Update on Y510P SLI ultrabay add in card problems

Well, some of you are aware that the Ultrabay 750m5 addin card that Lenovo has been selling for the Y510P is not compatible with the laptops and does not work. I have talked about this in other threads but I have been mainly pursuing this over on the Lenovo forums.

New y510p sli card not detected - Lenovo Community

To sum up the 30 pages in the link, everybody has tried every driver/patch/config/troubleshooting steps possible and these cards will not be recognized. I have sent my card back and gotten a replacement (same thing) and I have sent my entire laptop with the card back to have it fixed and it came back in the exact same state as before.

Mark_Lenovo has said in a few different threads that the cards are the wrong cards and we need the 750m5P model for it to work. He has also said he is working to have them removed from the Lenovo website at this time (see post 284 in my thread).

Y500 750m SLI Ultrabay sold seperatly? - Page 11 - Lenovo Community

I am now dealing with an elevated Lenovo support specialist and we are trying to figure this out. Hopefully I can return the laptop + card and get a functioning SLI laptop in it's place. I will keep everybody posted.

 

Looks like they want me to send in the card AGAIN! They really don't get it!

 

Yesterday I sent a big long complaint email to my contact at Lenovo telling them I am not pleased with how this entire transaction has gone down and told them I won't be recommending Lenovo to my friends. I explained how I have had to take time off work multiple times to send and receive packages to Lenovo and have had to spend hours on the phone with no satisfaction. Today I got an email from my contact saying she made a mistake and she asked me to send in both the laptop and the card for diagnostics (not just the card).Then, a few minutes later I got another email saying that she didn't read my complaint email before asking me to send in the entire laptop and she apologized and she is going to be sending me out a entire new laptop with SLI from the factory instead. All I have to do is wait for it and then ship my old laptop and ultrabay card back. This is good news for me but it doesn't help the all the other people with this problem unfortunately.

 

I totally gave up on SLI. Single 755 is more than enough for me and i will be putting my GPU dollars towards some nice Maxwell Silicon for my desktop, once it comes out of course.

Lucky you got the deal though, Lenovo's customer service sometimes amazes me, compared to others (Dell/HP/ASUS).

 

I have only called their customer service twice actually, both were very good experiences. Once to get a return label and RMA and the second time to get the Ultrabay 755M replacement. Both calls were very painless and it worked out like I wanted.

Now, I have called Dell on multiple occasions and have had decent service there as well. If you want to see bad service, buy a Toshiba. Mercy.....that is terrible service. Took me 6 months to get a power supply replacement from them.

 

This is good news for you! Keep up updated. Maybe I'll start ringing the Y410p SLI bell.

 

Looks like my new laptop won't ship until Feb 5th so I have a bit of time to kill. In the mean time I am keeping the thread over at Lenovo alive until a solution is found.

 

and they just informed me that I have to wait longer (possibly Feb 21 now). I am demanding my money back at this point and pointing out that I haven't been able to use my laptop for months now because of all the back and forth.

 

LOL, it figures, as soon as I ask for my money back the Lenovo person stopped answering my emails.

 

Funny, mine was set for Feb 5th and it's arriving tomorrow. I thought we were in the same shipping batch. Granted, my model is different.

 

They got back to me and they won't refund my money at this point but they are willing to extend my warranty. Apparently I am on the "critical" list now but the lenovo rep can't know anything for sure until Monday when the factory opens (closed for Chinese New Year this week apparently).

 

I hope you will receive it soon. Since you've established good contact with Levono, try to get also a DB36 DVD Ultrabay. It appears to be discontinued. I find it to be perfect accessory when you don't play game. It reduce heat and extend battery life.

 

I am keeping the DVD ultrabay from my old one and the lower powered wall plug, now way they are getting those!

 

New laptop is on it's way directly from China to me. I am not looking forward to having to deal with another laptop with all the quirks. I really wish they could just fix the this stupid SLI problem.

 

Since you will get dual sli system, it should work fine. Mine works perfectly out of the box. The only annoying quirk on mine is the touchpad. So, I disable it and use external mouse.

 

I wrote a scathing review on the lenovo.ca website for the 750m5 card, I hope it gets posted.

 

Doesn't show up, says (2) reviews, but i only see one, 4 stars out of 5.

This was it's contents:

As confirmed by this guy, the M5 was for the Y500 750M. The M5P would be the card you are looking for.

 

LOL, I am well aware that the 750m5 is not the correct card but Lenovo still doesn't believe me and keeps selling the 750m5 for the y5410p. The review you are seeing is on the .com site, not the .ca site.

 

Well, got the new laptop last night. I booted into windows to make sure everything was working (including SLI) and then shut it down and tore it apart! I put in my new 128 GB M.2. SSD, 256 GB Crucial 2.5 SSD, 2 x 8 GB 1866 mhz ram and then did a fresh install of Win 8.1 pro. I have only gotten as far as updating all the drivers and Windows updates so I will let everybody know how it goes.

 

Happy to hear things are finally on the up swing for you!

 

It may be good news for me but it still doesn't help all the other people with the same issue.

 

Definitely, its ridiculous. They sold the ultra bay feature as allowing you to alter your laptop on the fly and customize it to your liking, but then didn't support it whatsoever. I was very close myself to buying the non-SLI model and adding the card in later, luckily, when I went to pick the laptop up, I found out it was in fact the SLI model.

 

It's funny cause they insisted that you can't see the second card in the device manager and that you have to go into DirectX and look at the total memory to see if it is working. Only my new laptop you can certainly see both cards in the device manager. Everything they said was wrong.

