**M980NU (X1/Commanche SLI/NP9850) Owners Thread**

The new Verde beta driver that in theory fixes the stutter is out.

Board Message

I'm going to try it out later tonight. Would love to hear any news from the rest of you regarding both the stutter and any other performance or other updates.

 

Nope, it does not fix the stutter!

 

In my M980NU with a x9100 and only one GTX 280M don't stutter anymore.
Finally!!!!!!

 

So I'm not getting stuttering anymore (I've not tested with enough different applications and situations to make a confirmed *fixed* status, but it seems better), but I'm also getting a lot more video issues including hard locks and some other weirdness. I'm going to try to do a fresh driver install later and see if it fixes that. It's a weird trade, but I guess I'll take some hard locks over having sound desync and the other annoying issues.

Btw, I run two 280m cards in SLI.

 

Do u think it would be worth upgrading to the X8100?

Just wondering if an I7 would be much faster.

 

Yeah I had a little wierdness with the new 257.15 betas too. I've noticed some people reporting this elsewhere, so Im guessing its just some bugs left in the new driver strain. Im waiting til they go WHQL, until then I'm sticking with 197.44 WHQL.

Obviously in your case you'd perhaps want to go back to say the Dell 197.31 as they also have DPC tweaks.

Dazman, the X8100 is nippy, but its not really THAT much faster than the M980NU unless you're doing a lot of CPU based work, or playing a lot of CPU locked down stuff. The GTX285s are only about 5% faster.

 

Would the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300 be much of a difference?

Can't believe the chip is still so expensive.

 

well its still top of the line for the socket, the older sockets top end CPU T7700? (might be wrong model but principle is correct) are still several hundred pounds on ebay.

But i have changed from m980 to x8100, it is faster, but for gaming its only the 285's that add performance and only about 15%

I cant imagine you are having problems running games yet, so stick with what you have is my opinion and if you are looking to upgrade get the G875 (or equiv from your vendor) with an i7 and a single 480

 

So to upgrade I was told:

"I7 920Xm is around $1250. New X8100 motherboard plus all parts required to upgrade M980NU to x8100 are around $850"

 

$2000?

forget it lol

 

Yeah, £1.3-4k is a massive set out for that sort of upgrade, you could buy an entry level I7 gaming machine for that sort of figure. I'd definately hold off!

 

I wait till the QX9300 comes down in price and get one of those puppies.

 

I reckon you will have to wait a long, long time for it to drop a lot.

 

Aye, perhaps keep an eye out for a second hand ES. The top chips tend to hold value well.

 

i would be surprised if you will get one alot cheaper within 2 years

top end chips from 2 years ago still hold a good price

 

Instead of the QX9300 why not try the q9200. I am using one of these at the present. Still listed as an Extreme and coming in @ 2.4ghz. Very easily overclockable if thats your thing, and at £180 (Bay of Fleas) is well under half the price.

I originally had a X9100 and was trying to hold out for a slight price reduction on the qx9300 but still nearly a year later not even a 1p shift.

Even second hand they still are steep.

 

Shame you couldn't of gotten that deal via HP (if in US) when they were unloading the QX9300 for about $520 us dollars but I'm sure if you had to ship it to the UK or Canada the cost/taxes/etc would of made it not as sweet a deal.

 

So it seems most of you have given up on ever seeing a good driver for your machine, but here's my update on the 257.15s after a week or so of use.

The audio issue seems resolved fore me. That's the good news. Now for the medium/bad news. I use two external displays (28 inches of goodness each...) and these new drivers hate them. After logging into windows I have 60 seconds of extra "load time" where I can't do anything. Trying to move the mouse or click things is a lesson in futility and at best produced frustrating moments so I've learned to not do anything until this odd loading is over. With the monitors not hooked up (i.e. using the laptops tiny 18.4 inch display) this issue does not exist (none of the following issues do as far as I can tell).

So that loading thing wouldn't be enough to bother me, but there is also the issue with the control panel (nvcpl) taking 30 seconds to load and everytime you make any tweak to it it takes another 10 seconds to respond. Needless to say, it's annoying. Again, no issue when using the default, built in display.

Third thing. I had to disable the control panel's ability to put in an option in the context sensitive menu (read right click on desktop and a list of options show up) for opening up the nvcpl. This too would cause a lag bubble for about 7 seconds. You can imagine how awesome that makes having to use right click in Windows. I mean, NOBODY uses right click on their desktop, right? =) Anyhow, at least I fixed that one by disabling the option in the nvcpl and then simply readding my own to the system registry (which doesn't lag the machine out...I believe their registry blurb just has a typo or something, I didn't really look at it to be honest).

