~GX660(R) Owner's Lounge~

Better to save for hd 6970m then !

 

I'd avoid the 69xx series due to their reliability issues. The 770m would work. What sort of price could you save to?

 

Hi, I'm new

How can i change timing in GPU on my GX660 to less than 350/500?
Once i had 150/150 and baterry held about 4 hours and temperature was less than now, but after returning from service MSI reflash my bios...

 

You mean the GTX 770M? I was pretty sure Keplers don't work well on the GT663R... Why not the 7970M? Or maybe that's what you meant and just skipped a 9?

 

I've read somewhere that clevo 770M is the only one that works while dell version doesn't. Other kepler cards won't work. Don't know how or why. Anyway, what he meant was the 69xx series namely 6970M and 6990M.

 

I thought the best nVidia card that actually works on the GX/GT660 is the GTX 675M?!

 

The 770M works with modified drivers, it seems the bios they have created for the GK106 chip is more forgiving.

 

Aha... Thanks, Meaker.

 

But the GTX 675M works with standard drivers, right? I am asking because I am thinking of putting one in my GT663R...

 

Try the latest verde driver 331.93, hopefully you shouldn't need to mod it.
NVIDIA DRIVERS GeForce 331.93 Driver (BETA) BETA

 

I will. I just wish I knew for sure beforehand - before getting the 675M, that is.

 

why not go 7970m? almost twice the performance vs 675m and cost considerably low plus no need of modified drivers and all works nice and dandy

 

It has had higher failure rates though and some people don't like AMD.

 

failure of 7970m is somewhat I have YET NOT HAVE seen in MSI laptops! each for their own ofc, but 7970m in MSI GT660/GX660/GT680/GT683/GT780 laptops are the best option of all I feel, nothing brings as much performance for money as AMD 7970m, want more bang and go GREEN-TEAM? Simply go GT-Series MSI and be happy then I say

 

Hi, Firstly many thanks to all the contributors to this thread, your comments have been more than helpful.

I've recently upgraded my GX660R-646UK with both a 920XM and a 7970m I snagged a 180w charger off ebay a whilst back and am happily using that with an SSD (256GB) and more RAM (10GB)

I mainly use the laptop to play TF2 so am hoping to push the 920xm as best I can, Currently I'm using Throttlestop to push it and temps never go over 85°c with them averaging around the 60-75°c mark when gaming. (I could probably lower this with some better Thermal application as mine wasn't the best at the time!)

My problem is I'm currently using the 30H? BIOS which as far as I can remember is the completely stock one.

I've been led to believe that the modded and unlocked version of 30L is the one to use of which I believe I have a copy here -> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13744799/E16F1IMS.zip

I was wondering though if anyone has the most up to date version and if they can post it here? If not I'll be putting the one above onto my laptop in the next few days.

 

youre getting wonderful temps my man, no need to fix something that aint broken or needs tinkering with. There are many more features that are just minor statistical things but nothing serious. The main big idea behind unlocked bios is that you can get some unsupported SSD's for plug-n-play to run in your system. Like I said some SSD's just aint getting detected until people flash unlocked bios and change some settings for SATA ports. You got your system working - leave it alone, keep it steady and humble and enjoy ThrottleStop is the only one and best way working with CPU control so try with that, and I honestly dont believe you will reach any better temperatures for your XM CPU especially if you go OC route, Sometimes you may just have the very fine setup on thermal point of view and even the better thermal paste may lead to higher temps as there are little more variables in setting up heatsink well

 

Cheers for the fast response !

The reason I'm looking to put on the new unlocked BIOS is to hopefully unlock all 4 cores (fully) in the hopes of being able to push the 920xm to maybe 3.0Ghz? over all 4 cores. At the moment I can get 3.1Ghz but no idea if that's on all the cores or not.

