Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
In January, while playing a game my 18x froze mid-game and was forced to reboot. Upon reboot, the screen did not move past the "flying windows" glowing symbol. Earlier that day windows update occurred and i had an image of that. I went back to that image, and machine would not allow login into windows. Figuring it was a broken driver, and having backups of my data, and unable to resolve issue, i reinstalled all my items again using my factory disks. Upon doing this, windows would allow me to go in.
I then tried updated to a stable latest driver (last December from AMD Ibelieve) and .machine froze once again, and unable to log in. I called Alienware, and they sent a technician out to look at it, and replaced the graphics cards. Ever machine test ran, looked good. The technician satisfied, packed up and left. The next morning I booted the pc, started a game, and the machine froze yet again... unable to get into windows yet again. With Alienware support on the phone, I went into safe mode to disable the cards. Upon reboot, the machine would not find my SSD. O.O... I sent it back to alienware and the replaced the connector and the machine came back. I attempted to revert back to the original factory driver, but that did not resolve the issue of unable to log into windows.
Once again, I did a complete reinstall, from the factory CD's and factory drivers and everything ok,.... with new cards and new connector. I install an updated driver from AMD... and shortly afterwards, the screen freezes and upon reboot, unable to log back in as screen stuck at the windows symbol... but works fine in safe mode where i could disable the brand-new cards, and it would then allow me to log in as normal.
To verify that any driver other than ones from Dell was the problem. I once again reimaged the drive, with factory software and once complete, installed a driver for them 6970 using the latest AMD catalyst too which installed a m6900 series reference driver. Upon install of driver from AMD, the machine would not allow me to log into windows.... it was stuck their yet again... Going back into safe mode, reverting the driver to the factory driver and rebooting proved to be fruitless... Once a new driver, not from Alienware, but from AMD is installed, the machine wont allow me use of the graphics cards.
I once again reimaged the drive using the factory disks, and factory drivers. and i now can play games normally. But once I install a catalyst center update, different than what Alienware supported, the graphics cards become useless. I can play WoW and ESO beta fine but i am using drivers that are at least 2 years old in very real fear machine becomes unuseable and even unfixable software wise
What in the world is going on?
-factory driver wok fine,
-alll tests come back as good
-update catalyst center and drivers for my m6970 and cards not useable, machine wont load into windows and reverting back to original driver after this wont resolve problem, thus forcing a complete reinstall of factory software from scratch!!!
I only can think that something is breaking a critical driver of my system that is included from AMD or some weird hardware issue not diagnosable with any test, but is fine with factory software....
I can not find anything about this online anywhere.
Please help as i would like to run newer drivers (so far old drivers are fine)
Mystery problem with my 18x m6970.
Discussion in 'Alienware 18 and M18x' started by m18x_owner, Mar 7, 2014.