Last thing. I had some pretty bad crashing when I was using only one display with these new drivers, but now that I'm using two displays I haven't crashed in a long time. Actually I haven't even once since I hooked up my second monitor. I'm not sure why this is, and frankly, I'm not willing to tinker with things to find out. I'm pretty happy NOT crashing randomly.

Anyhow, that's where I'm at with the new drivers. I hope they bother to read the notes we've all tossed on their forums and that the release build of the drivers fixes these issues for those of us who use secondary displays. Either way it looks like we're moving towards something better. I'm really excited by the idea of not being stuck waiting for individual manufacturers to update the drivers and thereby being stuck on really old, outdated drivers.

Crossing my fingers...

 

Well, these drivers were betas, they've been widely reported as better for the audio, but a bit unstable, so hopefully by the time they hit release with a WHQL set of 25x drivers, they'll be a different revision that has a lot of the instability and kinks worked out.
As it stands the 257.15 were the first semi-official release for general use, and because of that I'd imagine they were as much a test release for this driver branch to try and discover bugs that are hard to find with a limited test set.

Shame its taken them so long to role the DPC tweaks into a driver though, I know sager has posted the modified Clevo driver now (189) but still, taken a bloody long time for it to reach the Verde notebook set.

 

Hi Alex, that's the 189.** drivers which we had a couple of months ago? Still a bit of a mystery as the issue was only reported by a very small number of people and of those it seems that the issue has disappeared with the new Nvidia Verde drivers.

 

Hi Neil, I believe its the same ones (189.4*). I dont have them for comparison anymore, but if my memory serves me correct they're the same revision.

 

i'm in need of help on my cpu... i have np9850 with core 2 q9300. it's 4 core cpu but i've noticed only 2 cores are in use when i'm playing bad copmany2 and MW2.... is this normal?

 

@ GamesCom 2010 / Cologne / Germany we`ll show 3 M980NU case-mods:



"Why?" > To keep the 15% OC under control .

 

Nice

Is the cooling setup in anyway mobile or will it force the DTR to become a small desktop?
Either way its an interesting idea, and its nice to see continued work for the enthusiasts using the machine, now that Clevo has legacied it.

 

What's the latest on the stutter issue?

I'm in Afghanistan so I'm out of touch with things.

 

Dazman: The stutter is mostly fixed in the last few revisions of the nVidia verde drivers. I haven't had much of a problem with that, but I do have some stability issues (which may be primarily because I plug up to two 28 monitors most of the time). Those not using secondary displays seem to have less problems. All in all, I would say the newer drivers are better than the old stutter issues...but as always your mileage may vary.

 

So the 258.96 drivers fixed the problem?

 

@ Dazman, I'm running drivers 257.15, with no problems this end whatsoever in terms of the stutter. But other things have manifested themselves, in terms of display drivers going wonky and reseting themselves.

But I have yet had the time to try the newer ones to see if this is a problem my end or a reported problem and a fix issued with the newer ones.

I believe we are up to version 258.96 but as said no time to try.

What driver version are you using at the moment?

 

Right. Stuttering has been fixed for a few revisions now, but there are a host of new things that may or may not affect you depending on your setup. So...just try 'em out would be my recommendation. =)

 

I was using 256 Beta drivers (Dated May 24) and they didn't help the stutter.

I don't have the laptop with me.

 

I'm trying to remember, but I don't think the first set of 256 fixed the stutter. I believe it was the 257s that first fixed it for me but I had some weird issues with those. The 258's seem to be the best of the 256+ for me with my Sager and the 2x280m cards.

 

You're right, the 256's helped a little, 257's had other manifestations for me and still the current one I'm using.

But what were the weird issues you mentioned. Anything like the screen going black and a little yellow triangle in the task bar stating, something like the nvidia drivers have just reset themselves or or words to that effect or different?

 

grassysparkie: Most of my problems stem from using the external displays (I hook up to two 28inch monitors when at my desk). They are things like the nVidia control panel taking forever to open or apply changes (known bug in the nvidia .pdf documents) and other annoying things like one of my monitors won't wake up when I've been away from the computer for too long. I have to either turn it off or unplug and plug it back in to get it to come back to life.

But I also get a lot more of the TDR crashes.

