Dell 7710 gpu upgrade

I got it to install using my changes

 

Update. It is fully working using my changes to the internal gpu! I will update this post to reflect what I changed. Thank youso much Aaron for the help!

 

i am having a MAJOR Issue. i cannot disable optimus for any reason, otherwise the setup doesnt work. (nothing on screen and nothing during post) is there any way to mod the dell bios to allow loading of this card? Or do i have to flash the vbios to something else using a hw programmer?

 

A little surprised to hear this, but not tremendously, it's always unknown territory with these GPU upgrades.
You can switch back to Optimus on by resetting the BIOS (pull the coin-cell battery) — assuming you figured this out already.
Does it work with an external display (i.e. HDMI) while graphics switching is turned off?

The only thing that I can suggest is try different 1070 vBIOS images and see if any of them work better. You shouldn't need a hardware programmer to flash — well, I guess i'm not totally sure if the nvflash tool works with Pascal cards, but that's what I used to flash my K5000M back when I was messing with that. vBIOS flashing always carries some risk.

You should always flash with graphics switching ON so that you can recover if something goes awry. You might have to pass "override" flags to nvflash to get it to flash anyway if the hardware ID appears to be wrong. (There are also special commands you can pass to re-flash in the event that something goes wrong in the middle of a flash and the card appears dead, happened to be twice.)

 

I was thinking on this and wanted to follow up. I just remembered something that I was fighting with back in June/July...

At the office, we have a pair of Precision 7510's that both have Quadro M1000M GPUs. They can't be used with Optimus turned off. Usually, they will work once and then fail after a while or after a reboot. When I say "fail" I mean that the display will not power on and the machine does not appear to get beyond the POST state (it just powers off after a while). To get them working again I have to jump through hoops to reset the BIOS to default settings, turning graphics switching back on. I never dug into this because we are perfectly fine running these machines with graphics switching turned on, but I assumed that it must be some sort of BIOS/vBIOS bug since it happens with both of them. I wonder if you are running into the same thing (Precision 7510 and 7710 share the same BIOS), it might be a problem with the system and (some?) NVIDIA GPUs rather than just your GeForce 1070.

 

The machine still boots with switchable graphics off, without the display on the laptop lighting up, so I know it's getting through post. but I am unsure of what vbios to flash. I have the latest bios for this card. If I try to flash the dell vbios I get gpu mismatch. But with the switchable graphics turned off, the display doesn't even come on at all. I will definately try an external monitor later, but with optimus on and something connected to the hdmi, I cant go past 120 hz setting for the monitor itself(hp omen 24 144hz) but the card does render more than that without issues. Pascal cards have a different encryption within the vbios, making it impossible to flash molded bios with nvflash. You can only flash official bios otherwise you get a cert 2.0 error.

The other thing that I thought might have been the issue, but after doing some research isnt, is the fact that the panel in these models are NOT lvds. So there really shouldn't be any reasoned why this doesn't work

 

Also. With the switchable graphics turned off, I nothing is displayed on the external monitor. I am attempting something else by using a dell dock. Will update.

Update. So I am able to see the screen when connected to a dell dock as seen in the picture. But nothing on hdmi or laptop screen. I am perturbed by this. And could really use some insight.



Update2: it gave me a code 43 error on that gpu and told me to restart. Doing so still led me to windows stopped this device because it reported problems

 

Have you tried with graphics switching on and also "direct discrete output mode" on as well (not sure the exact wording but it is a checkbox on the same screen as the switchable graphics toggle in the BIOS). That should allow external displays to be run directly by the dGPU. (i.e. if your laptop lid is shut then the Intel GPU is totally out of the loop.)

Just because your vBIOS has the highest version number doesn't mean that it is the best one to use. NVIDIA customizes the vBIOS based on requirements from different OEMs that will be using the GPU in their notebooks. It's possible that there is an official version with a lower version number that will not have this problem... Anyway like I said, if using nvflash to flash (can it flash "official" vBIOS images successfully?) you will need to use one of the override flags to get past the mismatch thing. Your hardware ID likely doesn't match any "regular" vBIOS images, just like it doesn't match any of the entries in the NVIDIA driver INF file.

 

That's the only way I do it. I will try to flash older msi bosses, as well as buy an hw programmer and reflash it to a dell vbios at some point if this doesn't work. And it can flash official msi bios with nvflash and the -6 flag. But I cant flash a different vendor using nvflash.

 

Flashing different bioses are a no go. i am getting a code 43 error in windows now with the stock vbios and latest drivers with a modded inf that worked before. i dont know whats going on and i really need some help just making this card work again. any ideas?