Sager P150EM Problem With 7970m

Hello everyone and merry Christmas!
I bought a used p150em last week and I experienced the 7970m driver problem. At first I did a clean install of windows 10 and let everything automatically. That caused the laptop to freeze. After that I did again a clean install of windows 10 but this time I put the stock drivers from sager site. That didn't work either. I then did a clean install of windows 7 updated everything except the 7970m driver. After updates were completed I put the 7970m stock driver from sager's site. Didn't work either. I put windows 8...nothing...windows 8.1...nothing. Now I've put win 10 with disabled 7970m. How do I make this work??? vBios of the card is 0.15.018.000.000.000000
Thanks for your time.
p.s Should I change both bios and vbios for this to work?

 

Sounds more like the card might be bad than a driver issue.

It could be something in the bios though I suppose if it's a corrupt image it could cause these issues. Find a stock bios and flash it to see if that resolves it but then it's back to bad card if that doesn't work either.

 

If the card never worked it's safe to assume it's dead.

 

I don't think it's dead, cauce I managed to put some drivers and then it froze. Or I had disabled the intel gpu and it worked for a bit till it froze. If i put clevo bios is that gonna be a problem? Right now i have sager bios.

 

These are exactly the same issues I had with mine. It started to show black screen in games after playing for some minutes (which forced me to restart), then I couldn't start games using the card at all, but it was fine to have drivers installed in Windows. After a while, it started to give random freezes and/or BSODs that just stopped after deactivating the card in device manager and it was like that since then. So yes, your gpu is probably dead. This sucks, but it is not a great gpu for using in 2020 anyway.

My recommendation is going with a GTX 970M if you are short on budget. You can buy another 7970M or even a GTX 6xx instead, but they are not good options (especially 7970M, which is already proven that it's just a faulty card) for the price they cost. GTX 980M is really good for the price, but it runs hot and need some modifications in P150EM to work fine, including with its AC Adapter (180W will not cut it. You need 230W or above, which implying investing in a really expensive one or doing basic soldering) and 1060 is kinda expensive ($299 or more). Anyway, it is up to you.

 

Based on @ PhOeNiX_H comments it concurs with my thoughts and if you're going to replace the GPU you might as well upgrade it within reason price/performance.

As to the power brick the max the laptop will draw is the # on the label on the case. For instance mine lists 19.5V 6.15A which comes out just under 120W. Well I thought I could squeeze some performance out of the brick and charge the battery quicker by upgrading to 180W PSU and that didn't pan out. I also did some testing with USB-C PD and the battery is just simply limited to 14.5W input but the system draw w/o gaming hits 45-60W and w/ gaming you absolutely will need a brick to keep things running w/o draining the battery.

I have a little bit of envy of those around here that have the MXM ability to swap parts as mine are soldered.

 

The battery charge will always be limited due to what the circuitry inside is designed to deliver.

 

Thank you a lot. Yeah I'll probably go with the 970m

Btw could bios and vbios take part if thw gpu is working?

 

Unlikely, being really skeptical.

Yeah, I've seen broken/incompatible vBios causing GPUs to freeze, but in this case, 7970M is natively supported in P150EM. If someone actually flash a broken vBios, this same person has no reason to not flash the original one back. Besides, usually a bad vBios causes different issues, like bad performance and stuff (it is pretty common with 970M/980M/1060).

A bad/older bios will cause more problems than just a driver issue. Probably the GPU won't being recognizable at all and you'll have the "continuous beep, fan at maximum speed and shut down" situation.

Also, you'll probably need a Prema Bios for 970M/980M/1060/1070/RXs series. I'm tagging him here: @Prema, but it is better that you send a PM to him. He also did a modified vBios for 970M, which can probably help on playing games with better performance without reaching boiling water temperatures in process.

 

It means you can use the standard driver rather than modified ones but no halm in modified drivers.

 

Where can I find the stock bios of sager p150em?

and btw what cpu upgrade paths do i have? Is there a better cpu than i7 3840qm for this laptop? thanks

 

Usually from the reseller it came from.

 

I have no idea where you can get sager stock bios, but about cpus:

i7 3632QM is the best choice for low power (35W)
i7 3840QM is the best choice for "regular" power (45W)
i7 3920XM and i7 3940XM are the choices for high power (55W)
I'm listing two at the last category because some people say that 3940XM is just an overclocked 3920XM, which means it will run even hotter than it supposed to be.

I'm using an i7 3632QM on mine, which gave me bottleneck playing Cyberpunk 2077. I'm not sure if I could get rid of that using an i7 3920/3940XM, but I doubt it.

 

If it's a bottleneck it will help but no more than the percentage of clock increase.

 

Hello again. I contacted sager to get the bios for my laptop but when I gave them all the info they needed they told me that my laptop is not their product, although I'm pretty sure it is, since the cover says sager and the bios install say sager as well. I guess it's just an old laptop and can't find it form the serial number. I finally want to upgrade to a gtx970m so what bios should i use? And what modification I have to do in order to make the gpu to work properly? Thanks for the help!

 

Prema bios would help with temps and stability, but it's not exactly necessary, unless you are using a really old bios version.

For 970M it really depends which card you'll get. In my case, I got what it seems like a GTX 970M from Dell/Alienware, so I couldn't install drivers without any modifications. I explained what I had to do on this topic.

Also, looking for P150EM bios will make easier to find something and I think it's compatible with sager NP9150 computers (if not, I'm pretty sure someone will correct me).

 

Should I flash the clevo bios instead of sager bios? Idc if I can't reverse unless there is a specific reason to do?!

 

Tbh, I'd do that only if you have any issues with your 970M (stability wise. Not being detected on bios setup and driver modification are the kind of "issues" that are expected). Idk if you'll lose some functions with a specific Sager bios because I never used this one.

But I'm saying that about clevo x sager bios. If you add prema in this comparison, I would choose that instead anytime.

Maybe you won't be lucky to find an EUROCOM v3b Bios (which was also made by prema) that will detect you card without any issues and install drivers without any modifications, but you can find a Prema 1.02.17PM v2 bios with some luck.

I'm saying that because this bios was public for some time, but now it isn't.

 

Ok so I tried a gtx970m and when I tried installing wondows after a while the windows logo got stuck on loading. What does that mean? P.s using stock sager bios

 

Can you boot in safe mode?