nick81

This is for people who upgraded the gpu of laptops which officially aren't compatible with (plug and play). Like my alienware 17 R5 (2013), upgraded with a mxm 980m (clevo) Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

This HF is to fix crashes with 860/960m in some games. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

There is already a very detailed topic by j95 on how to do that. Took me just 15 mins to get it right and mod my own drivers Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Win8.1?Win10? I assume you're using dedicated graphics, not Optimus? (120Hz screen)

I am on optimus... Yeah I really don't understand what's going on Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

@J95 I always disable driver signature when installing drivers. What I meant is that after using a driver for a few days, the gpu automatically switches to basic display adapter and I am forced to uninstall with DDU and reinstall the driver Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

@J95 Hey man I am facing an annoying issue once a week approximately, which I hope you can help me with. What happens, is when I boot to Windows, my GPU won't be detected anymore. In Device Manager I'll get the most-hated "basic display adapter" instead of 980m. In one case, this got resolved when I restarted the PC with driver signature off. Yesterday, however, I had to unistall the drivers using DDU and resinstall from scratch. Any idea what could cause this? I am using Win8.1 with Optimus. Just as a note, other than this issue, the driver/vbios/GPU are very stable in general. 0 issue when gaming, no throttling, low temps etc...

What's wrong with 359? No issues for me... Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Not necessarily. Unfortunately my trials on Windows 10 ended miserably... Using the Nvidia installer always gave me the same error as Assassin, while trying to install the driver manually from Device Manager, activated my 980 for 5-10 minutes and then it would "magically" switch back to Basic Display Adapter. Reverting to Win8.1 completely solved these issues for me. Aside from the inf mod, it's practically plug and play for me.

Out of curiosity how did Win10 screw up your old gpu?... Anyway, I have the same setup as yours: AW17, with a 880m, upgraded to 980m. I am able to remain up to date with the latest drivers. All it takes is modding an inf file in the official Nvidia drivers. If you don't want to do it yourself, there is a thread always updated by j95 who posts the modded inf. https://forum.techinferno.com/nvidia/6307-%5Balienware%5D-aftermarket-upgrades-driver-support-modded-inf.html I personally don't recommend Win10 as I wasn't able to install the drivers on it. On Win8.1 it was practically plug and play. Been using the 980m for a month now. It's an amazing GPU.

The thing is, that the latest inf files provided by j95 didn't contain anything other than hardware ID's. I compared his inf files line by line against the vanilla inf files in the official driver. I don't know if at some point he was modifying other stuff but I know for a fact that for optimus (I can't speak for the dedicated) the inf files are untouched, other than the addition of the hardware IDs. Other than that I have just ordered the caddy and a 850 Evo 500GB. I missed the deal on the 2 TB. I did get a pretty sweet deal of 130 euros for the 500GB. That size should be more than enough for my needs anyways... As for the drivers, the 980m would show up in device manager, get detected by GPUz, then suddenly, without restart, switch back to "basic display adapter". It drove me crazy and I actually thought I had a defective GPU... Formatting my hard drive and doing a clean installation of W8.1 allowed me to install the driver in 1 shot without a single issue. Just to clarify I had also done a clean install of W10 in UEFI prior to installing the 980m...

That would be great! Being able to update to official drivers without touching inf files will definitely be a big + ! Now I just wish I'd be able to go back to Windows 10! Maybe with the new vbios it'll make it simpler to install drivers for that OS. I am definitely not spending half a day trying to do that again! I am actually waiting for a flash deal on Amazon.de for a Samsung 850 Evo 2TB that should go live in 3 hours...Do you recommend I stick to W8.1? I might keep my existing 840 Evo as an OS drive and install the new SSD in a HDD Caddy (take out the DVD drive) and use it for games and apps. I already created a thread on NBR asking for advice on a good HDD caddy to replace the slot-load dvd drive of the AW17 but didn't get any reply... Is it easy to do and can I just use any caddy? Would the one in the link below work in your opinion? SATA to SATA, 9.5mm HDD Caddy for Slot-Loading Optical [OBHD9-SATA-SATA-NF] - $19.00 : NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks Thanks!

