Player2

Nice . That's like 2.5 times my 770m . Man I can't wait to get my hands on one of these cards.

Sorry miss understood you.

My gpu comes on as soon as I boot my laptop . It shows in hwinfo and msi afterburner and nvidia inspector. I can change all settings in invidia inspector . Without even ever starting a game.

At first mine wasn't on either. In hwinfo I set it to wake gpu on boot and wake gpu on boot extended. Try checkmarking both boxes in hwinfo for wake gpu.

I haven't messed with cpu overclocking yet. I have the 4800mq and with single graphics card 770m I don't think I really need too. Can't help you on that one.

Called hid evolution and got message saying business hours are from 900 to 500 mon-fri . Closed for orders sat and sun. I'm going to have to sneak away during work on Monday long enough to make order.haha.

On a different note what are you guys who have ordered the 980m and 970m doing for heatsink padding on the back of your cards. Are you just leaving it with nothing on back or do you guys put something there somehow. I know the cards only come with x - brace on the back. ? And if I have them send the correct screws for the x-bracket I can just screw my heatsink to card no problems right ?.

if i stick with optimus then yeah will probably have to make hwinfo64 wake the GPU at boot.

Hey what invidia driver are you using right now. 4709

good to hear, i suggest getting windows 8.1 if there's issues with windows 7....just sayin'!

Yea I will try with windows 7 in optimus mode first because I really don't want to erase my computer and start over . I'm confident it will work ok. If not i will probably be hitting you up on how to install 8.1 in the eufi to make the card work. I wonder If hid evolution is open on weekend so I can call them. Will try around 10 and see what happens.

This is only for sli laptops or for single card laptops as well?

Finally got optimus working without issue. Set hwinfo to wake gpu on boot and set global settings to prefer nvidia gpu . Seems to load games fine and even holds my overclock rock solid while gaming. So my computer seems to work Tha same as it was in dedicated mode.im sure performance isn't exactly as same as dedicated but as far as gaming I can't really tell the difference. Maybe for benching there is a difference.

Anyhow the next step in my master plan is to decide where to buy the 980m. I am confident enough now that if I buy the 980m I will be able to install in my system with little to no issues if I use optimus and my factory windows 7 install.[emoji4]

I am using WIndows 8.1 in UEFI mode. I need to use dedicated mode - Optimus not working .

Have not tried Win 7.

Do you have 120hz screen or your optimus just does not work?

Just checking that those whom have upgraded to the 980M or 970M on the Alienware 17s or R4s are able to run Win 7 fine?

Win 8.1 full UEFI mode is not required?

Thanks

From the information going around you can use windows 7 but you have to use the laptop in optimus mode. If you want to run in dedicated mode you have to use win 8.1 full uefi mode.

so 347.09 = no good?

EDIT: I wish someone bought this....

http://www.hidevolution.com/alienware-17-hid24-nvidia-gtx-980m-120hz-gaming-laptop.html

so we can dissect how HIDevolution were able to get to boot with the nvidia GPU and this might help those with 60Hz displays to boot in dedicated mode.

I wonder if someone was to buy a 980m from them if they would share their secrets on how to make it work with windows 7 and 120hz screen.

forgot to put thermal paste or shorted something? i usually wear gloves while working as some level of protection.

I put plenty of paste. The problem with the heatsink not working properly was when I put it up to card it wasn't sitting on the die flat.one side was touching and one was way off die so heat sink was warped really bad or it got bent somehow. So I was handling card and messing with heatsink to get a nice flush fit. I got the heatsink finally to fit card almost perfect but all the handling of card with bare hands I must of shorted it out somehow. I'll wear gloves next time.[emoji12]

so the 780m is not working anymore?

No I literally smoked it. The last time I changed heatsink and put it back in I started a game and it just went crazy screen and I could smell smoke or burnt electronics whatever you want to call it. So I just shut off computer and pulled card. Put my 770m back in and computer is fine thank goodness . I was kind of carelessly Handling the card so it's nobody's fault but my own. Time to move on to better things.

notebookreview is still down

shame, i still have heaps of fears (if you can call it that) about the 980M like...

1) running in dedicated mode - will it work?!

2) will the GPU still throttle on 347.09 drivers with a stock vBIOS?

and I can't answer them until i actually have a 980M in my hands.

EDIT: I wonder if display fusion pro is causing the PC to freeze on load cos when it loading there's hardly any icons in the notification area.

Yea that's to bad nbr is down because most of the information on 980m and 970m in alienware 17 was coming from . I fried my 780m from messing with it to much. Swapping x brackets changing heatsinks . And Handling to much I guess. Pulling out with battery still plugged it twice. Put my 770m back in and I'm good for now. But I'm looking to get the 980m here pretty quick .once you have a little taste of performance it's hard to go back to a slower card. It's like riding a Yamaha r1 street bike and crashing it and then have to go back to driving your Honda civic.[emoji4]

Yep, that does seem the case then. I don't know what else to suggest bar all the reinstallation procedure I listed earlier (you know: DDU to uninstall, Dell Intel GPU driver, etc).

