XPS M1730 and SLI problems

Tried earlier today - but could not. I have "SLI" enabled.

 

Has anyone tried contacting Nvidia to see if they have a solution? The problem is not limited to Vista only, as I am running mine with XP. This is ridiculous, to say the least.

 

We got an okay gaming machine - but not anything like a monster and BEAST as promised.

 

Contact Nvidia .. hahahhaaahaaaa! Sure ....

 

Hi this is what I got when trying to register.

 

You're not the only one I think it's because NVIDIA Certified SLI hardware on desktops only works with an NVIDIA chipset, Dell has used an Intel chipset in the 1730 and the graphics cards are designed to run in SLI without an NVIDIA chipset, although it is still SLI, the program probably checks for two graphics cards, SLI enabled and an NVIDIA chipset, which we don't have. When really the program only needs to check for two SLI enabled gpus

 

Thanks, wogstaa. It makes perfect sense. Perhaps we should let nVidia know? They might still be in the dark.

 

Has anyone run benchmarks with SLI disabled/enabled on this thing to see if there's any noticeable difference between the two?

I'll try running the benchmarks on Company of Heroes later and will post the results.

 

This is the M1730, running XP, with the latest Dell video drivers.

Company of Heroes benchmarks with SLI enabled:

Average frame rate: 33.9 fps
Max frame rate: 59.7 fps
Min frame rate: 5.8 fps

Company of Heroes benchmarks with SLI disabled:

Average frame rate: 20.6 fps
Max frame rate: 49.8 fps
Min frame rate: 7.5 fps

These results are pretty anemic for a system sold as the "Beast", but, at least enabling SLI seems to be doing something.

Can others also post their results so we can determine once and for all whether we were sold a bill of goods.

 

Try to run the Windows Solitaire game in SLI mode.

Does your Vista crash also?

 

I'm running XP. Are you kidding about the solitaire crash?

 

No joke ... Start Solitaire .... and !!!!!!!!!!! freeze/crash in vista when SLI is running

 

Solitaire works fine in SLI, some of the other games dont

 

Hi again! I'm the guy from Sweden who wrote before. I just got confirmed from Dell’s Legal Department and Costumer Care that I’m getting my money back. They are picking my XPS M1730 up next week.

I think I will wait until next year when they are releasing the XPS 1730 with dual 512 Mb instead, and when the SLI-Technology is working.

Good luck guys with your SLI-issues.

/Daniel

My XPS M1730:
Intel Core 2 Extreme X7900 2.8GHz
4 Gb RAM
200 Gb 7200 rpm
Dual Nvidia GeForce Go 8700M GT with SLI Technology
Ageia PhysX

 

Hello,

I just received my XPS 1730 yesterday and after running a few games on the pre-installed dell video drivers decided to take the alternate route of installing the drivers from laptop2go.

I first tried the 169.04 drivers (I'm running Windows XP) and noticed a huge improvement in games right away. Though Hellgate London was running less than reasonable and GRAW2 was less than impressive as well. After much digging and reading, i decided to go with 167.26 which I currently have installed.

In Hellgate London I'm now running at 1920 x 1200 with everything maxed out except for AA which is set to medium and I'm sitting at about 50 - 60 fps with SLI working perfectly. I have the SLI indicator enabled in the nVidia control panel to give me an idea of how and if it's working for my games.

I also run GRAW2 at 1920 x 1200 with textures, effects and dynamic shadows at medium and AA is off completely and I'm getting around 35 - 40 fps. SLI seems to also work fine in this game with the indicator showing both cards working.

I've found that for most of the stuff I play I need to go into the nVidia control panel and set the preferences for each game separately especially for how they handle the SLI cards.

I think lowering the resolution a little bit will help GRAW2 a lot. I also tried World of Warcraft which I have set to 'force split rendering' and get over 130 fps in Stormwind City with everything set to Max and 1920 x 1200 resolution.

I don't know if i'm just lucky with my games and settings but currently every game I've tried uses the SLI configuration and they all play very well.

My XPS M1730:
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz
2 Gb RAM
120 Gb 7200 rpm
Dual Nvidia GeForce Go 8700M GT with SLI Technology
Ageia PhysX

 

Great so.. question is : Is there someone who got a m1730 that works properly on SLI ?

I was going to order mine but now that I rode all the posts, its kinda freaking me out. Paying almost 4000 for a laptop with those bugs?

Pls keep us informed of further devellopements, and : Is there someone who love his m1730 or not ?

 

For me SLi its working fine... I mean It might be the case that has to do with XP...

