Clevo W880CU / Sager NP8850 barebone Graphic Card problem

Hello Everyone,

First post in the Clevo section as i recently received my first clevo laptop ever : the W880CU.

I bought this off ebay as a barebones with a 7970m GPU.
At the same time I bought an Alienware M18x r2 with a GTX 660M GPU.

The idea was to remove the 7970m from this clevo, set it in the m18x and take the 660m GTX from the m18x and put it in the clevo.

Guess what?
Clevo 7970m => M18x works like a charm
m18x 660m => Clevo does not work.

Here are the symptoms:
- boot allright
- windows boot allright and loads on the desktop
- after 30-60 sec of boot, the laptop starts to beep, with all leds near keyboard blinking and it shutdowns.
- same thing if I stay in the Bios (not windows related)
- not enought time to install Nvidia drivers before shutdown

After some reading, it looks like its temperature related...

My feeling is just that the GTX 660m comes with a dell/Alienware vbios or manufacturer ID and the W880cu doesn't like it / recognize it.

What do you think my options are?

Any clevo 660m GTX vbios out there that i could flash to it?

thanks in advance.

Jeremy

 

Anybody have an idea?

Extra info:
i dismantled the gpu right after a beeping shutdown and guess what : the heatsink is cool when i touch it... no burning temperature involved here...

So my guess is it has to be vbios related...

I will try a 580m on it see what happens..

 

Clevo/sager notebooks only work with clevo/sager MXM cards, it will not work with other brands due to the custom EC system they use.

 

Ok, anyway to flash a MXM with another clevo MXM bios of sorts for it to be recognized by this EC system?

 

Hello,

Anyone try to tamper with the EC system before?

up!

 

Hey dude. Well, I have some bad news.

Late last year I did exactly what you did -- Bought a barebones W880CU off of ebay, and ordered it from the seller with a Geforce 675MX. Unfortunately, after payment went through (and I had already purchased a seperate CPU from a different seller) the seller of the laptop states "Whoops, the 6xx series of Geforce cards wont work with that laptop. The best we can do is give you a Geforce 480M (which I was not going to do, since that card was like 3 years old at that time) or a Radeon 7970m. They said something about the MXM / Drivers / Firmware that wouldn't allow anything newer than a 480M to work in there.

I was basically stuck between a rock and a hard place, but after much back and forth went with the 7970m. It has been a decent card, but I still wish I would have gotten the Geforce 675mx. Oh well.

 

The 7970M outperforms the 675MX by a large margin and you have no enduro to worry about so I don't know why you are sad.