M15x & 6970M / 6990M - What you need to know - upgrading, problems, solutions

Sure when i get home i will get the images for you

edit: ill do it tomorrow.......

 

Just use the backplate of your previous card...

 

I am a little nervous about that but obviously it has successfully been done. I am waiting on a new heatsink because one of the screws is stripped and caught with a pin.
Slv7 can you or any one else give me tips on what to do with that backplate. I probably missed the post with instructions because I was freaking out earlier.

 

Scusa, sei ITA ?

 

No idea what that means.

 

Sorry if i am coming off as sounding like an idiot. When i performed this procedure it was after working 12 hours yesterday. As a result, i wasn't as careful as I should have been and messed up the backplate. I do still have the backplate from the 5850m which to me seems a lot more robust then the backplate from the 6970m but I was under the impression that the 5850m backplate wasn't an optimal backplate solution. I didnt get far enough to see how people got it to work well. I was asking to see if any body had any helpful tips so i wouldn't still have issues with my laptop shutting down after 5 minutes.

Once again sorry for sounding like an idiot

 

I was just overreacting due to being overworked and finals for school. It even crossed my mind to just buy a M18x and throw the 6970m I have in there

 

I used the backplate from my 5850m with the 6970m in my M15x. It's not a perfect fit, but works well enough.

 

Hi there,

Just made my upgrade
I had I7 720 and GTX 260

Bought I7 920 and 6970M
Everything works great, gaming Red Orchestra and Serious Sam at max.
I just did my repaste job today but I'm wondering if the temps are not too high?
CPU
Core 0 - 76°
Core 1 - 80°
Core 2 - 76°
Core 3 - 79°

GPU Overclock 700-900
Thermal diode - 73°
DispIO - 73°
MemIO - 91°
Shader - 78°

Before changing CPU everything was like 10° less...
What would you recon?

 

These are gaming temps, or running stress tests?

 

These are gaming temps.
Afte the repaste, I did yesterday.
Seems to get down a bit but still very high.

Could it be bad paste job?

 

It does look a little. If you ran OCCT on the GPU and CPU (not at the same time), that'd make it easier to tell.

 

Ok here are the pics as promised Hel20es, sorry i took a couple of days.
Anyways i put .5mm fujipoly on the back they are very squishy . The fujipoly on the top are 1mm. The white pads are phobya 1mm they are not sticky but of abit better quality, and very tough. The grey pads or some generic type i got off of ebay they are 4mm not stick but squishy like the fujipoly. the green circle is where the heat pipes sit on the pads(grey and white too) u can see the indention them. The red circle are just to show that i kept the 6990m backplate, and also you can see that i use e-clips to provide tension on the heatsink screws. and everything fits nice and tight. And by the way, YES, my last paste job was not my best...lol







And just for abit of fun after i repasted, i run a 3D Mark Vantage bench, a slight OC on the gpu and a good overclock on the cpu.

 

What are your temps Mexic00ls?

 

I'm still having shutdowns as well, after trying all the padding. Why is this card so troublesome for some of us?

 

highest on the cpu was core 3 hit 84c
i forgot to record thru gpu-z but i check highest temp and they were
temp #1 83c
temp #2 96c
temp #3 90c

 

first of all +rep to all your effort Mexic00ls. Saving all the images for reference now.

still haven't get my hands of the pad yet, but hopefully when it arrives, this will solve the issue.

 

Cool, checked my paste job.
It was vietnam.
Really must have done it with a spoon.
All the paste was spread around the core nothing on it.
The white thermal paste given by Laptop monkey is way too liquid, compare
to the blue paste given by MXM upgrade which is thick and works perfectly.

So I did it again and now the temps felt down from 90° to 70° for the highest
and under 70° for the average CPU/GPU which is I believe normal.

Now I can go for the CPU overclock...another step.

