Dell :: 8800m GTX SLI Laptop Owners! Forceware 179.13 Saves The Day
Oct 6, 2008
i ran across these drivers on laptopvideo2go.com and i really just have to let all m1730 users know about this. Stock dell drivers and drivers underneath 177.41 have had lots of issues running SLI well, expecially in Non-SLI friendly games like crysis. 179.13 is a laptop version of 178.13 by alienware. This is great stuff. This really has brought the raw power of my SLI out and i can feel it in all my games. Not only that it has lowered my temps by a few degrees over 177.41+ drivers. I strongly recommend these to any 8800m GTX SLI users.
Is the heat overly blown out of proportion with just the 9400m(no SLI)? Is it significantly more than a m1330 with a X3100?
What is the average battery life you get with no gaming(surfing, YouTube, music, word)?
Is the vent going to pose a problem if used on a bed or non-flat surface?
Have the Latency issues been fixed with the audio completely? I've read mixed reports.
I'm thinking about this because Dell offered me a system exchange for my m1330(T7500,LED,Intel X3100,250GB) and said I would be given a SXPS 13 since m1330 is no longer being shipped.
I notice that when I have SLI turned off, there is a stutter effect when maximizing and minimizing windows - this was occurring both in the Vista pre-installed as well as the Windows 7 x64 currently installed. When running SLI, no such issues occur.
As I want to disable SLI to avoid the excessive fan noise and save on battery life (I don't ever play videogames, and this was sent as a replacement), I want to figure out why this is happening.
1. What could be the cause of this? I can't imagine that a single 8700m GT isn't capable of smoothly rendering window max and minimization.
2. Would a forceware driver be better than the stock Dell drivers? If so, can someone recommend the latest, well-liked and stable forceware driver for Windows 7 x64? I know that some are better than others but navigating laptopvideo2go.com is a bit confusing for me.
Does inverting colors on a macbook pro save battery life? Is this because it takes less energy to display black then it does white? would this apply to any laptop?
My system (Inspiron 1564 - Windows 7) is still configured as I received it from Dell. The C drive is 58.5 Gb and the D drive is 164 Gb.
The problem is that everything saves to the C drive and nothing uses the D drive.
I do not want to reformat in one drive, happy to keep 2 but want pictures, documents etc to be saved to the D drive as the C drive is getting full up. How do I make the change to point these files to the D drive?
I may take them apart and do AS5 but I dont think it will make a difference. I took some pictures and I will post them in a bit but I am having problems. I was able to enable SLI and I ran 3DMark06 and I got 9937 so I went to overclock my video card and RivaTuner gave me some prompt that it has not been tested with my drivers and and would not run properly. Once in Rivatuner I noticed I am not able to overclock my vid card or anything. So I tried to reinstall rivatuner and nothing. Then I uninstalled my videocard 171.16 drivers and ran drivecleaner, reinstalled my drivers and same thing. I even tried the new 174.12 from laptopvideo2go and still nothing.
I just recently bought a 8800m gtx card with part number xm888 for my m1730 to replace the 8700m sli card that came with it.
My question is whether my 8800m gtx card is sli or not. With the 8700m, when i check my display properties it tells me it has a total of 512mb memory, which makes sense since it is two 256mb cards. But when i do the same thing for the 8800m card it tells me i have 512mb video memory. Does this mean my card is single and not sli? Or is my card two 256mb cards?
Correct me if i am wrong, i read some old threads and people who got the same 8800m card with part number xm8800 said it was a sli card with 1gb memory. Physically, the 8800m i have looks exactly like the 8800m sli cards that have been displayed all over the forum.
there are so many people with a dead 8800m gtx. Mine died a week back. Technician came yesterday.. replaced motherboard to see if it made things alright..It didnt. Now they are telling me that I will have to wait another week for the replacement parts which (is supposed) to be arriving a week later from Malaysia. (BTW I am from India.) If anybody here would be to let me know if 8800m are actually being replaced or not (especially in Asia)?
I have read many posts in this forum with most people from the USA and few in Europe having their M1730 being replaced with AW m17x. Any idea on whats the scenario in Asia?
What should I expect from dell a week from now? Any chances that I could actually get a 8800m replacement as I was told?
If they tell me to wait for, say a week or two more, do I have any other option but to wait? I asked them to provide me a temporary laptop replacement till the issue was fixed, but they said they dont have such facilities.
Crysis UpDated: (F'n vista caused the setting not to save right) The following benchmarks where done using Crysis benchmark util I found over at guru3d.
2/13/2008 10:32:44 AM - Vista Beginning Run #1 on Map-island, Demo-benchmark_gpu DX10 1900x1200, AA=No AA, Vsync=Disabled, 32 bit test, FullScreen Demo Loops=3, Time Of Day= 9 Global Game Quality: VeryHigh ============================================================== TimeDemo Play Started , (Total Frames: 2000, Recorded Time: 111.86s) !TimeDemo Run 0 Finished. Play Time: 186.87s, Average FPS: 10.70 Min FPS: 4.27 at frame 90, Max FPS: 22.58 at frame 1189 Average Tri/Sec: -9011310, Tri/Frame: -841973 Recorded/Played Tris ratio: -1.09 !TimeDemo Run 1 Finished. Play Time: 144.52s, Average FPS: 13.84 Min FPS: 4.27 at frame 90, Max FPS: 22.58 at frame 1189 Average Tri/Sec: -11535945, Tri/Frame: -833573 Recorded/Played Tris ratio: -1.10 !TimeDemo Run 2 Finished. Play Time: 140.40s, Average FPS: 14.24 Min FPS: 4.27 at frame 90, Max FPS: 22.58 at frame 1189 Average Tri/Sec: -11881713, Tri/Frame: -834120 Recorded/Played Tris ratio: -1.10 TimeDemo Play Ended, (3 Runs Performed)...
