Crashes, BSODs, and Hard-Freezes -- Oh My!

So....I got my awesome new M11x R2 in early March and was absolutely thrilled with it. It was perfect for Sketchup and my photography and at the time fulfilled my needs quite well.

Towards the end of March I decided I could live without my desktop for a while, so I sold it, and was amazed how well this little guy could drive my 27.7" monitor...for a while.

That "while" happened when I started playing some games--WoW, SCII, and Portal. Got good frames and all, but I would randomly freeze having to restart the computer before the game would launch again. This could happen after 10 minutes, or three hours but it always seemed to do it to me.

Figuring it must be drivers, I upgraded to the new 270.61--No luck. In fact the problem seemed to worsen--although I got better frames in WoW, the M11x would bluescreen giving me driver errors.

So I went to Dells site and downloaded their ancient working drivers...but I had zero luck there as my frame rates were easily below 5 and would go UP when I forced the Intel HD graphics.

After some research I found that many M11x owners have luck with the 266.58 mobile drivers, but they just revert me back to freezing (and the GPU wont launch, I can't even open the Nvidia control panel without restarting).


Dell was no help. They had a guy remote into my desktop and basically un-intalled my drivers with drivesweeper (what I was already doing) and try a couple dell drivers. He ended up forgetting to install a driver set and said "that should work, if it doesn't we will replace your GPU--just email me." Well I waited a week trying to live with it and emailed him. Its been four days so its not like I've waited that long but I need some help in the mean time from you guys.

Is there a fix for me?

 

Are you running stock clocks?

Hard freezes while gaming could be instability in clocks as well as many other problems. Let me know what clocks you are running at and then try to get an idea of what your temperatures are when under stress (HW monitor, stuff like that.) Also, did the games run fine before putting them on the external monitor? Do they still run fine when not on the external monitor?

We shall see if we can troubleshoot this.

 

Thanks, Xtrophy. Sorry for my late reply, I went out of town on a business trip and didn't take the M11x.

System is running at stock clocks/volts--does increasing GPU voltage increase stability, and is that even possible with this BIOS?

I suppose that WoW did run fine with the built-in monitor for about half a week--I had been using the external with it for gaming almost exclusively after that with no problems for several months.

Going to reformat and try the 275.33 driver and I will grab riva tuner and monitor temps.

Dell still hasn't replied to my email (that they asked me to send if I still had problems). Going to call them if I can't get it sorted out.

 

Sounds like a faulty GPU. My first R2 had one I had to get on the phone with dell for 5 hours before they finally changed my motherboard.

To confirm try lowering your shader clock to 980 while linked. If you dont freeze up in 5hours then its definitely the GPU.