8800m GTS to 8800m GTX?

wait what!? you mean you figured out how to recover it?

@Pranalien, thanks for the link, but now that there is possibly news of a BIOS recovery option, then I would be willing to try to change the V BIOS and flash it. Just need some confromation from johnksss

 

From his post in the BIOS thread

It seems we do have an emergency recovery blind flash method, which rocks. Now just time to figure out how to completely change everything so we have a "good" set of bios

 

Well uuh bump?

 

Feel better?

 

there will be no converting from 8800m gts to 8800m gtx using an mxm vbios. i tired to do it already and it's not compatible. . and changing the name doesn't work either. people with nibtor 4.0 and higher will already understand what this means. we need the ebbed version of the bios from an 8800m gtx notebook to try. (speculation of course) and i could be jumping on a ledge here...but i dont recall there being one ever made... i hope im wrong, because i would like to give it a try.

 

I have a feeling, even if you found the appropriate bios, it wouldn't work... I think Nvidia learned their lessons back in the 6 series era... laser-cut pipelines so there is no buying less than you need

 

The weird thing is the Gateway FX line up and the HDX Dragon are the only notebooks i've ever seen with the 8800GTS in them.

Could it be that our cards were defective and just had the minimum number of shaders that were required for this card (some might have more) maybe due to some manufacturering glitch?

You would think some where else the 8800gts would be used, but i've never seen it.

And with the 8 series of cards nvidia pretty much exclusivly went with the MXM set up. I cant find a non-MXM 8800GTX anywhere either. Even though i could have sworn gateway wasnt using them to begin with...but i might be getting MXM confused with user upgradeable, because i dont think they are always interchangeable words (i know they are diffrent but usually when you see one you see the other)

 

im pretty sure they we're laser cut as well, but am willing to make sure for the nbr community, since no one has asked an nvidia employee about these chips. and if they did...what was the real answer they received in return. with computers...you pretty much have to have a second and a third opinion before your satisfied.

 

well then i'm going to go chat with nvidia for you. I'll let you know what they say.

Any specific questions you want addressed?

 

can the 8800m gts have it's closed pipelines re enabled or have they been laser cut or any other form of irreversible cutting. are these chips mistakes or we're they made this way for a reason.

sounds like a pretty good start to me.

 

ok asked... though i have a feeling Nvidia is going to lay the hammer to me

 

I think they'll give you some BS like "we're sorry we cannot answer that question" or something about "please contact another department". Either way they'll give you some sort of response that'll probably make you feel like a retard "please refer to your manual". >____>

 

yes...hit f10

lmao!

 

i even checked and tried to change the streams via rivatuner, but that didn't work..it should have looked like the one for the 8800 gtx card, but thiers was disabled

 

I'd probably go with the idea of our 8800's being defected in someway that still marginally meets the standard of sellability (if such word exists). It doesn't make sense to make a perfectly fine product just to disable some parts of it and sell it for less. It's like building a benz, taking a hammer to the body at random places and deliberately making less profit off it.

 

ergo.. gs/gt/gts/gtx but with this last batch...the gt is out performing the gts. what gives with that scenario? you would think the gts would get the 96 unified shaders, but no...it's the gt. the fx would have definitely been sitting right with 96 unified shaders

 

So we can forget making the GTS into a GTX?

 

Probably, but its still an unsure. So far its a work in progress, these things rarely happen over night.

Plus i'm waiting to get a reply from nvidia... or at least a restraining order showing me they think i'm getting close to something.

 

*LOL* i heard that!

 

if we can find a way to edit that 8800m GTX bios we can try and mod it to work without MXM (do a combo from GTS and GTX for that MXM PORT)
Dont forget the HEAT from more PL

 

Well the nvidia forums were a total bust. Everyone looked at my thread but either they didnt know what i was talking about or they are keeping a really good secret.

