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

can anyone help me with some info about the pinlock mod or what is it called. i would like to unlock the fsb to overclock the cpu. i have a C2D T9500 and i run it @2,8GHZ with TS with 1,075v (i was too lasy to try lower voltage).the temps are 50-55 in-game,so i think a 3,2 - 3,4 ghz would not be a problem. i would like to try 14 x 233mhz or even 14 x 266mhz if the cpu and the memory are capable because the cpu really bottlenecks the new games

 

Hope things work out for ya, but this is the first time I've seen Dell freezing warranty with w/o a reason (atleast according to you).

When I have any problems after contacting phone support, and didn't reach a resolution, I just escalate issue via unresolved issues, and they have served me well.

Have you tried unresolved issues?

 

Yes its the LCD display wearing out.

 

Arrgh...my 9800GTX's have failed (2nd time) Just about to call Dell tech support (well in 1 hour) I wonder if they have any replacements for my GPU's

 

Thanks Magnus, much appreciate your efforts mate

 

No problem, are you based in the US? If so have you looked into the Nvidia Lawsuit to see if you are covered by this??

 

Guys, sorry to interrupt you all, but finally i did it.

Since i started worrying of my 8800m gtx being dead in the near future, i took the risk and tried to convert it to a 9800m gt to take advantage of the newer dell bios that fixes most of the problems and hopefully makes the card last longer.

In other words: A11 bios + Converted 8800mGTX into a 9800m GT SLI+Newer bios= TOTAL WIN.

Ive written a step to step guide, its easy and takes a couple of minutes here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...800m-gt-sli-bios-succesfully.html#post6904539

Hope it helps someone: i got finally a 9800m GTX sli now for about 400£ and ive left the 9800m GT aside...but i kept it running for two months at 640/1600/950 with no problems.

 

You should be able to get the same functionality without messing with the vbios through some inf modding.

 

Hi All,

I have had my XPS M1730 for just over 2 years, and thankfully took out another 2 years warranty a few months ago.
A couple of weeks ago my motherboard blew up, and they came out and fitted a replacement for me. Unfortunately when I got home, the CD drive was no longer working, so I called Dell and asked them to come and collect the computer and take it away and fix it (I have next day at home warranty but cant take anymore time off of work).

I was just wondering what they are likely to do to the laptop as they said on the phone that they would thoroughly check it, and deliver it back to me in a working order. (I have recently installed Windows 7 on it, so I guess they will reinstall Vista which was the orginal operating system that it came with).

I have my fingers crossed that they may just replace the machine, what do you think are the chances of this?

Thanks

 

If you have enough parts fail/replaced then you can lean on them and probably get a new machine.

 

Unfortunately, yes. I think during this process twice. After initial resistance and repeated failure of callbacks I used unresolved issues and within a week they issued me a replacement laptop which was then cancelled.

Trust me, I am abbreviating the history of this entire issue. If I wrote everything down I'm sure that most people would be in complete shock. The amount of time I have spent, the notations I've taken, the size of the letters I've written to both the attornery general and Dell are rather large and very well documented.

I realize that this isn't the proper place for it and I'm fairly certain it's against the rules to do so.

As for the issue with freezing my account, it makes no sense. After reviewing my account and talking calmly to person X they kept changing their story over and over. I would back them into a corner using reason, logic and fact and then they would change again. After awhile it became apparent that they were using this as an excuse to deny warranty service.

No one should have to spend hundreds of hours trying to pursue a warranty claim, ever. That is terrible customer service!

As a side note, I've dealt with Dell as an intermediatary for many other clients as a tech. Let's just say they have a pattern of this "send to depot" regardless whether it is A: under the contract B: warranted in the particular situation.

In some cases I understand the need for using depot services and others I am completely against this as it is a tactic for defrauding a customer the service they paid for and saving dell money.

 

kingpinzero though it´s a 9800m GT you have flashed to and not a 9800m GTX, the 9800m GTX has 112 shaders as opposed to the 96 of the 8800m GTX and 9800m GT.

I don´t suppose you have unlocked the extra 32 shader pipelines or have you? If you have I would be amazed

 

Are there physically 32 more shaders?

Deadline for fixing my beast is now the 12th of december...

 

No no maybe you guys got it wrong. Ive flashed my 8800m gtx as a 9800m gt and upgraded the bios from dell.

Ive just did this to show that is possible to extend the life of our older cards.

Then a week ago i got my 9800m gtx (k650,last revision) which is currently installed and running in my beast.

Ive put away my 8800m gtx converted to 9800m gt as i own that sli beast of 9800m gtx.

Ive just thought that it would be good to inform you guys of the succesful conversion with a guide and the necessary things, thats all.
Since a deep search on google shown that no one attempted and reported the succesful conversion,here i am i guess its an NBR exclusive?

I highly suggest to flash it,its amazing how well it performs now

So to recap, read my sig,i own a real 9800m gtx in sli right now..while keeping my 9800m gt for future proof hope it clears the doubts

Btw the additional 32 cores on 9800's are laser cutted on the board so physically is impossible to enable them.

