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

I think this is a complete list of all GPU's ever build in the M1730.

• HR106 = 8700M GT single 256MB
• RW331 = 8700M GT SLI 256MB each
• XM888 = 8800M GTX SLI 512MB each
• F979M = 9800M GT SLI 512MB each
• J951N = 9800M GTX SLI 1024MB each Gen I
• K650M = 9800M GTX SLI 1024MB each Gen II

 

Never heard of SLI 9800M GTX with 512MB VRAM. Are you sure that there was one?

 

Hi there,


I'm thinking of buying a M1730 as I can't find any other laptop with a decent screen and audio that supports XP. I like the keyboard as well. Since there are so many owners out here, is there anything that I should watch out for? Any particular model/VGA combinations that I should stay away from? I'm not getting this to play games but more like to watch movies on the bed.

Also, anyone looking to sell your M1730?


Thank you

 

you can not put the m1730 on your bed, you would cover the cooling intake and the notebook would die quickly, or you would have to put it on a tray and make sure enough air gets under it

 

Yea, I have a notebook stand for bed. What's the current market price for a M1730 with 8700MGT SLI and T7700?


Thank you

 

Check eBay with past auctions.

 

Looks like my brand new M1730 has died - I'm getting constant flickering, games won't even launch and the windows assesment wont even run, aero has also been disabled. Just contacted the seller, I think I've had enough of these machines now

 

Was it an eBay purchase? What was the price?

 

you should be able to get one for around 600 - 800€ depending on the specs

a notebook bed stand aye, you got a link or some pics of that? sounds interesting

 

RW331 = 8700M GT SLI 256MB each
That's what I have with the t9300 processor and 4gb of ram. Windows 7 installed. Love the screen, the size and weight are quite high but I have a good backpack for it, and have been carting it back and forth from work for 2 years now. The warranty is done now and I've had some problems with the machine itself in the past and even still now. In particular I think the video cards and ram.
They (dell) have replaced the motherboard once when the power connector died and the hard-drive once though that did nothing.
Quite often when booting the laptop up (practically every night) it will hang once, reboot, then boot into windows just fine and run well for the rest of the night.
Also my video card temperatures at idle at 70*C, going up to 80*C in-game (mostly world of warcraft).
The CPU temperatures are rock steady between 40*C at idle and 45*C in game.

Are the GPU temps normal? I have never taken it apart to clean it and it's been about a year now since Dell had it last. Suggestions?

What about the rebooting and hanging upon initial start up? Anyone experience that?

 

reconditioned laptop from an ebay powerseller for £825 with 2 year warranty thankfully.

 

Huh, that's a great price. Hope you've luck sorting it out. Don't forget PayPal's claim process is a pain; document everything and move really fast. I've lost money to their tight deadlines.

 

i got one for 700

 

(J951N)9800mGTX SLI disabled

(J951N)9800mGTX SLI enabled

both above with 4gig HyperX....BUT with me orignal 6gig Hynix shared mem an total graphics mem different.... HERE


J951N > generation 1
K650M> generation 2
ernstig, think ya need a edit to make ya top of the class gpu list perfecto

 

Done. So now it is:

•HR106 = 8700M GT single 256MB
•RW331 = 8700M GT SLI 256MB each
•XM888 = 8800M GTX SLI 512MB each
•F979M = 9800M GT SLI 512MB each
•J951N = 9800M GTX SLI 1024MB each Gen I
•K650M = 9800M GTX SLI 1024MB each Gen II

Still I'm curious what's the differense between the two 9800M GTX's.

 

Thanks for the advice - Ill bear that in mind. As a matter of fact I'm currently dealing with paypal because a total a-hole bought a laptop I sold and wants a refund because he broke it. Looks like he'll probably get it as well, and leave me negative feedback - the whole system is so biased in favour of the buyer. I guess that's good as regards my M1730 case though.

 

kade mention to me different bios

an Nvidia use a better solder method for K650M

gpu temp look okay , does WWarcraft play okay?any glitches?

about hanging not sure? do ya get any message top of blank screen when hang or reboot ? had something similiar an turned out to be faulty HardDrive Sata Cable were it would sometimes get reseat HDrive Message after hang

 

I just purchased a M1730 with T8300, 2GB DDR2, 320GB 5400rpm and 1GB 9800M GTX SLI for $1346 including shipping and tax. Tax was $100. It has 1 year Complete Care warranty left. Did I pay a good price or was that too much? $100 tax was just too much but I really liked the laptop. I understand M1730 can have two hard drives, I have no experience with this, do I just add the second drive and the OS would recognize it? I will probably put a 7200rpm or SSD drive as primary and keep the 5400rpm for storage.

