XPS M1730 9800M GT Sli Issue

Hello everyone

This is my first post so I am not sure if it is in the correct location. I apologise in advance if it isn't.

I just bought a Dell XPS M1730 second hand from eBay and have been having problems with it. I have tried lots of different drivers for the graphics cards. A lot of these do not allow me to boot into windows (crashes at initial windows logo). The drivers that do boot into windows then fail when I enable SLI (The screen goes white and restarts at the initial windows logo). I then have to use system restore.

I have trawled the web for the last few days and have not been able to find a solution. I have tried Windows 7 Ultimate 32 and 64 bit. I have updated the motherboard bios and graphics card bios to the latest, as per the dell website.

I am currently running official 195.62, with SLI disabled. I have used various other drivers from 179.xx to 267.xx including the Vista 64 driver from the dell website.

Something I find strange is when I run GPU-Z, there are discrepancies between the 2 GPUs. I will attach the images, but in case they require time for moderator approval, the discrepancies are as follows:

Card 1 Revision: A2
Card 2 Revision: FF

Card 1 Bios: 62.92.2c.02.06
Card 2 Bios: Unknown (when I updated the card bios, the flash utility said it was updating to 62.92.2c.02.07)

Card 1 Bus interface: PCI-E x16@x16
Card 2 Bus interface: PCI-E 2.0 x16@16

Card 1 Shaders: 96
Card 2 Shaders: 256

Card 1 Texture Fillrate: 24.0 G Texels/s
Card 2 Texture Fillrate: 64.0 G Texels/s

Card 1 Memory: GDDR3
Card 2 Memory: GDDR4

I have contacted the seller for a return, but if it is something I can fix, I would rather keep this laptop as I got it at a good price.

Can anyone help, or has the card had it?

Thanks
Rich.

 

Hi mate,
well theres no mobile nvidia card that have GDDR4 and 256 shaders.
Since you listed the problems already, im pretty sure your second card is the problem.
The bios update from dell was reporting the correct bios, where the last two digits specify the card address (06 means card in slot 0, index 0, 07 means card in slot two, index 1), but if it failed to update it correctly then theres nothing you can do right now.

Well, almost nothing. Theres a thing you can try thought, but its a risk to take.

Follow my guide here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...800m-gt-sli-bios-succesfully.html#post6904539

Basically same thing applies. You need to manually flash the second card to a stock dell bios that i provided in the post, using an usb bootable drive (you need a pen and the HPformat Utility, then create a bootable usb disk...guides are around).
I advice, however, to flash both cards to the stock bios i linked. Then see how it turns out. If it does end in success, then upgrade the bios using dell disk.

Follow the steps carefully and youll be fine...however, evaluate a few things:

- if flashing goes wrong, youll end up with a blank screen. You can try a blind flash thought, which requires to input the same commands and listen to bips
- if flashing goes ok, but it doesnt change anything, then at that point you know the second card is screwed.

Good luck

 

Thanks Kingpin

I did that, without updating to the dell bios and now it is showing the same info for card 2 as before and card 1 bios is 04 instead of 06, which seems correct.

I have tried something else I just thought of: I disabled card 1 in device manager and enabled card 2. When I run CPU-Z now, I get some strange figures (attached).

With just card 2 enabled, every time I do anything e.g. type in internet explorer, the screen seems to refresh/flash. If I enable both cards, windows crashes. I think the 2nd GPU is probably faulty.

Rich.

 

It might help if I attahed the files!

 

Yes i do confirm that the second card is dead.
Because if it shows 0 values for memory and clocks, its a sign that it came to the end of his life, althought now hironically its reporting the correct values, as i suspected.
It does happen on every card that xps m1730 uses, reporting 0s = dead.
Try to get a refound. For now boot the system using the media button (near the power button, the small one) to force the system to use one card only.

 

I only got the laptop on Wednesday/Thursday, so returning shouldn't be a problem. The hunt for a new laptop starts again...

By the way, excellent guide for flashing the bios. I used nvflash 5.95 and for that version I had to use the --index command instead of the -i command, as when I used -i=1, it was trying to flash card <0> still and gave a board id/firmware error.

Thanks again Kingpin.

 

Np man, im sorry to hear that your beast is fauly.
If you get a replacement or another one, please join us into our official thread in the XPS section of this forum.
The beast still a beast even in these days!