***The Official MSI GT72 Dominator Pro (GTX-980M) Owner?s Lounge***

The clock was oscillating between ~1070 and 1126 MHz during the whole benchmark

 

That's normal due to GPU boost.
1038 - 1127 (Boost) MHz.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-980M.126692.0.html

 

I know, these are the stock boost frequencies. What I mean is that with +160 on the core freq and no overvolting, I get a stable frequency of 1286 MHz, while with a +170 MHz o/c and overvolting, my gpu runs at stock frequencies

 

I don't know if it's just me, I could be paranoid, but lately whenever I play my games, the screen flickers when quitting the game. It's almost like the graphic drivers froze and responded really quickly. No popups, temps are fine. No overclock of any kind. No flickering during normal runs. Running 344.75. I hope it's something that has been happening and and I just now noticed it and just paranoid, and not something getting ready to fail. Anyone have this issue?

Note: The biggest obvious time when this happens is when I play Farming Simulator 15. According to MSI afterburner's OSD it seems the game uses OGL. Not DX11 or such. Would this have something to do with things?

 

It could be the card clocking down from high 3d to 2d.

 

I tried svl7 VBIOS and i found that it is highly unstable under over clock and it scored much lower than prema VBIOS on 3dMark

 

Which model GT72 do you have...... it this with 880M Kepler, or 980M Maxwell? Just curious, because I am wondering if svl7 supports Maxwell architecture.

 

I have the 980m. I used svl7 980m OC edition, but its a terrible VBIOS to overclock. With Prema VBIOS I have better overclock, but my 980m run hotter

 

Yeah, I wasn't sure if svl7 supported the 980M yet, and I know Svet hasn't worked on Maxwell Vbios optimization yet. Thx!

 

First laptop ever, GT72 Dragon Pro, I've read this forum beginning to end twice. Thanks for the help. I am trying to learn everything I can and put this thing thru its paces. Absolutely in awe even 2 weeks in.

Sent from my SM-P900 using Tapatalk

 

Woops, I forgot to mention that I wasn't able to overclock the card with svl7 vbios

 

True but just playing devil's advocate wouldn't it do that for every game then? Maybe I am just paranoid. The temps are fine, no pop-ups happen for drive hang or crash, nothing out of the ordinary really happens, It's just the screen flickers, and I found the closest comparison, it flickers as if the resolution is changing. But it's not, I try and run everything at native 1080p resolution. The flicker doesn't happen any other time. I've sat at my laptop for hours, playing games, reading the news, watching videos/ movies and that's the only time. It seems to only happen on that one game. So maybe it's the coding or something.
I may be just paranoid, but can one blame me, the last nvidia card I truly owned was a GTX 675M, (I tinkered with the 770M) that was in the Samsung Series 7 gamer laptop and that laptop was horrendous. When it worked it worked good, plenty of cooling since it had 2 fans like the MSI and Asus, nice keyboard and such, but I had to send it in for warranty repair 2 times in the first year of ownership! One was for CPU overheating, the other was the GPU failed. right towards the end I had suspicions that the gpu was failing again and got rid of the dang thing since it was out of warranty at that time. So I sold it with the warning to the buyer that the gpu may or may not fail. That laptop cost almost $2000 when I bought it! Plus $100 for shipping it each time. Anyhow, yeah for me, it wasn't good and has changed me to being more paranoid I'm sure. So I may just be paranoid about my MSI. Can one blame me though? I spent a lot of money on this MSI as well and already sent it in for a sticky keyboard. (Not my fault, spacebar just kept sticking). So yeah.

Beyond that, I really do love my GT72, and am still at awe over it. I recently had to get rid of my desktop due to not having the space and it was jacking the electric bill up some. The techie in me cries, but I managed to trade it for an Alienware 17 (before they switched to all the BGA and soldered on gpu crap) w/ a GTX 770M in it. I've been happy with that swap. Gonna look into upgrading it to a 980M sometime in the future. Though by the time I can afford it, the price may come down as nvidia will come out with their 1080M or whatever. Anyhow, I had to get rid of my desktop and I miss it, but not as much as the GT72 is pretty much my desktop, maybe even more powerful in places. (desktop had a GTX 770 in it and I was happy with it.) The 980M pushes past the 770 desktop by a large margin. The only thing the desktop had over the laptop was it had a Xeon e3-1230 v3 3.4GHz cpu in it. Anyhow enough rambling. I'm off to play another game! lol.

 

dragonwolf8504, if you adjusted the Nvidia 3D options for best performance, part of that is partially disabling the downclocking, "Power Management Mode => Prefer Maximum Performance", that will hold the clocks up after exiting a game / app, but not all exit the same and some will leave the clock high.