By the way do you think for gaming 4GB 1333 of ram is better than 8GB 1066 of memory?
And can I overclock the 6970M way more than 750/1000

 

Hi guys,

Although padding and undervolting the card helped me a lot to avoid shutdown, my computer shut down yesterday after 1 hour of skyrim (don't know why i can usually play this game for hours without issues).
Seems like this card won't work flawlessly for some people. The questions are WHO and WHY.
Here are my specs:
-M15X 900p 150w psu
-Windows 7 64 bits family edition (FRESH INSTALL)
-i7 720qm (max temp 60!!)
-8 Go G.skill 1333mHz
-SSD Samsung 830 256 Go
-MXM UPGRADE 6970m (no oc, undervolt @1.0v, max gpu temp 76, max mem IO temp 83)

Who else have shutdowning problems? What are your specs? Are there different motherboard's types for the M15X?

 

ah, so ram plays no part in shutdown. Thanks flo

i have similar combo specs to yours. the i7-720 and 6970m.

From my research it seems that most of the people who have no shutdown issues have the 920/940 instead of 720. So my prediction is the CPU itself. Don't know why but that's what i came up with.

 

Have you 150w psu? I too think the cpu could be the culprit. Does anybody else experience shutdown with the i7 720?
@svl7: What do you think?

 

nope, people experience shutdowns with both PSU with the same spec. mine is 720 by the way.

svl7 is using 920 so he's in the clean

 

I did upgrade 6970, the fan at maximum,

temperature:
GPU: 60° (idle)
CPU: 37/38° (core 1,2,3,4)

Alienware M15x EC:
Temp 0: 90°
Temp 1: 44
Temp 2: 44
Temp 3: 41
Temp 4: 35
Temp 5: 49

 

I have
-M15X 900p 150w psu (i believe...it is the standard right?)
-Windows 7 64 bits family edition
-i7 620m
-4gig ram
-256gig HDD
-6970m from Table21

 

Repaste the GPU and check whether the heatsink is making proper contact with the die, also check out the backplate / heatpipe mod.

Hmm, I dunno... there's only one thing that I can think of which could have an influence (when looking at the CPU), but that's all speculating.
The 720qm comes with 6M cache, the 620m with only 4M, that's not much compared to the 8M of the 920xm. The less cache, the more the CPU needs to access the RAM, which increases workload of the bus. At the same time, the faster GPU uses the bus a lot more than any card which was regularly available with the M15x, this might lead that a component which is responsible for the bus overheats or whatever.
As I said, that's only wild guessing, I don't know the detailed specs of the M15x, but the bus certainly was never designed for such a traffic. Finding out whether the CPU is responsible for the crashes is only possible by checking what happens when there's an XM in the system.

 

nice explanation svl7, may be that's the final answer to the solution. can other forumers confirm on this ? meaning those with 920/940 and 6970/6990 combo have shutdown issues. examples of this is at around less than 15 minutes, shutdown occurs when playing games, temperature never reaches above 90.

 

Thank you svl7! That makes sense! Someone on a french forum asked dell about the 6970 and M15X, the technician answered that the card's frequency bus was too high for the motherboard.

 

Svl7 ,

I need some guidence in here or anyone could help me to check if this is going to be ok or no:

I want to upgrade my M15x , it is the first release that came with BIOS A01 and I happend to be one of the people in disaster of the Failed A03 BIOS , sent it to "Dell U.K" since I live in Saudi Arabia and they replaced the Motherboard and that was like almost a year and a half now.

Now I have BIOS A09
Processor :i7-Q720.
8 GB RAM @BUS 1333.
GTX 260m.
Fatcory shipped PSU (150 Watt)
6 Cells Battery.

I want to upgrade to either AMD 6970m or 6990m , But I went through all of this thread and I've seen many people having problem with Shutdowns and most of the people having this issue are "720Q" users, no one "that i've seen yet " with 920xm or 940xm having this issue.

I really want to go for the best out there which is "I can say 6990m".

What should I really have to put into my consideration, Will I get shutdowns with my current 720Q Processor or I have to upgrade to 920/940 xm?Will I get more heat that I need to do something more than applying thermal paste? What about HDMI+Audio over DP ?Do I need to flash vBios for the 6990m or 6970m to work with My M15x.

Is there any big difference between the 6970m and 6990m in terms of modern graphic processing and games ?

Is this 920xm Processor ok ? Shipping by EMS Intel Mobile CPU Core i7-920XM Extreme 8M Turbo 3.2GHz In Tray | eBay

Is this 6990m ok ? ATI Mobility Radeon? HD 6990m GPU MXM 3.0 Type B | eBay

Is this ok 6970m ok ? ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 6970m GPU MXM 3.0 Type B

If you guys having any of the above components for selling, please pm me.

