Sager Laptop GPU Upgrade Driver Issue

So I had recently bought a Sager P17SM-A Laptop. I had a friend who had pulled a 780m from a different machine (same mxm type) and gave it to me. My machine's original gpu was an 860m.

I went through the DDU steps to uninstall the old Intel and Nvidia drivers, shutdown and installed the new card. All went well. The 780m shows up in my Sager BIOS, however I cant for the life of me find a driver that will install for me to use it. Have the Nvidia "No compatible hardware found" error.

(I should probably note that looking at device manager, the hardware ID for the "Basic Display Driver" is still showing an ID marking it as an 860m. Is that an issue?)


Any thing I'm missing to do to make it work? Flash a different Bios, and/or vBios? Missed a step? I can provide pictures of what information is showing in gpu-z, bios, or system of my current machine with the 780m if needed.

EDIT: Device manager shows this hardware ID -
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_119F&SUBSYS_74811558

 

https://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/32026-geforce-38541-mobile-oem/

Try using that modded inf to install it

You'll probably also have to disable driver enforcement

 

Okay so it found the card, issue now is it didn't install the drivers.

https://imgur.com/tznxO75

I had disabled driver enforcement and also done the custom option to do a clean install.

EDIT: Nevermind it worked! Windows 10 is silly and I needed to disable driver enforcement from the restart menu and then let it restart. That did it after it prompted me if I wanted to install the driver from a Win10 dialog. Restarted and all is good.

Thanks for that simple solution!

 

Glad you got it figured out! Yeah windows 10 enforces signed drivers to prevent any potential screw ups

Looks like the 780m wasn't designed for your model, so when nvidia received the potential specs of your laptop, they only receive certain GPUs the maker designs to have in the laptop. Like for your model, maybe only the 870m and 880m were listed as "possible nvidia cards", so nvidia didn't bother adding other GPUs to the list in their inf file

Good thing: you can use the above forum every driver update, as they release fairly shortly after a new driver release

bad thing: You have to do that every single time to update a driver. But if it aint broke, don't fix it. Probably wouldn't bother doing every driver, maybe only when you run into a problem

 

So now the issue is it is detected and even shows the gpu in gpu-z with all the correct bus speeds and clocks. However when running the gpu, even setting a program to use it, it ends up using the integrated gpu.

May just make a separate post for this issue.

Edit: Thanks for the info. I figured that'd be the case with the drivers. I appreciate your help
Maybe to fix above problem should I install an older driver to see if it works then?

 

Perhaps in nvidia control panel, specify to prefer the nvidia performance driver instead of auto-select

 

Also have done that. Set the global options to prefer performance as well as restarted a few times. I have tried running a few games as well as gpu-z render test on the gpu and all used the intel gpu.

Had MSI Afterburner running to see if the gpu was being utilized, and it showed 0%.

Looked online and some recommended to check and see if Nvidia processes are actually running in task manager. Will check that out as a solution soon.

 

Have you updated the Intel Graphics driver (or rolled it back)?

 

I haven't rolled back the Nvidia driver yet. I'll have time later today to try.

When I first uninstalled the old drivers, I then installed the card and reinstalled the modded driver above. However the intel driver that I installed is not the most current one. I have an older version that allows me to overclock the display on my laptop.

Should I try with the newest Intel driver instead?

 

Since they work in tandem, it's worth a shot. I would start there and then look to the NVidia driver if still no joy. Optimus does complicate things a bit.

 

I figured as such. I'll try that and get back to see if that solves the issue. Optimus does indeed make things like this a hastle.

 

Okay so the intel driver is up to date according to the intel driver installer. However it still doesn't work properly. The Nvidia gpu doesn't run no matter what application I force it to run starts.
It still shows up properly in gpu-z and shows that it's running at the lowest clock speeds, just never kicks in.

 

Not sure what driver to try next to roll back to for the 780m...

EDIT: I actually just tried the driver version that was provided by Sager on their site for this laptop, and that worked. I modified the inf manually and it worked. Just may try some newer ones later to see if I can get a more optimized experience.

Thanks for all the help!