Any slight overclock is likely to give huge gains to the fps of TF2 which is mainly what I use the laptop for, Infact if I could clock one core to something silly like 4.5Ghz and have the others down low I might get FPS gains also? If I could get a steady 120fps for example then I would be thinking about possibly getting a 120hz monitor,

 

Seems like you didn't understood UltraGSM reply to you. You don't need unlocked BIOS to that. What you need will be the throttlestop. Look for it and learn how to use it. Besides, the unlocked bios doesn't give you more options on cpu overclocking than the stock bios. Throttlestop can show you at what speed each core and thread of your cpu. 4.5GHz will likely require a lot of power and generate heat. Haven't tried it on just one core though.

 

Thanks, I've think you've confirmed what I needed to know, the BIOS holds nothing over how well I can over clock my 920xm. I'm already using Throttle Stop, I was under the impression that some BIOS's work better with Throttlestop than others as unlocking the full potential of the xm range of processors wasn't something MSI ever had to do with the GX660r as they never sold them with the 920xm's.

I'll try out the unlocked BIOS anyway, if it does unlock anything in the way of letting me use Throttlestop to push it higher I will post the results here.

For another question has anyone successfully fitted or even sourced a 15.6" 120hz monitor to replace the stock one, or simply overclocked the stock one using custom resolutions(and speeds)?

Also has anyone fitted a third hard drive in where the dvd-drive is? I'm thinking of setting myself up with two ssd's (one O/S, one gaming) and a HDD in the DVD Drive bay for storage. If so what are the transfer rates like to the dvd drive?

Thanks again

 

You will not get ANYTHING in terms of BETTER from any unlocked BIOS for your laptop - all of us with XM CPU's tried it and there's nothing new to what you have now
I had GX660R with 940xm and so many others etc etc

I had 2x256GB Vertex4 SSD RAID-0 setup and had additional 1TB HDD in optical-drive bay, speed was @ 1.5Gb/s as reported vs 3Gb/s. For HDD in optical drive is OK, for SSD in optical drive bay is little bottleneck

I can assure you - there is nothing to look for in an unlocked BIOS but trouble IF your current setup works flawlessly perfect. I would stay away from tinkering with stock BIOS in your case.

IF ITS NOT BROKEN - DONT FIX IT!

Best screen you can get is AUO V4 95% RGB LED LCD MATE FINISH. I got one on hand for sale if youre interested btw. Never heard anybody try overclocking any of these LCD's but some Alienware guys did some testings on their m18xR1/R2 screens and were able to go as high as ~100-105 Hz, however, I dont see the benefit but just unnecesarry stress to your LCD hardware. If it wasn't designed to run at that frequency - you're more likely to cause some sort of problem to your LCD than good. Beware. LCD has little CPU too that runs at 40-60Hz range, raising it to double the clock speed etc cant do much good IMO

 

If you're looking for the unlocked bios, try the one as posted by freakyguy59 two pages back. I am clueless regarding the 120Hz monitor but I am also currently using an HDD in my dvd drive bay. As for the speed, I didn't bench it and wasn't really concerned about its speed since I also intended for it to be my storage.

I agree with UltraGSM about flashing the unlocked bios for overclocking. But I think you may need that unlocked bios because of your plan on installing SSDs in your system.

 

I'm already running one SSD and one HDD happily, with decent speeds, but i've yet to benchmark em properly.

I'll steer clear of the BIOS then! Thanks for the heads up, probably not worth the hassle or headache involved.

I'm planning to attempt to overclock my monitor / monitors tonight. I normally use a 27" external ASUS that i'll try to overclock seperately from the laptop display also. I'm gonna use powerstrip if I can't find an easier way.

Last stupid question, has anyone managed to get three monitors working concurrently with the 7970m. I know the 5870m had issues doing this but seemingly the 7970m also dosen't want to let me run the laptop monitor whilst running a monitor through the HDMI and VGA ports.

Thanks again for the fast responses, is good to still have experts for this laptop.

 

If you were able to make your SSD work in your machine, then I find no reason for you to flash. Good choice on steering away from it.

AFAIK, the dual display limit is not determined by the card but by the motherboard. (I'm talking about laptops.) Our motherboard doesn't support triple monitor setup. Laptops usually only support up to two active displays. That is why on the recent msi notebooks, the triple screen is included in the advertisement as it is not usually supported in laptops.