When this card comes out at the end of the year, will it get the same 3dmarks scores and fps in old/new games as the desktop version or will it be a little faster then the 8700m? I hope its going to be same as the desktop version.
I get an average fps of 31 using DX9 Very High Cvars along with a Very High config, this running in DX9 in Vista with 8800m GTX overclocked to 625/1500/950 and this at 1920x1200 native res on my XPS M1730 ...
All my systems in my sig have replaced GPU's in a less than a year.
Is this what I get for trying to get a performance GPU's?
Kind of ennoying because I hate the tech's to come to my place and rape my system - I'm not saying all techs do, but I only had one guy who was really careful w/ my system when he was replacing parts. Others just didn't give a damn, which even lead to replacing my M1330.
I caught him when some plastic part from mobo flew off my system, and when he closed the system up, the system refused to boot up lol.
my XPS gen 1 w/ ATI still runs okay at my mom's place.
Anybody else wondering why we haven't seen anything coming out with the 8800m Nvidia cards?
Alienware had their big product release 11/19/07 for their new laptops with the 8800m cards then they pulled the link from their website.
Dell, who usually has the newest stuff doesn't mention them.
The boutique vendors like Voodoo pc and Falcon-nw that pride themselves on offering the latest hardware don't offer them. No press reviews in the print.
I've seen one on line mini review of bench marks from a clevo type laptop with an 8800m video card and that is it.
I wonder if nvidia is having a harder time manufacturing the 8800 62 nM cards than they have admitted. It would explain why the standard 8800 video cards are hard to get as well
I have read in other forums that you can put the 9800m GT BIOS on a 8800m GTX card on some systems. I want to do this because I am experiencing the yellow screen problem and dell did not release a fix for all cards. I have a dell xps m1730.
I just bought a new Dell M1730 with 4 gigs of ram and the Intel Core 2 X9000 processor.
It has the 8800m SLI video card(s) in it. I installed Everest and it consistently says that the GPU temperature is running around 160 degrees F. I am *not* doing anything other than surfing the web and haven't been. Is this normal? The harddrive and cpu temperatures both seem fine. They are 91F and 90F respectively. Any ideas why the GPU would be so high especially since I'm not really doing anything (playing games for instance) that would push it to it's limits? I did buy a notebook cooler but it isn't here yet. It's sitting on a flat surface with decent airflow.
I'm just a little concerned as I don't want it to burn up.
http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archi...customers.aspx The parent blog has a lot of announcements about the XPS line which so many of you are interested in. Good place to verify rumors or pick up new ones :-)
I'm another one of those waiting for an 8800M GTX (Dell PN XM888) replacement...
Replacement was initiated by Dell in early September, was told backorder until September 21. On September 21, backorder was pushed to October 5...
I've made a bit of noise and I'm at the "Consumer Escalation" level, but I know there's the "Executive Escalation" level as well. At this point, I've got a Service Call number for a system replacement, but it's showing no activity....
DISCLAIMER! - I will not be responsible for what you do with your cards. However, I wanted to create a thread that would show those that want to play what the 8800m GTXs are capable of.
Before we get started. Let me explain the theory and the reasoning behind this whole thing.
Dell is not in the business of creating computers that burn up, and as most are very aware, they factor in a lot of room for overclocking and game enthusiasts that want to push their hardware to the limit. Here however, they did a "no no" IMO. However it's also the only way that they could tame the beast the 8800 is.
At the heart of the problem is the Dell PSU which is only rated at 230 watts and is close to being maxed and general heat generated by the cards themselves.
The standard 8800s as they arrive from dell, are set to run @ 1.00 volts. This however is a long shot from desktop versions of the cards running @ over 1.3 volts which are near identical in architecture. (some desktop users volt their's to over 1.4 volts!!!!)
What gives? Well from doing a little research, I found out that Dell, is not alone in undervolting these cards and Clevo along with dell does this as well except they undervolt even more! Down to 0.95V!!
Now the benefit of the undervolt, is that you generate a lot less heat. However the less voltage you allow the card, the less stable the card becomes at higher clock frequencies. From reading the posts on this forum alone, I noticed that most people run into artifacting between 620mhz and 645mhz core clocks and 950 memory clocks. The reason for this, is that at those clocks, you are asking the GPUs to do more work, then the voltage supplied to them will allow. All cards are different, but for the most part will run into stability problems before they run into heat problems. Testing this, I found that the GPU fans don't even kick on high during Crysis a game that should push any GPU and its fans to high................................
I know a few of you have 8800GTX SLI setups right now. What kind of temps do those cards hit under a heavy load such as Crysis? Are any of you overclocking them yet? How many fans does the M1730 have, and how loud are they on high speed?