(If after trying different things you could just do a complete reinstall of the OS or restore a working image from before, and think about resetting BIOS to default settings).

Yea I will play around to see what I can find out. The reason I switched off optimus the first day I got my computer was because of this same thing. First game I installed on day one wouldn't use my dgpu so I switched to dedicated mode an never had a problem since. So I'm guessing if I restore my computer to the day it was brand new I will still be in the same boat. I will do some reading around and googling to see what I can come up with. Thanks again robbo for your help

You could load up something like GPUz and run a game. Then afterwards view the Sensors Tab to see what the GPU frequencies & GPU usage was. If you're not getting any GPU usage on your NVidia card as seen in GPUz, then you know it's your integrated graphics being used instead (think you can select and view Intel GPU usage in GPUz too - on first main tab). That's just one way of double checking your understanding of what's going on, and which graphics processor is running the game.

Ok I loaded up gpuz and started game and then quit it's still shows 0 for gpu load memory controller load and video engine load. Memory usage 0 . So I'm guessing it's not even starting the nvidia gpu.

Possibly there is the same option under "Global Settings" in the NVidia Control Panel where you can select "High Performance NVidia Processor" - there's definitely such an option under "Program Settings" in the same control panel, but click on the "Global Settings" instead to find out.

- - - Updated - - -

Try the following if you like:

1) Uninstall NVidia drivers. Then run DDU to remove any remnants of NVidia drivers.

2) Uninstall Intel Graphics drivers.

3) Install Intel Graphics driver - downloaded from Dell website specific for your model of laptop.

4) Install latest NVidia graphics driver (or recent NVidia driver of your choice) from NVidia website.

5) Retest for Optimus functionality.

The idea of all of the above is that sometimes you need to use the intel graphics driver from the Dell website in order for it to work properly. It was like this with the M17xR3. It was important to install the Dell Intel Graphics Driver first.

Thanks for help robbo. I tried under global settings and Set nvidia processor for prefered grapghics processor and no dice. Also set program settings for nvidia gpu for specific game and no dice either.

It loads my games with no errors it's just everything is is like 4 frame per second so it has to be using integrated grapghics.

Is nvidia control panel always running or do I have to make it boot up with my computer

strange, it works fine in dedicated mode and i am worried that a 980M won't work in dedicated mode either and spending a lot of dough just to find out is a tough sell. it crashes when there's no driver installed and it has been wiped with DDU as well as with the intel driver installed.

the last thing to do is a full reformat and install of the OS but can't really do that right now....a bit late.

Maybe your overclocking software or osd is causing conflicts.

Edit - this post was supposed to be before yours but I guess you beat me to the reply button

Mine seams to behave fine I optimus I just can't play games . But I'll read up on optimus and figure it out. I start a game like shadow of mordor ar far cry 4 and it actually starts the game but it runs it at 4 or 5 frames per second. Kinda crazy looking.

strange, it works fine in dedicated mode and i am worried that a 980M won't work in dedicated mode either and spending a lot of dough just to find out is a tough sell. it crashes when there's no driver installed and it has been wiped with DDU as well as with the intel driver installed.

the last thing to do is a full reformat and install of the OS but can't really do that right now....a bit late.

The crazy part is we spend a lot of time tweaking our systems to run a certain way to get it to do what we want and then all of a sudden throw a rench in the mix like optimus and the computer goes into cardiac arrest.

I have no idea why if I switch back to Optimus that the pc decides to crash after logging in.

That's not good.

Maybe it's your computer's way of telling you to put it back into dedicated mode.

Yea I thought the computer was smart enough to figure out when it needed to use the dgpu or igpu . Lol.

I'm switching back to dedicated graphics and will cross that optimus bridge when I have to.

I heard hidevolution got a alienware 17 with 980m and 120hz screen and windows 7 for sell. So hopefully we will be able to do this 980m upgrade after all with out having to mess with optimus .

in manage 3d settings it will show an extra drop down with the integrated or dedicated gpu as options.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]13575[/ATTACH]

Thanks for elaborating .

I added farcry 4 to programs settings .

selected high performance nvidia processor bit it still uses igpu.

I know this defeats the purpose of optimus but is there a way to permantly turn on dgpu in optimus so it would work without issues but still have optimus so one could use the 980m.

it should be in the nvidia control panel.

You wouldn't mind elaborating on that would you.[emoji4]

I'd would be ok with optimus to if I knew how to make my games work. I bought my laptop over a year ago and turned of optimus 30 minutes after the firs time I ever turned my laptop on and never switched optimus back on again. Well today I switched it back on just to see what it would be like and when I try to play a game it only uses the igpu. It shows both igpu and dgpu in device manager . How do you make the games use the dgpu for games when your in optimus. Is that why people don't like optimus because it don't work.