 

I will try that, it looks like it was set to adaptive. Considering my laptop is almost always plugged in I'm not concerned with battery life, lol. Though with everything still hooked up, and brightness settings at 50%, streaming music on spotify my battery shows roughly 2hrs and 40 mins and is jumping slowly up from the looks of it. On DTR's I treat the battery more like a UPS anyhow. If I really need battery life specially on the GT72 I will switch it to iGPU before leaving of baring that switch it really quick upon startup. With the speeds of the SSD a restart isn't out of the question.

Anyhow, I will give what you stated a try since it seems that wasn't set right and report back after some testing/ playing.

Thanks!

On another note, I can't seem to rep. i don't have the button. Anyone else have this issue?

 

dragonwolf8504, actually the adaptive setting is the one that downclocks quickest

The settings highlighted in the image are the highest performance settings, you can try them and see if your performance improves.

I wouldn't worry about temps too much, there are protections built in when it gets too hot, and eventually your card will downclock - you can try exiting the game/apps that have the API for the GPU open, that should allow the GPU to downclock.

The board is undergoing performance issues after switching to a new server / forum software, in time it will stabilize, but various features have been disabled until the fixes are found. Thanks for the thought

 

I'm not worried about temps, heck I had it OC'ed for a little bit for benchmarking. I restored it to stock since the 980M is plenty powerful enough for me at stock. Haha! it's good to know though that an OC isn't out of the question down the road when the 980M get's long in the tooth. Anyhow, the images are broken so I can't see the image your referring to me right now. But I did change it from "Adaptive" to "Maximum Performance". So I'll see how that goes for now.

Good to know about the board. Hope they get things fixed soon! I'd offer to help, but I'm more hardware, lol. It does look like it'll be really nice once it's done though, I already like how the
quote options are. It's the small things that count to me.

 

Hello everyone,

I got this beauty a couple of days ago, and I am really loving it so far. I got the version with 256gb ssd raid0 configuration. Of course I have a few questions I hope you can assist me with:

1. What fan speed is normal idle and full load? I currently get about 3500 rpm when playing shadows of mordor (about 65 degrees gpu).
2. Does the comfort, sport or green mode really make a difference? I cant seem to notice any change, but I stick with sport for games thus far
3. I am new to raid configurations. What happens if the raid0 breaks down (1 ssd dies)? Is it easy to rebuild for a non-techie? Is it warranty covered?
4. Paranoid as I am, how do I create some sort of recovery media for the computer? I prefer something that lets me restore it to exact factory state, with raid0, bloatware everything.
5. How many hard drives can I fit in the machine? Does it void warranty? (I see the sticker on the bottom case)

Thank you very much. Extremely impressed with the computer so far. Just trying out shadows of mordor which I think is a great game!

 

1. That's normal.
2. Yes it does change some TDPs and target temperatures.
3. Raid 0 has no redundancy, one drive dies and all data is lost. In the event of a hardware failure (one of the drives dies) then yes it would be replaced but all data is gone.
4. Get an imaging program that lets you take snapshots of the system and save them to the cloud/an external drive.
5. Adding in regular parts like a HDD does not void the warranty so long as you don't physically damage it (in the US at least), your system can take 4 M.2 drives (SATA III speeds) (you have 2 of those filled), 1 2.5" HDD (SATA II speeds) (Which you likely have one already) and 1 ODD (which can be coverted to a HDD using a caddy) (SATA II speeds)

 

Today my MSI gt72 stopped charging! Thank god that i found a solution! I uninstalled Microsoft acpi-compilant control method battery and then a reboot. After the reboot it started charging again! Is that normal??

 

What charge level were you at? What had you been doing?

If you had just been using it the battery may have been to warm to charge immidiately.

 

9%. I was gamed for 30 min on battery then when it was about 25% I tried charging it and it wouldnt charge!

 

Sounds to me like it was too hot if you were gaming on the battery. It's a protection mechanism to stop it getting even hotter.

 

I have one more question guys!

Suddenly, when idling in windows the fans go all crazy and spin to maximum for like 20-30 seconds. Is this a driver related issue? It never runs hot, idle or when running games. The fans go from 1700rpm to 3500rpm in a matter of seconds, even when I am not doing anything..

Hmm?

 

Hello, I need your advice on when to buy and what to buy.

I have been using a 2011 HP Pavilion with an AMD 6770M. Can't play most of the AAA games released since mid 2013 and on.

I have made up up my mind on the MSI GT72 Dominator Pro series, but since I have already been using my laptop for 4 years, and going to make a $2500 investment anyway:

1) Shall i wait for the Pascal iteration of Nvidia mobile GPUs due in 2016? It is based on the 16nm architecture and delivers exponential performance compared to the current maxwell. Nvidia Pascal is scheduled for 2016, any rough estimate when will the mobile Pascal follow and get adopted by manufacturers like MSI? Key Indicators I am asking about here: (i) time to announce the mobile version after announcing the desktop version, (ii) time for laptop manufacturers to launch new products with the announced mobile GPU.

