GTX 980m horrible performance

With the help of the people on this forum I've been able to upgrade by MSI GT70-2OC from its GTX 770m to GTX 980m. All it required was updating the BIOS and a simple heatsink mod. It was working great, but it was running hot so I re-pasted the card with better thermal compound. Now, I'm getting horrible performance, worse than my old 770m! In the Witcher 3, for example, I was getting 50+ fps on the recommended settings I am now getting less than 20fps.

I have tried everything I could think of and looked all over online. I have updated vBIOS, reinstalled the graphics driver, restarted windows a billion times, swapped back to the 770m and then back to the 980m. I have looked at the card very closely and I don't see any physical damage.

MSI Afterburner shows that the card is running at 1124 MHz and is at 100% utilization. What could possibly be wrong?

 

What are the temps after you repasted with better compound? The easy solution would be it's a bad paste job and its throttling like crazy.

 

The temps are staying under 60c. I've actually narrowed it down to a problem with the AC adapter. In furmark I can see it run 60+ fps for a few seconds, then the AC adapter cuts out entirely and it does the rest of the test on battery. The only way to get the ac adapter to work again is to unplug it from the wall and plug it in again. I believe other people have done this upgrade and used the normal 180w power supply, but maybe not.

 

It could be that your power adapter is a bit weak? Do you have a 2nd one that you could try? If not it may be a good time to get a spare one.

Or it could be some sort of BIOS or EC power usage limitation, however I would have thought that would have come up in the upgrade research you did.

 

According to notebookcheck the 770M is rated at 50-55W and the 980M at 100W. It's very unlikely that the original PSU was over-rated by at least 50W so, as you have seen, the PSU is being overloaded and cutting out to protect itself and the computer is running on battery. It then throttles to avoid very high battery drain rates which wouldn't do the battery any good. Some notebooks are designed to share the power drain between PSU and battery but, to do that, it needs to know the PSU power rating (on Dell notebooks this info is carried by a small pin in the centre of the plug).

Look around for a PSU rated about 50W more than the original one.

John

 

You need a new PSU.. A 230W one should be good enough.. Have a look around for the GT70 780M model PSU.. That should be rated for a 100W GPU power so should work with the 980M system you now have!

Sent from my LG-H850 using Tapatalk

 

Haven't all MSI Gt70 models this smaller power connector on MB? I'm almost 100% sure. If I remember correctly was this model delivered with max 180w psu and 100w graphics(780-880m). You couldn't use the 230w psu who was delivered with Gt72 due the bigger connection in the end of the psu cable. And the Gt70 models was crippled with this crazy crap BATTERY BOOST who DELLIENWARE tough was so nice!! So Mr. Azor and Dellienware used it for the first AWBOOK "Echo" models.

 

can use 230w I think

battery boost don't work if the psu is outputting enough power to sustain the system, so 230w is enough for stock performance


I believe some users on msi forum found a way to splice a 330w into the gt70, op should head there

 

Yeah, I know you can do this. But I don't know if you need a mod firmware to bypass the hybrid functionality. Remember the crazy Battery boost feature in older Msi have strange behavior. The 180w psu will never give more powa than rated when the battery is fully. When the battery is almost empty after use of hybrid functionality will the flimsy 180w psu start to deliver more powa like +-200w.

 

Have the exact issue above been proven?

 

I saw it in a review. I don't remember maybe Tomshardware or Anandtech. This was with the Hotwell Extreme and 780m I think. The 180w psu pushed +200w when the battery was downing too around 30%. A crazy feature And Mr. Azor wanted same feature for their first AWBOOK's. All know how this went I think I have posted about this crazy topic in the forum before. Pict and link's.

 

Then just remove the battery cable

 

What if firmware has a powercap with a maximum power draw without battery. I do not know. But there are several ways to cripple a product

 

As far as I remember, GT70/GT60 all used 180W adapters and never took larger, and are designed to pull from battery. It's possible a Svet mod could fix this and use a 230W adapter like the ones on the P6xxRS/P6xxHS models without pulling from the battery, but it won't function so amazingly out of the box.

However, something I haven't seen asked... have you reinstalled your drivers OP?

 

Also, they may have gone without mentioning, but have you checked your power settings?