some advise and explanation for the problems i have been expierencing with the laptop. This is an extremly long winded story and i do apologise but i just cant understand it.

A week ago the laptop randomly froze with a distorted display forcing a shutdown. Every time i restarted the same thing would eventually happen after about 5 minutes. My first thought was GPU overheating but temperatures are 50-60. Ocassionaly instead of completely freezing it would recover saying that the Nvidia Kernal Mode driver had failed and recovered. I tried reinstalling drivers and and system restoring but it made no difference.

The problem seemed to get worse: first it would still load but the screen was covered in distorted lines and then would freeze. It then it got to the stage where the laptop would now freeze with a distorted screen during windows loading which led to a blue screen citing the nvidia driver.

I now had to run on safe mode, this allowed windows to load and no freezing ever occured but the screen was covered in horizontal wavy lines. It then got to the point where the bios and system info screens were also compltely destorted. So it definetly now looked like a graphics card failure to me.

After using the system in safemode like this for about a day the display then completely failed. Whenever i turned on the laptop on i would get a black screen which would change to red then blue then green and fianlly white before repeating. This happened every time i turned the laptop on but i could hear widnows still booting.

4 days later the problem hadnt gone away (i was too busy with studying to phone dell). I have an external monitor which i had previosly been running in duel screen but had unpluged when this problem surfaced.

I eventually found out that you can use Fn F8 to change screens (oops). So i started up the laptop and sure enough it gave the usual alternating solid colour screen and i then plugged in the ext monitor and changed it to the primary display. It actually did give a display, but the system info and bios screens were all distorted like before and i could boot in safe mode with a very distorted screen.

I could flick between the monitor and the laptop screen and sure enough every time the monitor would work but with distortion and the laptop screen would give solid colours. So i was "happy"; to my eyes i had convinced myself it was the graphics card and not a faulty laptop screen.

So with the system left in this config using my monitor as my display i phoned dell and explained the problem. The first thing they told me to do was unplug the external monitor (which remember had been unpluged all the time until this day so not a root cause) and then restart the system.

And i couldnt believe it the laptop screen displayed the image perfectly, no distortion and no freezing. And despite 6 hours of use to this point there is still no problem.

Dell said they would send an engineer out as i said the lines would return (they havnt tho....).


So im compltely lost, how has plugging in the extneral monitor, flicking between the displays then unplugging the external monitor and restarting apparently solved the issue which left me with no laptop for a week.

I was sure this was a graphics card problem as the issues got worse and worse with my use which looked like i had damaged the card more and more, but now they have vanished.

So hats off to anyone who actually read my deranged ramblings and does anyone have an explanation to what has happened and should i email dell and tell them not to bother to come out?

Many thanks to any replies.

(Oh i forgot one thing,the dell technition told me to hold the d key while i booted which gave a grey screen. He said it shouldnt be grey but didnt explain further, so im not sure how that fits in)

 

You defenatly had graphics failure, and it WILL return, try running a modern 3D game for a few hrs

 

@ Callous_Hades

I don't know exactly what GPU you've got, but are you running in SLI modus?
Maybe one of the two got fried and you're running with one GPU now?

 

hi everyone, i got my m1730 pretty recently. so uh, greetings, cheers and everything.

i took the laptop apart shortly after i got it. the first thing i thought of is how the cooling system on the gpu could be improved.
i noticed the fans are standard 12v, .4a, and not only that but it seems like bigger fans could easily fit in the casing.

before i further speculate, has anyone modded or heard of someone modding the cooling system on an m1730 gpu?
im really excited to get this going.
if i had fitting fans laying around i would have already stuck them in there just to compare temps.

callous hades, definitely sounds like your gpu failed, you should check if both are running. although its just as likely that both failed and then randomly recovered.

 

@niffcreature
As far as I know no one on this thread did that kind of modding. Would be interesting to see what that would do to the temps tho

 

sweet
well according to HWmonitor the fans haven't gone past 3000rpm.
i dont know much about fans at all, but i know next step is measuring in mm and finding something faster that fits.

is this the kind of thing vbios would screw up??? it totally sounds like it, i hope i can get it to work...
i wouldnt expect the fans to just stop the computer or gpu from starting up at all, but i definitely dont expect non oem fans to go at higher RPM automatically... maybe its the kind of thing rm clock will handle perfectly.

blablabla i should post this in a different section

has anyone removed the heatsink from an m1730 gpu? ive heard some say the copper mod wouldnt work for such and such reasons, but how would they know without trying it?
by the looks of it there are some more of those light blue cooling pads under there... :O fail
well i ordered a t6-10 screwdriver set, i think i had a t5 and it didnt fit. if this what finally makes me buy tools for building my own heatsinks from molten copper im ok with that.

more updates to come.

 

modding xps ..... best place is to start here!
niff do ya mean somthing like this copper mod HERE
but need to cut out some of rear casing (gpu side) to slide in the copper fins

 

Hi,
I finally got my M1730. This is my 3dmark06 score

I'm worried abaut the CPU score.
What do you think abaut?
Thank you folks.

 

I have 14000 3dmark06 on OC-ed xtreme CPU and non OC-ed SLI 8800m gtx