Phone calls were more intresting. When i finally did get an actual person on the phone i got transfered to about 7 diffrent people and none of them had any idea or as Jim (or jeremy i cant quite remember the guys name) the tech guy told me that i should basically **** off for trying to get something for nothing (rude git) and if i wanted the GTX i should have bought a better laptop
I dont know if that should tell me that it is possible and he was mad for someone trying to do it, or if he didnt know either and was having a bad day...who knows

I'm now on my second to last resort, email. hopefully someone can answer my questions via email. or at least i hope so. But if not... i found an intresting tid bit of info, Nvidia has a corporate office in my wonderful home state of Alabama. So once i get home i might just take a trip to Madison AL to see what i can scrounge up from them directly.
Its a bit harder being rude to me directly to my face than over a phone (gods i love working in the oil field, its taught me how to twist off on people so well)



@Lum-X
I cant really say about the MXM conversion, i'm not that well versed on BIOS editing, but it will be tricky due to the capability has to be programed in and it has to be the exact same size in the code (from what i remember)

Cooling on the other hand i'm not worried about at all, i built a custom cooler for my 6860 and i can make the thing fridged if i want to (by using external power) but i keep it pretty cool just off of USB power... i rarely see more than 65 degrees even after gaming for 6+ hours

 

say, lets see some pic's of that cooling solution! since no one really has a very good cooler for the fx series notebook. due to fan placement.

 

This took forever to find.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=282923&page=3

I unfortunatly dont have any others with me (i'm at work currently) but the fans sit directly under the bottom vents and it even has active hard drive cooling

I was thinking of moving the design into a bamboo sandwich so the fans are better protected and i will shave off ALOT of weight, cause you know oak is heavy.

its a pretty rough design, but it serves its purpose very well. With a fan swap out and a larger power converter i can run the thing with desktop fans and make the laptop icy cool. I tried it originally, but the noise was pretty bad (again why i think the sandwich design with noise cancling filling would be a better way to go)

 

yes, i like the design...it hits all the right spots!

 

now your just being dirty

But yeah for as ugly as it is, the thing does a remarkable job keeping the FX series really nicely chilled

 

Ok so teh Cooling is not the problem but we must thing of editing that BIOS and do domethign to make a custom one for our GTX non MXM.

If womeone can find a BIOS editor for Nvidia cards that will be goot to give a harder push on this way.

 

well here is the email response i received from Nvidia

I'm going to keep replying to this email in hopes something will slip through, but if our best hope is contacting Gateway then all hope is pretty much lost.

Either that or we can open our own Boutique computer store and get everything we want... for the cheap to

i might just have to convince my wife and all of her friends to ride up to Madison with me; posing as "really intrested in video cards" college girls and see is extortion works where everything else fails lol

 

yep...we are shot down...yet again.....*sniff* *sniff*

 

You know you can just ask me for the 8800m gtx bios right? LOL let me know if you still looking for it.

edit: nvm, you need a non-MXM bios?

 

yeah...and i think i asked you way back when and we all talk about mxm vs onboard...lol else i would have had my hand out again.

 

Thanks mate, but yeah we need the non-MXM (which i actually dont think exists)

One thing... what exactly is the MXM? I know this is probably alot to ask but can you take a pic of your GPU? I was wondering if its some really fancy connection method or just a socket the GPU actually uses.

If its a socket i wonder if its possible to replicate it?

 

Its just socket all MXM type laptops are supposed to used, so cards can be swapped, etc. The only difference between his and ours is the seperate BIOS and being able to remove his.

 

Ah ok... its weird that a socket (supposedly using the same connections between it and the mobo) would require a special type of BIOS. If i'm picturing it correctly it would be like a BIOS chip socket. Which isnt any diffrent except you can buy replacement chips and swap them out.

If we would really have to somehope get an MXM connector and remove our chip to get this to work its going to get cost prohibitive to even attempt this.

That sucks

 

If I'm restating the obvious, please don't flame: I will simply crawl away in shame...

This link goes to the nVidia website and talks about MXM. It makes sense to me that the video BIOS would be on the MXM board so that any GPU/memory configuration would be able to talk to the mobo without having to change the main system BIOS (other than simply recognize the new card in the setup).

On my old Dell 8600, I had multiple video cards over the years. They used a proprietary connection system so I was limited to what Dell produced for that model. With MXM (if my laptop supported that format), I could have chosen from any manufacturers boards that were MXM. That's the theory anyway...

