MadK17

Given that I've had some rather specific issue in installing my 870m, I thought it would be worth creating a specific how-to guide for anyone who decides to be cheap like me and and buy a weaker GPU than a 970m. Given I was able to pick this GPU up for £150 compared to the $500+ price for the 970m currently (if you count shipping and import duty). Note this method is based on an older guide from rob41488 in this thread which I've seen posted both here and on the Notebookreview forums. 1. Disabled audio in bios 2. Run DDU in safe mode to remove all traces of previous nvidia drivers. Uninstall the generic High Definiton Audio Codec and IDT Audio drivers from device manager. 3. Get the 870m fully working including the hdmi audio drivers in full Windows. I used Mr Fox's modified 345.20 drivers available here. There's also some newer driver kicking around on laptopvideo2go (353.75)which I'd previously used but then rolled back to the older ones. I think the same process should work on that one too. Make sure you boot with signed driver enforcement disabled which you can do from the Windows boot options menu (F8). 4. Enable audio in the bios. 5. Restart into safe mode and install the latest dell audio drivers. Once this is done you should see the IDT control panel in control panel. 6. Disable all sound cards under Sound, video and game controllers including the IDT AND NVIDIA DRIVERS. 7. Restart into full windows. You should be able to boot even with audio enabled in the bios now. 8 . This is where things get different: Disable the GPU in device manager, then enable only the IDT sound card driver. Finally renable the GPU and after a few screen flickers, you should have stable sound and video! Make sure to leave the nvidia hdmi audio disabled. Haven't tried enabling the displayport yet, but will update once I've done so. Will also update if this method works with the newer drivers (which it should, but I don't feel like messing with a working setup right now).