Edit: I tried to make a quick search about the triple display on 7970M. Base on card specs, it supports up to 6 displays but some are having trouble enabling it. Not sure if what I've said about the limit is still valid. I've read about that ages ago. But I found nothing about making it work though.

 

I could run 7970m on my internal LCD and external at the same time I remember, but never tried the 3 monitor setup as addition using VGA port. I believe its mostly because of resolution difference. VGA can only support so much as far as 720p I think and HDMI and internal laptop monitor running at 1080p just wont allow your VGA to light up due to resolution difference. However you can try dropping your primary LCD resolution to 720p (1600x720) and then plug in VGA cable, and lastly HDMI, and report how it went.

 

Just a special opportunity...

 

Out of the pre-haswell models you will only ever get 2 displays including the internal. So Internal + external or 2x external.

 

Hi guys. As my GX660's getting old, I decided to reinstall windows just to make it a bit faster and less "buggy" (Chrome crashes etc.) So I decided to burn recovery DVD, but when I launch the app MSI BurnRecovery, it says "recovery files are missing". Laptop was once in a servis where they just reinstalled BIOS and probably forgot to put in recovery files. So my question is, could someone possibly save that recovery files in .iso somewhere so I can get it? Or should I download Windows from here Download Windows 7 ISO ( 32bit / 64bit ) from Microsoft's Official servers, burn that image and install it with my windows key?

 

A fresh install with your key is a good idea, just make sure you have the drivers you need on a USB stick to save time.

 

You can use the ISO image to load, and then enter the key on the back of unit.
Drivers are available at below page, you may also need the utilities, and don't forget to install Dotnet framework 4.5 first.
GX660 Win7 x64 drivers

 

Thanks a lot guys!

 

Anyone here using a Crucial m500 ssd? I want to make sure that it will work on gx660 because I remember someone posted here that you must flash the BIOS in order for the SSD to work.

 

only very few SSD's will work without system BIOS flashing to an unlocked version. Its not that bad of a thing with going flashing system BIOS to an unlocked version one so you can do appropriate settings changes to allow those SSD's to be utilized, its just a way some SSD's will need to be treated any SSD will work eventually so not to worry I'd say, bite the bullet, get the SSD you feel you like the best and then you will push yourself trough to do whatever it needs to be to get it going in your system.

BR

 

Crucial has good compatibility even with the older MSI products such as GX660 without an unlocked BIOS.

 

Thanks for the replies!

 

Hi all,

I have registered just to post here. I have an ageing GT660R_064UK (could you tell by my username?)

It is the model with an i5, 1TB HDD, HD5850 graphics card and 6GB ram.

I want to do what I can to extend it's life as I can't afford to build a full PC at the moment.

Firstly I'd like to beef the graphics card up. I read on this thread that an ATi 7970M would work but I haven't dug enough out of this thread to identify what is required. Does it simply go in the place of the existing card? Does the existing heatsink line up over the 7970M GPU? Do I need to do anything to make it work beyond paste the heatsink onto it?

People make reference to it being low cost. To be honest I'm struggling to even find anywhere that sells them! Is there a specifc manufacturer version I need? Any advice or point to a proper guide for this would be extremely useful.

After the graphics card, I am wondering what else can be upgraded. I assume I can swap in more RAM if I want, but how much more?

Can the CPU be upgraded? If so, to what?

Any advice greatly received. I don't want to mothball the laptop yet but it is starting to creak. I own an Oculus Rift, and it demands that the games are rendered twice to get the stereoscopic vision required for 3D VR. The HD5850 just isn't up to this job. The 7970M would be a huge leap forward.

 

You need the right heatsink or skills with a dremel to modify your current one, you can get the one from the GX60.

Ebay is your best bet and you want one with the HM bios on it ideally since your system does not use switchable graphics.

Your ram is currently limited by your processor to two slots so 2x8GB should work.

The same generation quad core will work (eg 2300m to 2720qm) you can't move to a later generation product (eg 2300m to 3720qm).