 

Yeah, I remember reading about how MXM was supposed to be as easy to swap out cards as on a desktop... unfortunately most Laptop resellers use their "own" MXM with their own connections... that, and where can you find a mobile graphics card for sale except Ebay... it never really took off like it should have

 

what you guys really need to do is someone bring his/her FX to science lab and check the number of shaders with electric microscope.

 

that will require some sawing wont it ?

 

huh????????

 

Our GPU is soldered onto our motherboard so except for a top view we cant actually see what else is going on with it with out un-soldering it from the board...more than likely slagging the chip and the mobo at the same time

 

arh I totally forgot about that.

 

yeah, you lucky gits with your removable GPU's and t8300s that are way overclockable and BIOS that arent next to worthless

Well final update until i can get home.

I have offically been shot down by nVidia. I was finally transfered (via email) to one of their techs. He gave me a brief history lesson about some time ago they did make a card alot like the 8800gts that was just "programed" to be disabled compared to its better and more expensive counterpart.

Aparently they helped people "break" this code somehow and alot of people screwed up their GPU's and had a s*** fit with nVidia and demanded all kinds of restitution. So needless to say they wont help us.

Now the morale of this story is confusing to me as i dont know if they learned their lessons about telling people how to break the coding, or they learned their lesson and physically modified the card...he wouldnt say.

In any case we can blame the OEM's for the non-universal adoption of the MXM socket. nVidia's goal was to create a new market for after market laptop GPU's (to milk more money out of the system) with the "user upgradeable" video card for laptops. Most of their profits would have come from places like EVGA and the like when they sold the tech to them to create like in desktops.

Unfortunatly all but the higher end manufacturers killed the idea because they liked the fact that we had to keep buying new entire laptops instead of simply upgrading a few hunderd dollar GPU.

So thus we are stuck with oddball cards like the 8800GTS never to be given another choice but to continueally upgrade laptops until we smarten up and buy from the higher end brands.

i guess instead of purchasing another FX laptop when nehelams die shrink happens i might just have to save up for a Clevo or Flextronics

 

For sure that they won’t help us cause I have a friend that works for Nvidia he is electrical engineer and when I asked him he just laughed.

 

ya the idea of doing this entered someones head because the 7900 gs in dell inspiron 9400s could be soft modded to be a 7900 gtx using the bios from the xps 1710
this can be done because the two machines are identical except for the video card.

Theres no such machine to the gateway 6831 so this project is not impossible but a major hardware engineering task.

If someone is really qualified to write hardware bios please step up. Otherwise forget about it

 

ok mxm is nvidias specific technology to let the notebook manufacturers swap graphics cards in their notebooks.

They put the bios ON the video card. So the new card works.
Most notebooks use the other technology where the video bios is in with the bios ( i cant remember what this is called but it is unique to laptops and most models use it)
So to get a new video card in your non mxm laptop you need the bios to be programmed to accept it.

 

We can mod the BIOS. It will be hard but it can work and the GPU Bios at gateway is in GPU cause when i upgraded the BIOS i it didn't change the GPU BIOS.

 

i tried both types of bios and neither one works mxm and non mxm (so they say). and neither will post a video screen. i have both editors and a hex editor, but im no a+ student bios writer either.... so if you think i might be missing something in there...then by all means...do tell.

side note:
you dont even need to boot into bios recovery. just leave your usb hdd as the first boot device. (before you go messing with anything) then boot from your usb crisis recovery disk. just insert and turn laptop on and that's it.. it will do the rest.

 

ok

no the gpu bios is in the bios. It didnt change because your gpu didnt change did it? lol if you could change it thats the whole point of this thread lol. Someone have a gateway bios with the 8800 gtx, would is softmod their video card like the dell 9400 did with its 7900 gs.

 

correct. tried this mode with rivatuner and that was a big no. it has to do with the nvstrap. and the 8800m doesn't have that or the option is not available.

 

try and count on two hands the number of clevo owners who have ever upgraded their video cards.

Almost never happens. It costs about 700$ and its only usually one generational and sometimes requires a new motherboard because the power is up.

Its bogus forget about it its a sucker move. You bought the smartest purchase for your money whether you believe it or not.

 

yup i don't see the hope of upgrading to gx200 series.