2) Any idea if there will be a refresh of the current MSI GT72 Dominator this year with a new processor build or a refresh model of the maxwell 980M (or other?). Will the current model remain MSI's flagship all the way until Nvidia announces Pascal GPUs next year?

Thanks
Ron

 

The msi gt72 has been touted as an "upgrading beast" by msi themselves, with the mxm gpu and all. Msi has guaranteed two generations of upgradability so regardless, you will be set for the future for a while.
Regarding cpus, cpu performance since the sandybridge days has been sidegrades or miniscule upgrades at best and a good sandybridge is still very relevant today so i would not worry about intel pulling out some "wondergem" of a cpu later in the future with how the trend goes. The current msi gt72 with either the 4710 or 4980 will last you quite a way into the future, along with the mxm upgradable gpu system the gt72 has.

 

"Upgrading beast", maybe, but Nvidia Pascal is a 16nm architecture that attaches to next gen motherboards too, i dont think the current build of MSI GT72 dom pro can fit the mobile nvidia pascals (with features such as NvLink...).
28nm to 16nm architecture is a game changer for me.

Will MSI stick with the current gt72 dom pro model as their flagship model up until pascal in mid-late 2016? or are there any leaked refresh builds on the way? This can be my middle solution.

 

Well they guaranteed support for the GT80 for 2 generations, so there should be MXM modules up until then at least.

As for PASCAL and NVLINK, the demo board is just that, a demo board. It is not a release product, I don't think you can draw conclusions as a result on the final design. I would expect it to be able to run over standard PCI express or they will kill their market in a single release.

 

There will always be better and better product from Nvidia no matter how they handle their customer base.

 

Consider you were at a crossroads like me where a new architecture form is the next big thing (in 12-18months), and you have the MSI Dom Pro with maxwell 980M in the market right now

You have been using an old $800 laptop for the past 4 years with a mainstream AMD card, how do you invest your budgeted $2,500? Wait for 2016? Or make the MSI GT72 purchase right now? If Pascal was not a whole new dice form i wouldn't have considered waiting at all.

P.S: Star Citizen on max settings means a lot to me.

 

And after 2016? The waiting never ends and you would eventually have to make a decision when your laptop finally give way. Hopefully it would not be an impulsive decision by then.

Star Citizen is still neither final nor is it optimized. Even current gen desktop high-end GPU are struggling. Maybe even after 2016 you can never play it on full settings with a laptop. Or it could even be optimized enough that even 700m series could run it. End of the day, it is your money and your call.

 

I have a question for fellow GT72 owners, has anyone tried running the Steelseries Engine 3 on your beast yet? Please do share if it works. Thank you in advance.

 

Will now, I was having an issue with a certain game pretty much cooking my gpu. Sims 3 was causing my gpu to hit 70C while playing with everything maxxed out! Something is wrong there considering the age of the game and everything. Now 70C is safe for the 980M but still My Firestrike hits that!


Short Story behind it:
I decided to install Sims 3 and all the expansions and while playing I wondered why my gpu fan was ramping up to max speed. I thought to myself why would such a game be maxing out a 980M?


Issue:
Will in case no one knew, the game is horribly optimized. (That part I at least knew) What I didn't know is the game can be a "High-end gpu cooker" meaning that high end gpus would be rendering 200-500 even more fps and running hot. Ouch! This I didn't know. I hadn't given it a thought on gpu's before because the fans where never noticed. After running MSI's OSD I noticed 200-400 fps and temps hitting 68-71C! Usage pegged at like 80% Wait what?! Sims 3 using 80% of a 980M?!

After looking into it, I found out about the lovely GPU cooker "Feature" of Sims 3 and a fix.


Fix:
Sims 3 doesn't have V-sync so in order to enable that, you need to go into Nvidia Control Panel --> Manage 3D settings and switch from Global to Program settings. Locate Sims 3 exe, not the launcher, and set the v-sync to "on". If you can't find the sims 3 exe try checking in: C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Game\Bin and find TS3W.exe or TS3.exe if you don't have any expansions.

I posted this as I'm sure other games might need this. I am not 100% certain, but if you see a game "cooking" your nice, new and shiny 980M and it's an older game this could be the reason.

I know v-sync isn't always a good thing for everyone, but most older games should be perfectly fine at running at 60fps on the 980M or even 970M so in hindsight this probably works for both.

I just thought I would share this little tidbit of information since it was the GT72 I found this out on.

