BigBr0ski

Well.  Now I get a fail to post with 8 beeps.  I have done the removal of the cmos battery and confirmed all settings are correct.  However upon ressetting, same issue, fail to post and 8 beeps.  I fear my 980m may be fried

Any other things I could try?

Well, unfortunately the power throttling has reared it's ugly head again.  Which is something I do not understand since I've made no changes and has worked perfectly for 2 weeks.  I've tried the switch to igfx, reboot and immediately change to peg, still no change.  Any idea guys?

4 hours ago, Mr. Fox said:

I see you found it. I sent you a message with more detail. The INF is already modded for you. It's more of a mod than just your hardware ID. @J95 did some magic stuff to help stop the nonsense Alienware has developed a reputation for, and fixed some of NVIDIA's cancer crap. 

 

Sister @BigBr0ski was having troubles very similar to yours and this driver mod cured all of her woes, or so it seems. You might want to look into using this new unlocked BIOS. The stock locked BIOS is trash. I had it on my M18xR2 before I sold it to the guy that developed the new mod and a lot of people are very pleased with it.

 

 

I was wondering why you kept calling me sister, then I realized my profile was set to female, awkward lol.

but yes, this bad boy worked perfectly

@Mr. Fox You've been a great help and thank you very much for pointing me in the right direction.  This whole 980M and m18xr2 fiasco can be difficult to find any info on, so it's great that I could find the answers here and find such an active forum.

Well, so far so good!

@j95 368.25 drivers installed flawlessly, and no more throttling ( so far ), more testing to come but here are some screenies.

Well, as a last ditch effort I may try to install windows 7 again to see if I have some luck.  If it doesn't work I'll just be reverting my bios to a previous version that worked.  It may have throttled but some of my games were at least playable

I do it via "Advanced Start-up" in windows 8.1.  Would that not be the same action?

I've attached some pictures for additional information.

Flashed with correct premamod ( although mismatched, I was told it's fine ), the correct device ids with gpuz and device manager.

Videocard adapter in the bios is set to peg.

yeah, I've tried the 361.43 and even the 355 series drivers, without success.  It's odd because I have flashed the vbios with premamod before installing the new a11 bios and it worked fine, could this be causing the issue?  

I have also tried the "have-disk" method, I get the error, "Nvidia Geforce GTX 980M, the system cannot find the file specified"

15 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

What GPUs? If you are trying to install drivers newer than 362.00 stop and try 362.00 or older drivers. If you have upgraded with aftermarket video cards, you have already modded the INF correctly? Drivers will not install if you have upgraded to video cards that were never offered as an option by Dell except with an INF mod.

980m installed in m18xr2.  The card worked pre-modded A11 bios ( all though with severe power throttling ), I was also able to install the drivers without a problem.  Which leads me to believe I am copying the modded INFs correctly, is there something I'm missing within the bios that would not allow me to install the drivers now?

Edit:  I should add, before I flashed the modified A11 bios, I had 361.43 installed and windows 8.1 pro.  I have made no hardware changes before installing the new bios, I was unsuccessful in installing any driver versions with this bios under win7 or win8.1, I spent the time to try both

Installation of this bios went flawless, installation of windows was flawless.  However, installing any nvidia driver fails, moddified or not, disabling driver signature has no effect.

Any ideas?