whiskeyknight

I never had any issues (aside from the scorching heat) with the previous card setup 7970 crossfire. I do believe they were running at 8x each but i can't confirm this now unfortunately. I pulled the 980m card out , checked the connector and gave it a shot of air, nothing appeared odd. I flashed the a10 unlocked bios and resintalled windows 8, scoring about 8300 in firestrike and it's show a pretty steady 55-60fps in witcher 3 with high settings in 1080p and GPU-Z is showing the card running in pci-e v3 8x. The odd thing now is in the BIOS i only have a choice of pci-e gen 1 , gen 2 ,or auto .....

Guess i should've mentioned it's not sli, just the one card. Yeah i noticed tremendous drops with mr.fox's modified drivers and some other drivers on the web which i figured was the throttling issues i read about. Haven't experienced those drops with the drivers i'm using now but you still may be right. Anyone know if unlocking the bios would allow me to change pci-e settings. Guess i'll start scouring that thread, thanks solo wing

So i finally managed to install the 980m from eurocom onto my alienware 18 r2 , windows 8.1 but i dont think it's performing properly. The system has 24gigs of ram, the 3630qm processor, and i'm using the NVIDIA 347.25 drivers from the eurcom site. These drivers were the best performing ones that i've tried scoring about 7700 in the 3dmark firestrike benchmark compared to 6300 or so with some of the modded drivers from the forums. I've enabled high performance in the windows power savings settings and set the nvidia control panel to maximum performance under the power management tab . Now one problem that i did notice that according to GPU-Z that the card is running in pcie 3.0 x2 and not 8 or 16x... would this be the cause ? So i'm wondering if these benchmarks seem low or if this is the performance i should be getting. I've been considering flashing the bios to an unlocked version to set the pci-e to 16x but i'm not even sure if that setting would be unlocked or if it would effect the performance. So does anyone know if unlocking the bios would allow me to change these settings or is that even necessary? It would require me to disassemble the laptop and remove the card in order to reboot in legacy mode and flash the bios so you can understand that i would like to try some other solutions before going to those lengths. Thanks Edit: oh it's not overheating and downclocking that i'm sure of temp maxxes out around 61celsius