 

Aha, didn´t know you got a 9800m GTX K650 GPU Nice nice, did you buy it from Ebay?

 

Yeah Seller asked me 490GBP, which is roughly 500 euros.
I thought it was a good deal, since ive sold a few things and i had money availability i took the plunge and bought it.

Sent from UK, it shipped in 6 days. At first install the second fan wasnt working, but i guess it was due to me manouvering the card, someway i disconnected the second fan pin a bit.

In the meanwhile ive used my 9800m GT (lol, it was an 8800m GTX righte? ) fans and kept it going for a few days, then a few days ago i took apart it again and switched back to the original fans.

Well everything works perfectly

Since i had plenty of time while waiting for the GTX to ship, i did all the tests into converting the 8800 gtx to a 9800 and tricking dell to actually think i had the 9800 to start with, the dell gpu bios upgrade that fixes the yellow tinting/card dyeing worked like a charm.

Amazing what a bios flash can do, god bless nvflash

 

Yes I have flashed my GPU´s several times, though I am a little uncertain when it comes to flashing to another GPU. However the GPU is the same it´s only the vbios that differs.

You can flash with nvflash -5-6 -i0 bios.rom, if you put the -6 in there you don´t have to answer the numerous questions that occurs.

Well I am very eager to try the bios flash, thinking if I should do it or not

 

Oh well i was thinking to myself "do it, or do not".

Then, a day of heavy rain and generally one of the worst days of the week, i was super pissed off that ive tried it without even thinking of it.

Fired up nvflash, flashed the first card...OK
Rebooted, fired up nvflash, flashed the second card...OK

Windows 7 loaded, GPU both installed, Drivers installed, overclocked it and furmark'ed it. I was amazed that everything went so smoothly.

Then ive just downloaded the iso from dell website with last bios updated, burned,rebooted,flashed it automatically, back to windows. You know the rest

Give it a try, maybe flash the second card first, then do the first one. Dont forget to backup your bios with GPU-Z

PS: i didnt used the -6 switch because i was thinking that the best way was to read every step that nvflash made, in case something screwed up in the prrocess. When i attemp to do something...i dont like to do it automatically, manually its better. I mean, full control is less incline to errors.

 

I tried thought the -6 switch doesn´t automate it. However I was a little too scared to do it when I got a warning.

 

Just do it the manual way using only the -5 switch, which overwrites the subsys id.

 

Yes however I get the none of the PCI devices match the other or something like that

 

I hate the x7900 CPU grrr once it sits at 80C while gaming i get BSOD. going to buy x9000 CPU hopefully i can get a better 3dMARK06 score currently 12887

 

Yeah, X7900 is a bit of a pain. I just cant get mine to stabalise at 3.2Ghz or above. Tried talking to Dell about it, but they say that if CPU works fine with stock speeds (which it does), then it is not covered by warranty. I'm just sticking to the 3.0Ghz now, which is good enough for me. Little noise, and I have yet to come across a game that would be bottlenecked by this CPU. If you still got warranty left, try calling Dell. May be you'll have better luck than me.

 

Mine is super stable at 3.4ghz normally but when playing Blackops it crashes(BSOD) after about an 1 hour and always after nearly finishing a level. Might redo the heatsink and see if i can get temps below 80c

 

If you send the machine to the depot, it will often come back with a clean installation. The technicians don't want to spend time dinking around with software and driver issues.

Send it in without any hard drives, or create partition images to restore your system when it comes back to you. Macrium Reflect does a nice job of this and it's free. I would recommend using an external drive for this, but you can use multiple DVDs (or BDs as you have the BD-R drive).

If you did not image your Vista installation before upgrading to Win7, you could create a factory install image when the machine comes back with your drives in original condition before restoring your drive image.

 

I lost my trust on depot service when my M90 had liquid damage, sent it in, and all they did was changed the keyboard. When it came back, wifi/bluetooth didn't work out of the box, and was over heating. They asked me to send it in again, and I said no, and they pretty much brought every part to replace at my place.

 

Hey guys, just wondering what fan speed readings you get on your XPS M1730 when the fans are running at full (via the BIOS set to overclock at 3.2GHz or higher so fan speeds are forced to full)?

HW Monitor was saying 4000+rpm until I cleaned the laptop (it was REALLY dusty) and now it's saying 3800rpm for all 3. . Did I just break my fans? The temps are normal though.

Also, those of you with 8800M GTX SLI cards... what nVidia driver version are you using which is stable? I stopped updating drivers around the time nVidia released those drivers which fried video cards!

 

I use 197.15 in both XP and Vista.

 

Thanks!

Btw, do you have any kind of hardware monitoring program (like CPUID Hardware Monitor) installed? If so, what are your fan speeds at?

 

I use the latest drivers from nvidia as they are best for New Vegas which I am currently hooked on. I have used a few older drivers but some games will not like them. For example bad company 2 REALLY doesn't like old drivers....had graphical errors and glitches in that game using older ones.