I've gone through nVidia's forum guide and I know they note that it's a windows problem and not a driver issue, but I wasn't getting anything like that before the 256 gen drivers. Naturally I've gone through the testing of a ton of things like the ram etc. trying to track it down, but so far I have nothing to point to other than the latest drivers are more spotty for me than earlier builds when it comes to the driver having to be shut down and restarted. Thankfully it's not super often (maybe every 3 days or so) that I seem to have a TDR issue right now.

So yeah, exactly what you mentioned. What you described is exactly the TDR issue. You can check out this post: Board Message and the guide and see if anything in there helps. Frankly it reminds me a lot of the sort of bug where everyone says, "it's not our fault" but you know it has to be someones. =)

 

OK guys, here's something new. My NP9850 now refuses to power on without a plug. The battery is fine. It's not charging anymore, but it has power. The Device manager still sees it and says it's fine. What happened? Did I get a weird power spike that fried something? I keep hearing about fuses built in to higher-end laptops. Did my fuse blow? And how do I replace it if it did? Any ideas?

 

Guys am I the only one that has been having problems with the dvd/bd drive not working properly? It simply refuses to play a lot of discs with no scratches or anything. The machine thinks there is no drive in the tray at all

Plus, this is the second drive I've had Sager install! I got back from their office about a week ago and the same thing is happening with this drive. ???

 

sounds like ya just got unlucky.

Time for a new one

 

got a question i hope you guys can help me out with. i got a bfg deimos with 2 gtx260m's right now that i wanna upgrade. i was looking around and a good upgrade would be to replace those 2 cards with a single ati hd 5870 mobile card. the 5870's are mx 3 b spec just like the nvidia cards. obviously i would not be able to xfire 2 of them because the mainboard is 730i. the guys at rj tech also agreed that it should work but i was wondering if anyone has did this mod. does the gtx 260m heatsink/fan fit the ati 5870 card or would i have to make my own heatsink? was hoping someone has done this and could chime in on the matter.

 

any of you NP9850 owners with dual nvidia 280m playing F1 2010? If so, what kind of performance are you getting and under which in-game settings

 

I've been trying forever to fix this, I've tried probably 20+ different drivers, totally clean reformats then installs. I still can't fix it. I got my laptop from pc torque, so I called them to see if they could help. The guy on phone pretended to have never heard of the issue, said he didn't know what a stutter was. I called again and another guy asked me to run 3d Mark 06....

It's been a great notebook at times, but the stutter issue is so constant that I've become to annoyed to even play on it....

 

If the new drivers dont help, try the steps in the link in my signature, unless its been deleted its the 'final' layout of what I put together to help myself and others suffering with the issue when I had an M980NU.
If it doesnt work, discuss this with PCTorque, Clevo KNOW there was an issue with some of the M980NUs, they've discussed this with several resellers now. Point out the DPC latency spikes etc which shouldnt happen. Many M980NU dont have this issue, but the ones that do simply aren't working 100% correctly.

PS. Obviously there are newer drivers since I wrote my guide

 

thanks i'll give the guide a shot first

 

PS. Please note the guide is YMMV, and it doesn't CURE the issue, just makes it a lot more tolerable.

That said if it helps you like it appears to have done some others, then great

 

Does this issue occur when you have music playing? I often play music while playing racing games. I've been playing F1 2010, Ridge racer Type 4, and GRID. I get stutters every so often...I'd say, maybe once every 15-20 minutes. Only seems to happen when playing music in a program like Winamp/Foobar.

 

Anymore news on the driver issue?

 

I've not heard any more, apologies, but then I'm out the loop. If you're still having issues I'd consider taking up with your seller as it's possible it'll never be fixed with your chassis.

 

I continued to have the stuttering problem even with the latest Nvidia drivers, but I found an alternate solution. In my case the stuttering appears to have been caused by either the gamekeys or the touch control pad drivers.

A few months ago I did a fresh install of Windows 7 and refrained from installing those two drivers and I haven't experienced a single instance of stuttering ever since. I'm not quite sure which of the two was causing it, because I don't want to have to reinstall Windows again, but that might be an alternate solution for people who are also experiencing the stuttering even with the latest Nvidia drivers.

 

I just got home from Afghanistan, got a couple weeks before I go back, and with new drivers mine still stutters.

I'm going to try your solution.

 

Well that didn't work.

Any ideas?

 

My stutter is every 30 mins or so so I guess it is different from the original issue.

 

So I refrained from installing the ATA Nvidia storage drivers when installing the chipset drivers, ver 15.46, and it fixed my problem. Finally!