 

Never had any issue with SLI. No freezes either. I have had some Vista issues but they are non hardware related so there is no point raising them and they were minor anyway. I get about 50-80% performance increase when SLI is enabled. Sure it won't run crysis on 1920x1200 on high without it being a slideshow but on medium at 1280x800 it runs great @ 45fps.

This is a great machine that performs well, as long as you don't expect it to compete with a Quad processor desktop with 2 8800GTs in SLI etc, etc.

I think the biggest issue with this machine might be the Physx card, IMO don't get it as it has been reported by some users to crash the system when the battery is in operation, but if you don't use the battery then there is no issue.

 

I contacted dell to advise them of my problems with like the loose power adapter and screen bleed and poor performance and during our conversation it was going nice and smooth until I mentioned the word return. Thats when the person got an attitude and stated I would have to accept their repair solutions and returning would not be an option unless I wanted to pay 15% restock fee on a 4k computer ($580.00) atleast.. The reason I mentioned return was because he stated he would send a tech out to replace the motherboard because the connection was loose at the power supply connector and I didnt feel comfortable with that on a brand new 5 day old machine that cost a fortune.

 

The should still be able to refund you if you've only had it for 5 days. What country are you in? They have different policies for returns in each country.

 

This is good news. Would you mind detailing exactly where you obtained the 167.26 drivers, and how you installed them? I've heard that installing non-Dell drivers makes the camera and some other things not work properly.

 

Driver support trully blows. Finally got the SLI to work okay in benchmarks, but now I can't watch BR movies since I'm using laptopvideo2go drivers.

This is retarded.

 

many different drivers ppl here have tested, anyone who has tested the most popular ones and can say which are best for games (for us who do not have a BR drive)? If any drivers can give a boost to SLI that would definately be a good thing, can't imagine we have to live with the second GPU in here just blowing dust of itself..

 

I am also having issues when I enable SLI - Vista randomly crashes, and games under-perform.

I have set the 'Manage 3D' settings in Nvidia Control panel (for the SLI option) to force frame rendering 2. I may try the 'single GPU' option when I get home and see if that makes any difference. At the moment I am having to disable SLI, which isnt ideal since that was one of the main selling points of the M1730...

 

Try 167.51 from Nvidia. It works as it should for games I tried - COH, and STALKER. BR also works.

 

I just got my m1730 with these specs:

DUAL SLI 512MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800GTX card
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T9300 (2.50 GHz, 800 MHz FSB, 6 MB L2 cache)
2048 MB 667 MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2 x 1024]
320 GB (7200 rpm) SATA RAID 0 Striping (2 x 160 GB)

I haven't had to much time testing games with SLI, but my first impression is that games run with a much higher FPS with it disabled... I have downloaded the latest drivers by dell, and also tried some vista hotfixes recommended by nvidia. But only number 1) on this page worked:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/windows_vista_hotfixes.html

I really hope this works out.. I'm starting to think that i should return it, i paid alot for this computer.

 

Have you tried Nvidia's newest Beta driver for notebooks? It's like 169.x something, I think.

 

You just have to go with 3rd party drivers.

3dmarks crashes if I use stock drivers in my case, so I just started using 17x series from laptopvideo2go.

 

I'm using the 174.31 drivers and they work like a dream. :wink:

 

Where did you get them from? Laptopvideo2go? Any heat issues from them?

 

Yes, go them from lv2go. No issues so far and I have had a small performance boost. My 3dMark06 is with no OCing.

 

My system is relatively new, I've only played maybe 40-50hrs but I've had zero issues with sli.

Yes, performance isn't always much better, but that's the fault of the game designer and nvidia, not the laptop manufacturer.

There's a lot of poorly coded games out there. Take crysis for example. People with stronger cpu's are achieving much higher framerates then those with weak cpu's. The whole purpose of GPU's is to process games. If you have a game that's bottenecked by the CPU or dependent heavily on it for performance, then it's a poor game.

The 2 games I'm playing right now are vanguard and COD4. The gfx in cod4 are far superior to Vanguard (totally different games, but bare with me). My COD4 fps is 90-120 with everything maxed. My Vanguard fps is 20-50 with mid to high settings.

Visually COD4 is superior. Vanguard is poorly coded and buggy as hell and this is the result of crappy programming.

Why does an inferior looking game take up more resources (or achievve lower fps) then a

 

Well, i have tried some drivers for my xpsm1730 8800GTX SLI laptop. But i can't install them because of some error saying i don't have the right hardware to do so.. Please help me, this laptop was way to expensive. And when i finally get it, it doesnt work properly..