 

People are starting to post in my thread on the Lenovo forums that when you call tech support to complain about the ultrabay cards not working you get told that the single card motherboards do not supply enough power to the ultrabay cards and it is a know issue! So I guess they disabled something on the motherboard for single card version of the laptop (kind of like removing the M.2, connector on versions without the 24 GB SSD). So I guess we have our answer and it will never work.

 

For those to lazy to go look at the lenovo forums, here is the problem:

Unfortunately, we are all being misled by Lenovo. I have the same issue, and tech support tells me my model, even though it has Ultrabay all over it, doesn't have internal power to support the NVIDIA GT750M5 through Ultrabay. It must be at least 20V, 8.5 amps to be supported. Why Lenovo thinks it can market Ultrabay technology with all these features, even badging the device as Ultrabay compatible, and then not provide adequate power is beyond me. They said to try Models 59362706, 59370006, or 59370007. You can call their Post-Sales Department at 855-253-6686, Option 2, M-F 9 am - 7 pm (EST) and ask about options for an exchange or money back for your Ultrabay card they sold you.

 

Interesting update on the SLI situation. Apparently the Lenovo rep that gave me a new laptop is still working on my SLI issue. I was contacted by the Lenovo Level 2 engineers who have my old laptop and they wanted my password to access the laptop. Originally Lenovo wasn't going to give me a new laptop, they wanted me to send back my laptop so their engineers good take a look at it and figure out what was going on. I refused to be without a laptop for that along for a second time so they sent me a new laptop but it looks like they are still working on my old one. I will update everybody if I find out more.

 

The lenovo Level 2 engineer says he got my SLI working on my old laptop using a 750m card he had on hand. I am trying to figure out if it is one of the 750m5 cards we all bought (0C65964) or one from a working SLI laptop.

 

Have you received any updates from the engineers? Or have they kept silent, I'm eager to hear more about this in hopes for a possible fix with this issue.

 

BIG NEWS! Looks like Lenovo is working on the problem still and posted the following in my thread over on the Lenovo Support Forums:

All,

We've been quiet on this for a while even though it is being worked at several levels.

I think we believe there may be different versions of the card in circulation, with the principle difference being the vbios on the card. We are working on a solution for the field, and I am hopeful it will be a simple vbios update.

Ordinarily I wait until we are certain of the solution and have a timetable for it, but I know this has been a long running issue and I wanted to share that we are finally making progress.

Best regards,

Mark

 

Is this problem also there with the 755m5 card listed on the website for ninety nine dollars? Planning to buy one.

 

Is it just exclusive to the 750m5? There were three 5 star reviews on the Lenovo store starting that 755m5 improved performance

 

nope, this is only for the Y510p owners that have a 750m card and have bought a second 750m ultrabay card. As far as I know the 755m cards are not affected.

 

With all this mess Lenovo has got its customers into, I think they must provide some sort of compensation or at least refund instead of asking them to send back the laptop and creating confusion. Thanks. I think I'll get one. How is the ultra bay hearing up? How to you keep performance up without throttling? I live in a hot area. The max goes around 37 Celsius. Does a cooler help? Iam not into mods though.

 

Well I don't use the ultrabay too often since the main game I am playing on my laptop right now doesn't support SLI (Titanfall). For cooling you will certainly need a cooling pad and I also undervolted my CPU and adjusted my turbos on it to lower temps. I am going to repast my ultrabay next and probably follow that up with the vent mods.

 

So are you saying the GT755M5 cards will work with the laptops that have the onboard 750m gpu? I have been watching this thread for awhile so i never bothered to buy a second card. Do the new 755 cards work with the older 750m gpu or is there even a solution at this point?

 

There are hacks that will make that combo work (hacked bios, hacked drivers) but no, it won't work out of the box.

 

Lenovo just pulled the 750m5 cards from their website.

 

Another update from Lenovo!

All,

I know we are pusuing the vbios update as a potential solution - this is not confirmed yet as "the" fix, but we are actively working on it. I am hopeful that we will have a status update later this week.


Best regards,

Mark

 

Thank you for all your efforts. its a really big let down when you spend so much on a computer for a specific feature only to find out down the road the feature does not work as advertised. I really hope this solution gets rectified.

 

i had a thought, which might work...

would it be possible to flash a whitelisted bios onto the laptop, then flash the GT755 vbios onto the 750 onboard dGPU so that the newer 755m5 card would mix with it in sli? I realize that the 2 gpus are similar but i have no idea how close of a match they are. Do you know if anyone has looked at the vbios of the 2 to compare the differences or would this work to the best of your knowledge?

 

There is a hack that will allow you to do this. You need the hacked bios/white list removal so you can boot with both cards and then you need hacked nvidia drivers. There is a thread about that someplace around here. That still doesn't help the people that have non-working 750m ultrabays.

 

I looked around for that thread. Are you talking about the thread here http://forum.notebookreview.com/ide...eries-gpus-650m-750m-755m-might-possible.html The thread doesn't really specify using a 750m with a 755 ultrabay

what i would really like to do is flash 755m vbios onto the dGPU so i can use stock nvidia drivers.

EDIT: Looks like the original author on the techpowerup forums made a utility that can be used to manually patch any drivers you want. I think im going to order the 755 Ultrabay and try it out with the white listed bios.

 

is this thread still active?

 

Sorry yes it is. Last update I have is apparently you can send your card/laptop back to Lenovo then they can now flash the card with some sort of new bios and it appears to fix the problem. There is still no at-home solution.

 

so how do i send it in??
like should i send them a problem notice???

 

You have to contact support and tell them the problem (this is the hard part because a lot of them will just try and trouble shoot the problem over the phone) and then once you go through that process you will be able to send it in.

 

has there been an at home solution made yet?

 

not that I am aware of. I don't think there is a way of flashing it from home when the card is not being detected. I think it requires a forced flashing that is not possible without manufacturer help.