Once you go to quad core you can use 4 memory slots.

 

He's GT660 and not GT680 series so he is on 1st gen i5 cpu, best bang or buck is i7 - 920xm. another good move is to get ultra low latency RAM, and like Meaker said - 7970m with early DELL VBIOS or HM VBIOS from CLEVO/SAGER/EUROCOM vendor is the job

You got 3 slots to fill your ram to max which as far as I have tested on my GX660R in the past was 12GB 1333 DDR3 RAM

 

thanks guys. like a total plonker I realised now after getting home from work that I have the GX660R not the GT660R. how does this change things?

mine has i5-460M 1x 4gb and 1x 2gb ram (so I assume as you say that can go up to 2x 4gb without a cpu change)

Is the heatsink in this laptop able to accomodate the 7970M without mod or should I look to source one myself?

thanks again.

 

you can do DIY on 5870m heatsink to fit 7970m card, please use search button on the top of the page "7970m heatsink DIY" and no it doesnt change things, you still can up your CPU to 920xm (very close or slightly better (if OCed) to performance of 2'nd gen i7-2630qm CPU) and what you have right now is pretty weak CPU I dare say. Even with i5 I would try bite the bullet and go 12GB (3 x 4GB 1333MHz CL9 or CL8 RAM) and if your CPU doesnt like that and shows only 8GB @ 1066MHz, then you can always use option in the future of upgrading the CPU and utilize all the ram @ full potential.

Advising regarding RAM upgrade from my own past experience, folks kept on saying to others (even intel states the same, but however...) that i7-2670qm wont see more than 16GB max and wont run more than 1333MHz, and guess what - Installed 32GB DDR3 @ 1600MHz and it all ran just perfectly fine

Regarding heatsink I would strongly recommend save your time, efforts and possible headache and just get proper MSI 7970m heatsink from GX60 or GX80 laptop series, if you look @ NBR market place there are folks selling those cheap!

 

thank you very much. this could just save me a fortune i was going to spend on a new rig

 

best upgrades to your machine is RAM to 12GB @ 1333MHz CL8 or CL9, i7-920XM or i7-940XM, and of course GPU to 7970m, and of course the SSD of your choice if you havent got one already. Such laptop would do you very well for few more years to come or even more. also very good thing to upgrade if your LED LCD screen if you ever consider about having better colours better viewing angles and better contrast as such all in one 95% NTSC RGB LED, many folks has done it before and oh boy, results are eye-blowing I had upgraded myself to this LCD and that was the best ever upgrade that you can see and feel every time you start up your laptop. (I still got this panel spare in the box for purchase if anybody considers it )

One more thing, as you upgrade your GPU and CPU you want to look in to PSU upgrade as well, as you will need 180W PSU or more, well if you dont OC too much if you would be happy with slight OC on CPU and GPU or none OC at all 180W will work just fine as they tend to have little more headroom over 180W but if you are thinking of doing some serious OCing and doing extra cooling mods to support the OCing you may want to go DELL 240W PSU option (also some DIY involved, where's 180W is all direct Plug-and-play PSU no mod required.)

 

hey guys my friends MSI GT780 motherboard died , sandybridge gtx570m model .

He is willing to sell me gtx 570m for 100 dollars which is a good price.

I see the card will fit in the gt660R , The size looks the same etc

Will the card boot up without any problemd?

Cant test atm before i buy it , he is out of town atm , but can ship it to me.

 

Hard to say, but probably not.
Hopefully someone who has tried this before can give you an answer about this.

 

msi 570m wouldnt work in msi ? hard to believe

 

it would, just make sure you get the heatsink wit that card too

 

Thanx guys , seems my friend is away till 8th of jan so will not get it anytime soon.

My other friend is upgrading his gt780 with gtx 570m to 770m , i can grab his card if his card arrive before the 8th

 

Yes, and heatsink too since he will need a new heatsink too.

 

Will the GX660 / GT663 boot without a dedicated videocard provided the CPU is an Arrandale?

 

no, it wont boot

 

GPU in the CPU isn't connected to the display so the screen will stay in black.