Trials and tribulations installing a 1070 in a M6800

I think you might be on to something here.

I've seen it occasionally playing Kingdome Come: Deliverance. I played this quite a bit with Proton/Steam on Linux and did not have any issues, however playing it on Win10, I've seen it several times. Running it on Linux seems to be bottle necked by CPU a bit. Monitoring the GPU, it rarely gets up past 75% utlization. Under Win10, it's running full tilt.

I had tried playing some older games, like Risen, Gothic 3 and _every_ time I ran the game, it would BSOD, usually just as the game finished loading. (Not the intro screen, but actual game play). However, I tried running them on battery (which limits the power states of the GPU), and they ran just fine, even if I crank up the frame rate limiter in the GeForce Experience settings.

 

Found this, which appears to just disable boost while you leave the application open, putting a cap on the clock speed at the rated speed.
https://developer.nvidia.com/setsta...-getting-more-deterministic-timestamp-queries
(Possibility for a way to "throttle" the GPU without forcing it to P8.)

 

Have you had any more thoughts on this? I experienced another BSOD today with no external displays connected and the system sitting totally idle. This random crashing isn't really something that I can put up with and I'm sort of out of ideas, so I am thinking that I am going to sell the card and switch back to a M5000M.

 

Nothing new, really, only that I'm starting to think my issues are definitely related to specific games and probably specific to my "hack" of reassigning ACPI OperationRegions to different spots.

I dumped the whole ACPI reserved and NVS memory regions to hex and rooted around in it a bit. There are some large sections that match up with the vBIOS in rather strange places. I just re-installed my 980M with the intent of doing the same and seeing where those OpRegions I re-located might actually supposed to be.

I feel your frustration though. I got it working about 95% with a Win10 VM, then about 90% of what I wanted in pure Linux, and now I've got it about 95% with bare metal Win10. Always _so_ close.

 

I got my ACPI memory regions dumped with my 980M. Sure enough, the 3 ACPI OperationRegions that i re-located are definitely supposed to have specific addresses. Actually, 2 of them are fixed locations. In particular, there is an Nvidia OpReg that has some pointers to places where the vBIOS is shadowed in memory. (which explains why I was finding those scattered around in the NVS memory region.)

Next up, I'm going to try re-locating those regions to the same spots with the 1070.

Btw, does anybody know if you can get replacement ribbon cables for the keyboard/touchpad/palmrest? Mine are getting close to their upper limit of removal/reinstallation.

 

Built a bootloader version that patched in the OpRegions from the 980M into the spots for the 1070. So far, it appears to be working well.

1) Haven't had any BSOD for VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE for KCD since.
2) Still had it for some older games. Using Nvidia "whisper mode" or whatever to limit the FPS for those games to < 100fps fixes the problem there. I believe this was a completely separate issue.
3) CPU is properly turbo'ing when necessary. However, still doesn't clock down below 2.9GZ. I'm guessing this is another region to find and replace.

 

Looks like you are on the right track.Thanks for keeping us updated.

 

You're on the money now!

Not sure whether it is Dell's BIOS causing this issue or Nvidia changed the way their vBIOS works. My guess is, it could be a bit of both and Dell never bothered to update their older laptops' BIOS to match Nvidia's changes.

 

Dell shouldn't have to "update their BIOS to match NVIDIA's changes"... These cards are working in some other systems from the era (i.e. Alienware systems that had MXM slots) and also desktops can be updated with newer cards with no issues usually. It's sounding to me like there are outright problems with Dell's BIOS that went undiscovered because it "happened to work fine" with the cards that shipped with the system. Of course, Dell doesn't really expect people to be trying this or support configurations like this, so I doubt that they would actually consider it a "bug"...

 

I just forgot to ask,if anyone is using an EDP lcd screen on the M6800 with either the GTX 1070 or the P5000?
Thanks