Now I read that there are overheating problems with this laptop and there are things that I need to to make sure it doesn't overheat. I will read the hundreds of pages of this thread but it would be great if anyone would like to share what steps I need to do to prevent overheating. I have NC2000 cooler if that helps. I will be running XP SP3 and Windows 7.

Thank you

 

On occasion wow will lock up and the screen will show severe artifacting. I've guessed in the past it had to do with the video cards/heat. Since I've updated my drivers to the latest version this hasn't happened, though the video will still sometimes crash when bringing the computer out of hibernation or periods when the screen has been off for a while.

As for the hangs on start-up, some times a blue screen will come up with a error message stating "memory parity error, contact your hardware vendor for support". Usually shutting the machine off and restarting it is all it takes.

 

Congrats on your purchase. If you got an actual 9800M GTX, than it is a great value in my opinion. Even if you got 8800M GTX/9800M GT, it is still a good value for that configuration. The reason why I'm saying if you got 9800M GTX, is because a lot of sellers on ebay state 9800M GTX, when in reality it is a 9800M GT.
Overheating issues are affecting GPUs. Propping up the back of the laptop by about 10cm will drop temperatures by about 7 degrees. Another thing to do to avoid overheating is to clean your system regularly from dust. Preferably by taking the system apart and doing a thorough cleaning.
NC2000 might help. Up to you, if you want to use it. Other M1730 owners have been reporting very minor drops when using this cooler.

 

Hi there,


I'm looking to buy a M1730 by today or tomorrow. If anyone is looking to sell, please PM me the price and service tag.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/want-buy-price-check-forum/485845-wtb-dell-m1730-today-tomorrow.html

Thank you

 

Hi there,
I removed the Physx card, and now it works perfect. I spected some shuttering before. My 3dmark06 score got maxed at 14700.

cheers.

 

consider also could be mobo because dell replaces with refurbished mobo's not new.
could try to rule out ram , if one or both ram sticks bad.(usually ram lasts long time). Guessing ya have 2 + 2 gig memory sticks installed, correct? does ya bios "memory installed" correct amount? what does Cpu-z SPD tab say for slot 1 an slot 2?

Could try testing for one bad stick > with only 1 ram stick installed into memory slot 1 an then try it in slot 2 then do same for other ram stick(me xps can run fine on a single 2GIG STICK in either slot) .
Better still if ya have another DDR2 stick 667 or 800mhz installed in another notebook that is good to test with. NOTE: when changing memory amount an then boot up rig, that loading bar will be real real slow okay.

@phenon great score an cpu score 3016 >nothing wrong with your x9000 for sure......... lookout ernstig , AUS dell refused to install that Physx processor in me rig when ordered new> im glad they didnt

@ mnd99 you can have seperate operating hdrives installed> OS hdrive will recognize storage hdrive, just make sure in Bios under "SATA Operation" is set to "RAID Autodetect/ AHCI" mine is an have seperate hdrives > NO RAID

 

I removed that crappy piece of junk a long time ago. It's a complete waste now. If someone still has it inside his rig; don't doubt to remove it while you're cleaning your beast.

I'm not that worried.
Cause of my 'tweaked' memory.

 

Interested in opinions about removing the Physics card from M1730 equiped with 8800, what if any is the impact guys, should everyone just remove it

 

Hi there,


Is there going to be any real performance difference between T7700 2.4GHz and T9300 2.5Ghz? What about temperature differences? I hear T7700 can run very hot. I'm looking at two M1730 models. The only difference between the two is the processor. The T9300 one is around $165 more than the T7700 one. Both have 8700M GT SLI.

Thank you

 

The Aegia PhysX card is pretty much useless. It's not even supported by the latest nVidia drivers because nVidia has added features to the PhysX API that the Aegia card in the M1730 is not capable of accelerating.

If the system runs without the card then there should be no downside to removing it.

The good news is that the latest nVidia drivers can move PhysX acceleration to the 8xxx/9xxx series GPU(s) in the M1730.

 

I've been using it up until a few months ago and I was actually getting better performance in some games that support PhysX. However, I started experiencing some problems with 19x.xx drivers. Pinned it down to PhysX card, disabled it, and problems are gone. So, yeah, there is no point in this card any more.

I doubt it that you would notice much of a difference performance-wise between these two CPUs. T7700 is manufacture using 65nm tech process, while T9300 is manufactured using 45nm tech process. So, yeah, T9300 will run cooler. But I have not heard of anyone having heat issues with T7700. Oh, and T9300's architecture has had some minor tweaks. Nothing too serious, but should give some boost in performance when encoding/decoding videos or music. Not sure if it is worth extra $165 though.