Edit: It it helps, i can try to install XP instead of Vista? Maybe my driver problem will solve itself with xp, but i would rather use Vista if possible

 

XP's not going to help for this at all. It would be the same situation with it. You've got basically three options.

I'd recommend using Dell's rapid release drivers, or Nvidia's Beta drivers for notebooks, whichever is newer (I'm sure somone on here has posted links, or look through the driver sections on those websites). This is one of the few notebooks that actually gets some support past the initial drivers, so I'd just use them.

In the future, if those aren't available, you can resort to laptopvideo2go, or you can force Nvidia's desktop reference drivers to install (I've got instructions for that up on Dell's forums). But you shouldn't need to do either, at least not right now, as Dell and Nvidia are providing more or less up to date drivers for it.

There MAY be heat issues with forcing the reference drivers to install, but I'm not really clear on that, or why (I've done it on a Macbook Pro with Windows, and the fan seemed to ramp up correctly and it still even identified it as a mobile GPU when running the Desktop reference drivers).

 

I usually stick with Dell drivers TBH - they seem to be the most stable. Just waiting for Nvidia to release some new drivers and I'll change to them.

It seems the 8700 has more SLI issues then the 8800. With the 8700 I used to get ramdon crashes all the time. With the 8800's, the driver seems to have been improved a little, and the only time I everget a crash is when using Movie Maker. When I use that I have to turn SLI off. Otherwise its always on and runs fine.

 

Oh crud, I hope I don't run into stability issues I'm still not sure that I shouldn't cancel this, just because of the price.

I'll be really upset if I end up not being able to get function drivers for it at any point. I guess SLI just has issues though, and, and maybe even with a desktop and reference drivers you'd have to shut it off sometimes?

It's not a big deal to turn SLI on and off though is it? You don't need to reboot or anything...so I guess I could just switch it on before starting a game...

I would have just bought one 8800GTX if it were offered.

 

I get this all the time on source files that aren't MP4! I'll try to turn SLI off the next time I publish a movie and see how I go.

 

Thanks for the help. Now i got another question, i have read that xp has small fps advantages over vista on almost all games. And i really don't like vista to much, so if i install xp from scratch, can i install drivers directly from nvidias page or will i be forced to install dell drivers as i am now? And how am i supposed to install laptop2go drivers? Please explain, as i am not to good with this!

 

You have to download modified inf file, and replace it.

The site has directions on it, so read up on it.

 

I tried to download the driver, and replaced the inf. But still does not work.. The thing is that 8800GTX is not listed among the laptop gpu's it supposed to work with..

 

I ordered my laptop a few days ago, I was just wanting to get an opinion....should I cancel it or not? Is it worth it???
Here are my specs:

Intel® Core 2 Duo Processor T7700 (2MB Cache/2.4GHz/800MHz FSB)
Bone White
2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz
17 inch UltraSharp TrueLife Wide-screen WUXGA
NVIDIA®SLI蒂Dual GeForce®8700MGT with 512MB GDDR3 Memory(the 8800 isnt available for where I live)
Speed: 200GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) Free Fall Sensor
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Edition - English
Ageia PhysX Accelerator

Thanks in advanced

 

I would cancel it. Then reorder when the 8800m GTX cards are available.

 

I would wait for 8800. It's trully night and day difference in terms of power.

 

The 8800GTX has been available for quite some time now. But yeah, the XPS 1730 doesn't really make sense unless you order it with the 8800GTX cards. Spending that much money on a glorified 8600 doesn't make sense.

 

The 8800GTX isnt coming out for where I live. I live in Puerto Rico, and I just figured that I would order the part separately or w/e, and install it myself, perhaps after a couple weeks.

 

Darn, that's too bad They probably charge more as a separate part. (I'm kind of surprised Dell has a separate store for Puerto Rico!)

Oh well, from what I've seen even the 8600GT plays today's games, at least when paired with a nice Core 2

 

Well, I go to university in Boston, so when I go back there, later this year, I'll probably buy one. Does Dell sell the gfx cards separately?

 

Sort of. I'm not sure if they're selling it as a separate part yet, but it'll probably be available through spare parts. It looks like it's more than what I'd want to do, in terms of swapping the video card assembly, but it is possible.

 

Yeah, it's not that hard. Done it before on an older model, just unscrew the LCD, disconnect it all, and replace the card. But I just need to find a way to buy the card itself. I saw a couple vids on youtube of people, but none of them revealed the secrets of where they got the card

 

Could someone give me a link to a driver that works for 8800gtx? I've tried one at laptop2go, but i can't find any completely new ones that work for my system.. (vista 32bit 8800gtx sli)

I'm so sick of trying. So help is really appreciated!