 

I've read the 154 pages (ouch!) and listed people having shutdowns (like described by Hel20es post 1533). Here's a summary:
-darth voldemort cpu i7 720
-kaizenmx cpu i7 740
-MrValle cpus i5 430 and i7 840
-Hel20es cpu i7 720
-Kumquatwrath cpu i7 620
-Ninefingers cpu i7 820
-Myself cpu i7 720

 

nice find and thanks for your hard work flo, yup that should prove my point. there are no 920/940 in the shutdown list.

 

Dav0415 had shutdowns with 920xm (i'm not sure). But his card was a firepro. So what's next? Could someone try swapping around the xm for a qm?

 

I'm not sure if this can help.
I had 720 before...no temps issues.
And I noticed shutdowns when Overclocking 6970M and playing Battlefield Bad company 2. But I'm quite sure it wasn't due to overheating.

Since I got 920 only one shutdown when overclocking 6970M during Serious Sam 3...

So I quit Overclocking...huhu
I think it's more a power supply problem, but I can't tell.

 

great, i just bought this card and it's actually on the truck for delivery today. I'll be pretty pissed if i put this thing in and i have these stupid shut down issues. Yes, i'm running the 720 as well.

okay so here's my question, does anyone with a 720 NOT have any shutdown issues?

 

hmm i'm eager to know too. keep the stats coming !

 

is little?

Card not valid?

 

Hey, I just powered up BF3 this morning and my FPS was in the 20s and I have no idea why, normally it is 40s, 50s. What are the possible causes for this? Stealth mode is disabled, PowerPlay is enabled :x. Also, BF3 is the only game that's been crashing, if that means anything as well; everything else is fine.

 

Same here... no idea why.

 

Haha stupid me, messed up with my clocks

 

sometimes it happens to me too, when you first start playing bf3. way to fix this was just a mere stealth button toggle. oh well it still annoys me anyway.

 

You can add me to the list of shutdowns, with a Q 820.
I guess we'll have to wait until someone drops an XM processor into their system to see if it fixes it!

 

Okay i got my card installed about 3 hours ago and haven't had a shut down yet. I played BF3 single player for 30 minutes no shut down. I played Batman AC for 30 minutes no shutdowns. I've monitored my temps and the highest they've gotten so far is 77c. I run at 45c idle and have gotten to the high 70's while gaming.

I'm have the 720, 4GB 1333, and the 6970. Only real difference i've notice is that i'm running Bios A08.

I'll keep pushing it and see if i get any shut downs.

 

is the fan control issues sorted with the non dell cards ?
not wanting to use hwmonitor, can we flash non dell cards with dell bios to get auto fan control ?

 

hmm, A08, taking note...

any more results ?

@lampredi, the only one which the fans work is the official dell card. other than that you need hwmonitor.

 

Ok,just read another thread where a dell 6970 worked perfect in a clevo/sager 17inch,guy had a thread explaining it, so why not their 6970's in M15x with auto fan ? wished it worked cos I wouldnt want to depend on a app to do fan control.mmm... To SVL7,IS THERE NOTHING WE CAN DO TO GET AUTO FAN CONTROL? A mod of some sort?

 

Ok,just read another thread where a dell 6970 worked perfect in a clevo/sager 17inch,guy had a thread explaining it, so why not their 6970's in M15x with auto fan ? wished it worked cos I wouldnt want to depend on a app to do fan control.mmm... To SVL7,IS THERE NOTHING WE CAN DO TO GET AUTO FAN CONTROL? A mod of some sort?

 

No, there's nothing you can do about it. It's not that bad really though, at least there is an option to get the fans working at all.

 

@owvp702: keep playing! My computer sometimes shuts down after 1 hour gaming (for some reason it occurs when gpu's temp is around 83). Wish it works for you!

 

Has anybody tried the 580m? Would it work?

 

No Body told me , are the cards I posted from eBay ok or not, Thanks

 

I've just ordered a 920xm. We 'll know in a few days if it changes something.I'll keep you informed!!!