Cheers

 

On a side note, whatever driver you use you will get much better performance in many games by setting up the SLI profiles yourself either using Nhancer(pre 200+ series drivers) or using Nvidiainspector (all drivers)

A quick google search will bring you up to speed on those also in the graphics options,

I set anistropic filtering to 2X

I turn OFF antialiasing (at 1920x1200 it shudnt be noticeable)

I force off V-Sync and turn off triple buffering

Turn on "High Performance"

Turn on all the other "optimization settings"

Set pre rendered frames to 6 (I know seems high does it, try it)

Overclock to 600/1500/900 (I want my cards to last)

Set CPU overclock to 3.0ghz and volt it really low 1.5 gets me no greater temps than 60c

Make sure you turn Powermizer OFF and also in graphics options you set it to Single display performance mode.

Hope this helps.

 

hey all sorry to bother you with more questions but im stuck. you all had some good advice last time so here we go again lol. I just bought new speakers and installed them into my xps but i dident install a audio card yet. My questions are - Do i need a audio card just to hear my onboard speakers ? Will ( Creative ExpressCard X-Fi Xtreme Audio Notebook Laptop - eBay (item 330466277048 end time Nov-27-10 00:20:00 PST) )fit inside my laptop somewhere ? My motherboard is a dell MXGO71 (according to everest home edition) what is the best cpu i can install in it ( perfer overclockable but not required ) ? I was told i dident need a audio card just to here my speakers and ill never use headphones or mic. my new speakers do lite up im just worried that there broke or i did something wrong. Thanks again for all the help so far!

 

Yep, I have custom SLI profiles for different games.

Which drivers have been the best for StarCraft II? You'd think a system which can run Crysis at good framerates (at around Medium or High settings, forgot which) would have no problem with SC2 but my fps was lagging in some areas on some maps. I lowered everything down from Ultra to Medium/High and it's smooth now.

I set pre-rendered frames to 3 for single player games and 0 or 1 for multiplayer games. The higher it is, the more input lag you have, but the smoother the framerate.

 

Hey mrmarkwalker, sorry to bother you but do you have a hardware monitoring app installed? If so, what does it say your fan speeds are at? I wanted to know what fan speed is at "full" (when you overclock via BIOS)

 

Hey mate, no I don't but I will stick one on and let you know. But yeah, at 3.0 ghz and 1.5 voltage I don't exceed a CPU temp of 66...

 

Bios A10 set on 3.2 or 3.4 >>>> Gpu fans(J951N) = around 3440rpm
Cpu Fan = around 3700rpm
used software diagnostics tool in Dells Drivers an Utilities disc or HWmonitor

mrmarkwalker ya mean 1.15v not 1.5

 

That's the one

 

raad11 I will see if I can download a hardware monitorin program to see the fan speeds. Will get back to you soon.

 

Got my laptop back today, and of course, I`ve been screwed over. Man I`m pissed.
They gave me 2 8700M GTs, instead of the 8800M GTX SLI.
They said they're going to call back tomorrow and offer me another sollution...

Unbelievable, I won`t settle for anything less than an equivalent 8800M GTX.

Also, it appears that they flashed to the A11 bios, the cpus stayed under 30C at idle, and HWMonitor now reads fan speeds all around.

Not too noisy, from what I`ve expected, nice and cool though

 

Ha, that truly awful. Why oh why do they think they can get away with that!!!

 

This is awful. Maybe 8700M GT is all they got? It would be great for you, as you might end up with an replacement.

 

And this is why I'll never trust depot-option.

Well, Eleron, you make 'em fix this issue. Also, on a positive note, it is good to read about your experience of the new bios. I myself had a feeling that it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but then again, look at my signature. I'm a noise-extremist.

 

Does anyone know if the A09 bios supports the 9800m GT. Or is that only in the A10 bios that also supports the 9800m GTX?

 

Well, it will sound louder than the A10, I`ll give you that. And there is a certain rinse repeat at first, before it stabilises. While doing nothing it can get annoying in a quiet room, sure.
But when gaming, you will only notice the cooler temps overal, which is fantastic.

About the replacement, one can only hope. I won`t stick with 8700M GTs, they`re terrible in comparison.

 

Hey Magnus, what was the OCing tool again?

ntune 6 ?

 

Yes Ntune 6 is the one I use. Damn that they gave you 8700m GT SLI. Talk about a huge downgrade. I assume you will get the 9800m GTX SLI instead?

 

Nothing below 8800M GTXs, that`s for sure, I don`t care how they do it. I paid for this performance, I won`t settle for anything less.

 

i got 9800GTX SLI to replace my faulty 8700gt SLI that have died twice. in between they did try and send a single 8700gt so i assume that's why i got 9800gtx SLI. So make sure you get a 9800GTX SLI to replace.

Hikoo did you get your beast working? 9800 card alive still? i got a Vantage score of P11369 is that ok? will upload to HWBOT

 

Magnus, only A10 supports 9800m GTX. I messed around with the BIOS files at first and had to go A10 to run the 9800m GTX when I was running the beast. So I gather that you're gonna' finally get yourself a set as well?

 

Yes however the 9800m GT does that also require the A10 bios? I am very eager to flash my 8800m GTX to the 9800m GT bios instead.