Trane

Great! Thanks very much, Brian! Much appreciated : )

Hi Everyone : ) I'm new to this forum... but I've been checking-out this site for the past couple of weeks and it's been extremely helpful and informative! Many thanks to the T|I staff and to all the contributors, from whom I've learned a lot. I'm about to order an M18x, but first I had a couple of questions about the graphics. Ideally, I would like the ability to switch between the following options: a) Run two 6970Ms in Crossfire Only use one 6970M (no Crossfire) c) Use the IGP exclusively (no GPUs), for very light tasks. 1) Is it possible to disable one of the GPUs in an M18x that's been configured with dual GPUs in Crossfire (or dual 460Ms in SLI)? 2) Have any owners here, actually tried this with their M18s? - and if so: What are all of the steps required to run only one of the two GPUs? When I asked a Dell agent, he mentioned that a user would simply access either the NVidea or ATI control panel, and then switch between dual-GPU mode and single-GPU mode. I've never used SLI or Crossfire before, nor am I familiar with these control panels... yet I have some doubt that the Dell agent's information is accurate, for the following reasons: When the M18x reviewer from Hardware Heaven mentioned in an NBR thread, that a re-boot is required to switch between the IGP and the GPUs, he also mentioned that a re-boot is required to enable SLI. From this, I inferred that a reboot would also be required to disable SLI (or Crossfire), such that only one of the GPUs would handle all of the graphics. (I'm only guessing though). Also, the M18x uses Intel's HM67 chipset, which apparently does not natively support SLI or Crossfire. Therefore, to offer dual-GPU functionality, Dell might have added a port splitter / PCIe MUX switch, or implemented other work-arounds. In this special case, I'm not sure that simply changing a setting in third-party software, would be enough to disable one of the dual-GPUs. (Again, I'm just guessing, and could be wrong). Thanks in advance, for any help you can offer :-)