Clevo x7200 upgrade from 6990m to 7970m

Dear Clevo and modding gurus,

In short:
I have a Clevo x7200 (purchased from XMG Germany) purchased end of 2011, running:
- Crossfire of AMD 6990m
- i7-980 (hexacore)
- No Express port on front panel
- Currently on bios 1.00.12 and EC 1.00.08 (latest official bios)
Within 1 month, both of the 6990m died one after the other (crashes in game or with Furmark, Windows desktop corruptions).

The rest of the components are functional, I am looking to replace the two GPUs by another card.
I’ve read many threads, what would be a suitable replacement, and I am looking towards an upgrade with Nvidia 680m GTX, or AMD 7970m.

The problems:
- On Prema Mod, I don’t see modded bios for x7200 for the 680m GTX, only for more recent Clevo chassis.
Also, to get a 680m gtx in Europe, at a decent price is very difficult.

- I could get a second hand 7970m from a Clevo p170em.
This could function in my chassis.

Could you advice on what should be my next steps? Do you know someone who has a 7970m functional in a x7200 chassis? What were the required mods to Clevo bios or GPU bios to make it work?

Thanks in advance.

 

I would try to get a GTX 680M (like I am running in my x7200), it performs great but is - as you mentioned - hard to get nowadays. Keep in mind you will also need to buy a heatsink for the 680M. I would contact some of the European resellers if they still have it in stock and ask for an offer.

The single 680M outperforms your 6990Ms by a fair margin, by the way.

I had 6970M crossfire in my x7200 before. My cards still work, but AMD drivers sucked (for example in Skyrim), so I switched to my 680M after less than a year of using the 6970M's. I don't know if or how well the 7970M works in the x7200. But if you can't find a 680M for a reasonable price, I could sell you my 6970M's that have been laying around unused for 3 years. The advantage is that I could simply send you the 6970M heatsinks with it, as I don't need them anymore.

 

Hum, I could make good use of one or two of your 6970m units, to make my rig useful while I manage to get the 680m. I'd like to discuss buying & shipping details with you over PM, but I first need to have at least 5 posts to enable PMs
By the way, would the heatsinks be needed? Won't my heatsinks from 6990m match those for 6970m ?

Anybody else has experience with AMD 7970m on a x7200 rig. I've read about some lingering issues (no HDMI, no audio except over USB ), but still solid performance.

 

The heatsinks should be identical, but the heatpads might be arranged a bit differently. On Saturday I'll PM you some pictures (I'm currently in a dormitory and go home for the weekend), then you can compare the heatpads to yours of the 6990M.

Just post a few more times and shoot me a PM. I would be happy to help you out and not have them lying around anymore, and won't charge a lot. If you don't need the heatsinks that makes shipping a lot cheaper too I guess, as they are heavy (compared to the cards itself).

For the 7970M, this thread suggests that nobody on notebookreview has tried one in his x7200. Of course, if you would get a 7970M to work in the x7200 that would be a lot better. I guess people stopped trying after they realised the 680M works flawlessly I also read about the HDMI issue before, but not for the x7200 but the P170HM.

 

Yes, all the GPU heatsinks are identical in these units, it is just a pad layout change.

 

Okay Sirana, sounds good, I will review your pics, and I will also share some from the insides of my x7200, just for the sake of comparison.

In parallel, I'm also trying to get a 680m GTX as a more long term solution. I may have found a guy who is selling an older P370 SM in pieces - he is selling separately the CPU, the GPU, the RAM, the SSD...
I'm planning to get more info from him before buying the 680m GTX.
Seems a bit shady though.
Anything I should be on the lookout for?
I guess first I should make sure I get the 4GB version of the 680m GTX, but as it's coming from a Clevo, the bios should be fine.
Any other tips here ?

 

Ask him if he did heavy overclocking, decreases the cards life span and might enable you to haggle the price down. Also ask him for the VBIOS version. Since the x7200 is generous in terms of compatibility it should boot with a new VBIOS as well, but the version that worked best for me was 80.04.33.00.10 (OCedition'_revised_01) by svl7 over here. VBIOS flashing is easy if you follow this guide here. Other than that, you will need to modify the NVIDIA drivers .inf file to install the display driver, because the x7200 is not supposed to run a 680M (which it does flawlessly though). For modifying the .inf you can apply my own guide here (end of first post) or I can also just send you my .inf file which works as our systems are pretty much identical by then

 

Thanks for the tips and the mini-tutorial on how to install the 680m.

The seller from whom I'd like to get it (the shady "selling a p370sm in pieces" guy) is not answering my simple request to share a high resolution pic of both sides of the card, so I think we can make a deal concerning the 6970m units.
If those work, my pc will be functional for a while again, so I will not need to get the originally planned 7970m card.

 

Well, you could contact several resellers directly and ask for a card, that's at least the safest option.

I sent you some pictures, you can find them in your profile under "Conversations", I guess the new form of "PMs". If you can't access them I'll post them here directly. Take a look, if everything is alright we can discuss a fair price and I can send the card/cards by Monday. Also I can send you clearer pictures as well if needed, and I will clean the old thermal paste off the core before sending it of course. I just took some quick pictures with the cards inside a clear foliage which I used to store them.

 

I've mailed ~6 european resellers, so far no luck getting the card, noone has it in stock.
I replied to your PM - thanks for taking the time with the pictures !

 

Its possible they might use the same distributor channels for their parts. Might need to search a bit wider from other companies to get one from a reseller. While trying to get one from a reseller is generally better (in my opinion) to get the proper card, it might be worth checking ebay as a back up. Or even maybe looking through the NBR marketplace forum to see if anybody has anything there that might work.