Now my gpu sits at 60fps all day, and doesn't go above 60C and usage kind of varies between 40-60%

Small explanation:
To explain a little of why it 'cooks' the gpu is at such a high fps the gpu is rendering way too many frames and can't push them out due to the slower refresh of the screen 60Hz limits to 60fps as we all know and I'm sure there are plenty of games that do this. If we had a 120Hz display it would probably reach 120fps (wish I had a 120Hz display to test that out.) Anyhow, the gpu is rendering a lot of unused frames. Many of which may be multiple copies of a previous frame, so you may have even 30 frames on the gpu that is the same thing! This is also due to the optimization issues on the game itself. So not all older games will have this issue. The biggest thing is this causes needless usage of the gpu and 'cooks' the gpu. There is no reason any older games should cause this gpu to run hot. Now this isn't a full on rule, but it is just to help out.

Needless to say, you may need to enable v-sync on some games and even force it in Nvidia control panel if it's not in the game. I'm sure most people on here may know all or any of this as it is kind of old news, but I figured for some who may have not had such a high end gpu and this is their first high end gpu or just didn't know this would help out.

 

Hi There,

I had the same problem myself a while ago. I solved it by making sure .NET was updated, then uninstall and re-install SCM. That way the GPU button will work again and you'll be able to restart your laptop using the intel gpu and install the drivers.
Hope it helps...

 

I have tried the Engine 3. It does not support our keyboard. There is a newer version of Engine 2 on Steel Series website though that you can update to.

 

Awesome! Thank you so much for the info.

 

Does the newer version bring any thing new?

 

Not feature wise, I don't think. However I'm sure it addresses some issues or else they wouldn't release it

I have also installed a newer version of Dragon Gaming Center which looks like it fixed SHIFT getting stuck to 'on' when you're on battery.

 

Same problem here... in my case it misbehaves a lot when not plugged in.

 

Hi guys, today i am also a proud owner of a MSI GT72 Dominator Pro. Well i am already very happy with this notebook ... but I hope u can help finding a solution of my problem.
First i thought i have a normal TN Chin-Mei Display (Cold colour temperatur display) but instead i have LG Display (LP173WF4-SPF1) which is Warm colour temperatur display. The LG display is really nice but i dont like its colors or maybe Colour Temperatur. Using Nvidia control center wont satisfy me at all because during games it uses standard color profile which turns it toward more red coloured which i dont like. So my question is, is there any chance to calibrate the color or colour temperatur for gaming too and not only desktop? I prefer it more cold colour temperature.

Btw. sry for my bad english ... i hope u can understand what i mean.

Best regards Zodrac

 

Very cool you found the solution to the issue, but I just wanted to comment that 70 degrees is nowhere near cooking your GPU haha, and firestrike is not even the most demanding software because it runs for so little time. Maybe if you run firestrike on a loop nonstop, you will reach max temps

Your temperatures are more than great, they are excellent, and you should be fine. But yeah, vsync is a must if you have excess FPS on your games.

 

Sorry, I didn't mean cooking exactly, for what the game is though it is cooking. After I did that vsync "fix" it did drop the temps dramatically as I think I stated. So it was something. But yes that big of an excess in fps is not needed. Lol.

Anyhow the temps though makes me think I would be able to do some decent overclocking then. I only tried some basic but knowing I have a good temp I'll have to look more into it. Though the 980m is more than I need right now honestly. So having overclocking headroom is a bonus.

 

Exactly most people don't need to overclock unless you plan on going above 1080p or 60hz.

 

I'm having bsod everytime when I close the lid of my laptop for a few minutes and opening it up again.
I did a fresh install of windows and I installed every driver correctly.
Looking at the minidump, I see it refers to PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA. qcamainx64
I'm using the recent Beta BigFoot LAN&WLAN driver. Maybe some one els can confirm this too.

 

What memory are you using?

 

It has stock AM1L16BC8R2-B1QS memory from Adata.

 

It looks like an occasional problem with Qualcomm Athereos drivers, here is someone with an earlier complaint:

http://www.eightforums.com/bsod-cra...s=54b7b15122e06747de08acd7083bd56e#post458865

 

Ahh. This bugs me. The fans on my GT72 go crazy sometimes when idle. What can I do about it? It drives me crazy. The fans ramp up to 3664 rpm and make a lot of noise. I have nothing running except steam (idle) and chrome.

Help?

 

Have you checked out your temps when those fans kick in? You can be running next to nothing on your machine but if your temps creep up the fans will kick in as that's what they're designed to do.

 

I think fans turn off completely, when laptop goes idle, then heat starts to accumulate, raising the temps, which leads to 'bursts' of maximum fan speed.
When not idle and not under gaming load, fans rotate at minimum speed, which prevents heat accumulation and no 'bursts' happen.

I got used to it, did woke up a couple of times during the night, but now it doesn't bother me much.

 

Do you guys think it's time to update the GPU driver? I recall recommendations to stay at 344.75 (dated 11/18/2014) and Geforce Experience now notifies that 347.52 (dated 2/10/2015) is available.