 

tweaking hey...does this look familiar an back of it
hmmm.....wish there was a cas 3 HyperX to tweak more

about physx card remember on phone AUS dell saying its old technology, that was over a year ago so must be ancient now

 

I dunno... I've had my 1730M with 8800GTXs for over two years now and have had no troubles at all. My GPU temps are fine and the thing has never frozen even once. I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit with no problems either. All games run smoothly with the latest Nvidia drivers and have stuttering problems only with the awful Dell drivers.

For the past four months or so I've had the back of the case propped up a mere 2 cm, but it was having no problems laying flat.

I did strip my 1730 about six months ago to clean out the GPUs. It was definitely a worthwhile task as I removed about four dust balls that were too large to be blown out with an air can. My GPU temps dropped 4 degrees with a good scrubbing.

 

I tested this with and without the Ageia PhysX card one year ago. I ran Vista x64 with the 185.85 driver. There was no performance gain anymore, cause the nVidia drivers where optimized to run PhysX by the 8xxx/9xxx cards.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...30-owners-lounge-take-2-a-76.html#post5004908
Lol, I already had removed the PhysX card at that time and had to put it back in to perform this test for Kade Storm.

Let me put it this way; The Ageia card is nothing more than ballast now. It consumes power and still produces heat. We don't need extra heat inside, don't we?
If you want a sports-car you try to keep it as light as possible.

 

Lol, nice retail packaging you got there.
I can't remember I've seen one. I think I got mine in a nice finger-cutting blister packaging.

 

I removed it last night, as you say Physics is now handled direct from the Nvidia cards so it is effectivly reduntant and producing unwanted heat and consuming power when not required.

 

Yeah, I even spected some shuttering with it, nevermore, also cpu temps got lowered. Probably some power conpsumtion reduced, I would like to know how much...and what is most important better performance. Just one thing against the m1730; you have to almost full dissassembly for anything you want to do (I miss my c90s wich I had full access from the backdoor...sight)
cheers!!

 

my 8800m GTX works really well too after over 2 years. Now I have even overvolted them to 1.05 Voltage and runs them at 680 Core, 1650 Shaders and 980 Memory

 

That's cool. How much of a performance boost did you see with these clocks? Also, what software did you use to overvolt GPUs?

 

I think you could overvolt trought vBIOS. Nibitor should do the job, I don't think you could do by software, not even nVidiaTools show my voltage profiles. Do you??

 

I don't think i have the guts to do a thing like that, it voids your warranty you know ..

 

Nibitor does the work, for overclocking I am using Ntune. Yeah it voids warranty but how would they recognize that? It isn´t exactly that they would know the GPU´s runs at 1.05v instead of 1.0v.

 

They would probably read te vBIOS...anyway +0.05v under safe temps, and with enougth power supply it would be safe.

 

Thanks for the info. Don't think I'll be overvolting GPUs any time soon. Pretty happy with the performance as it is.

 

What ever you do don't get a rig with 8700GT SLI! these are massively underpowered video cards. Get 8800 series or higher.

 

Well abaut voltages, I tried to push extra profile voltage to 1,1v but I could not get performance at all, in fact I can't be sure if these voltages are applied since I can't monitor by OS. I know some people did overvolt and could clock his 8800m SLI much more, but my experience is to keep 620/930/1550 wich are 100% stable, and enought performed aswell.
My recommendation, there's no point to mesh with the vBIOS.
Cheers

 

Yeah they're probably junk these days, but a couple years ago when I got them in my M1730 they were fine. They ran Fallout 3 decently.

The better chips (8800 and a 9xxx option I think) were a huge price increase over the 8700M at the time, so I couldn't justify them.

 

How much should I expect to pay for a M1730 with 9800M GTX SLI and a T8xxx series processor?


Thank you

 

Yes mine overclocks stable to 680 core with +0.05v. However 625/1550/950 on 1v is enough.

 

For now overvolting is for me a bridge to far. I don't want to take the risk killing my GPU's.
I run @ 640/1600/950 stable without overvolting. This is my max I can reach without issues. I'm not complaining.

 

Yes only problem is that without overvolting there is artifacting when you stress test the GPU´s in ATI tool, it detects those deltas what I don´t want. Deltas you don´t see in real gaming but it´s bad for the GPU´s to have deltas when you overclock.

 

Going to be taking the beast apart tomorrow for an overdue dust clean out before the summer heat really starts to put it under pressure.

Plan is to follow ifti's / dell blog's youtube video how to access the GPU's and instead of upgrading the gpu, I'll just clear all the dust away from it.

Any major things I should be aware of? (BTW not using canned compressed air, might just use a hair dryer or something)

 

With all the people here seeking out Dell service because of baked GPUs, I'd never over-volt mine.