Thanks man! So the only thing I'll be doing in the future is get the modded inf (if not then just do it myself). If I am not getting any throttling, then I don't need to do anything additional? I read j95 that Prema needed to "fix" something in his vbios. Any idea what that is? Couldn't find anything about this anywhere in this thread...

Hey all I am currently using 359.00 with my 980m mxm on Windows 8.1 without any issues. Benchmarks (without OC'ing) show the performance of my AW17 R5 (2013) to be on par with others with similar setups here and on the NBR forums. There are though a few things I didn't do when installing the drivers: delete some of the folders in the driver files as instructed by j95 and NOT installing Geforce Experience. I am assuming that one of the folders we have to delete avoids the installation of Experience. What is the problem when installing GE? It's working perfectly fine for me (even though I don't use much of it, aside from checking what optimal settings it recommends for the games I play). I already know about the Nvidia streamer service which I've been disabling as soon as I install a new driver, even before I got the 980m. The one thing that remains is j95's suggestions regarding NVInspector. I did import the profiles (v5 now). But I am not doing the p0/p1 states match thingy. Does this affect performance? The reason I didn't change that, is that because it just doesn't save changes. A bit of research showed that this might be caused by Geforce Experience. But if the impact of modifying p0/p1 is minimal then I'd rather not change anything. I have ZERO throttling thanks to Prema's mod and as I said, benchmarks and my personal experience playing games have shown very good results so far. Hope someone can enlighten me with this as I wouldn't say no for even more oomph from the 980m! I am very very glad I opted to keep my AW17 and just upgrade my GPU, instead of replacing it with a MSI or Asus...

I am personally sticking to W8.1. I spent 2h trying to install drivers for the 980m before I gave up and reverted back to 8.1.... Installing drivers on that took me 5 mins...(including modding the inf file myself) Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Your firestrike score seems a bit average. Did you flash your gpu to prema's vbios? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

@J95 Hey man Thanks for your reply! I actually downloaded your latest nvcvi.inf file (2 pages back I think) and used a tool called WinMerge to compare it line by line with the official inf file from Nvidia for the same driver version. The only differences it found were the entries in the OS and Strings sections. Am I missing something? Or did it happen that you didn't include tweaks/enhancements in that specific driver version? Were your tweaks included only in the 353 PEG version? That version doesn't apply for Optimus right? I am sorry again as I am a bit late to join the party... I am doing my best to catch up and get myself informed about what has been done so far to mod drivers for the 980m . I did import the profiles using NV inspector. I am planning to do some research into what exactly the "enhancer" of Laptopsvideotogo does to inf files. I am just really curious about how everything works. I do know something, the 980m rocks so far. I don't even think I need to change anything in it. I did some OC yesterday and was able to get some serious results in benchmarks but IMO it's just not worth it aside from that. I did some benching using Fraps in Arkham Knight and Witcher 3 and differences are negligible. So I'll stick to stock frequencies (I always did this with all my GPU's anyway...) The only difference was with my 880m which throttled like a 90 year old, something slv's vbios fixed completely for me.

@J95 Hey man I recently upgraded my 2013 AW17 R5 (Ranger) from the stock 880m to a 8GB 980m mxm. I was able to use the latest drivers from Eurocom. I will be trying to install your Fallout 4 drivers tonight. I have a question though. I actually modded the official Nvidia drivers last night but the only way I was able to install them was by pointing Device Manager to the nvdmi.inf file (the inf for Dell). Even though I was modding the nvcvi.inf file exactly the same way I did for the nvdmi.inf, the installation was failing. Is there any problem in the method I used? The driver versions shows up correctly in the device manager and in GeForce experience. Do your modder inf files include anything else than the added Dev strings and OS entries? Thanks a lot!