xPalis

On 12/16/2018 at 6:02 AM, Papuang said:

For anyone new coming to this thread, I have yet to get my 970M to work properly in my M17x R4 running Windows 7 64-bit, but these are all the steps I have tried so far.

 

1. Downloaded and successfully installed Eurocom modded driver version: M17xR4_05511028_9xxM_399.07_W7_W8.zip [Alienware (Dell), GPU, Nvidia driver version, supported OS]. MSI Afterburner showed GPU1 (970M) activity, meaning the driver worked correctly. However, I still felt I was lagging in games unnecessarily considering I have 22GB of RAM. Therefore, I wanted updated modded drivers because I thought that might fix the issue given that these drivers were more than 2 years old.

3. Downloaded newest default 970M driver version from Nvidia website (417.35).

4. Edited nvdmi.inf file so driver would work on M17x R4 as per this guide.

5. Successfully ran setup.exe and downloaded the updated modded drivers. However, although recognised in BIOS and Device Manager as installed correctly, MSI Afterburner showed no GPU1 activity and I lagged worse in games. Therefore, I thought I might need to have an updated and/or unlocked BIOS set to start using PEG (PCI Express Graphics [970M]) for it to work.

6. Downloaded most recent default M17x R4 BIOS (A14) from Dell website.

7. Ran BIOS setup file and successfully updated BIOS from default A12 to default A14. However, still no GPU1 activity.

8. Requested an unlocked A14 BIOS from @Klem (many thanks <3).

9. Formatted a USB drive to run FreeDOS using Rufus as per this guide.

10. Extracted the DOS version of FPT, prr tool, and unlocked BIOS files all kindly provided by @Klem into the USB drive as per @svl7's original post.

11. Restarted the laptop, booting from the USB drive using the boot menu accessed by pressing F12.

12. Ran Flash.bat successfully and restarted again.

13. Opened successfully modded BIOS and selected 'Load (or restore) optimal defaults' under final 'Exit' tab, before pressing F10 then enter to save and exit.

14. Same as initial situation - outdated modded Eurocom drivers showed GPU1 activity and modded newest drivers showed no GPU1 activity.

15. Restarted and opened BIOS and went into new second Advanced tab, and changed Primary Display to PEG and saved and exited.

16. Laptop failed to start and it beeped several times with the fans running loudly.

 

Up until two days ago, I had no idea about driver modding or BIOS unlocking or how to do any of this, but I feel I have pretty much comprehensively tried everything I have been able to find to no avail. I am very tired as its 4am and am truly at a loss as to what to do. I've seen people have managed to fix their laptops by booting into the old AO5 BIOS or something, so I will be doing that shortly, but after that I'm pretty lost.

 

Any help on this would be insanely appreciated. :/

 

EDIT: I'm going to sleep now, and would be super grateful if someone could quote the fix for the beeps problem that was posted earlier in this thread, because I really don't want to have to look through all 26 pages again because I just finished doing that :'(.

Hey if you still need help with your 970m or anyone else having the same problem heres how... a year ago i had same problem... I followed online guide on how to mod nVidia drivers to work on Dell hardware (i have Alienware m17xR4). After changing inf file and installing the drivers my gpu was recognized in all the programs yet the load would still be at 0%.

I followed this guide : https://null-src.com/posts/nvidia-notebook-driver-inf-mod/post.php . It all came down to wrong section number (which is mentioned in the link).

For example, after opening device manager, getting the hardware ids and formating the string for my gpu it looks like this : %NVIDIA_DEV.13D8.0551.1028%, once i looked for this string in nvidia .inf file i got multiple entries with: Section250, Section251,Section253 and so on... 

My fully formated string looks like this: %NVIDIA_DEV.13D8.0551.1028% = Section252, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13D8&SUBSYS_05511028

After installing the drivers i would try to load the gpu. If nVidia card got 0% load that would mean that i got the wrong "Section number" so i would change it to another Section that matched my string. Another match for string %NVIDIA_DEV.13D8.0551.1028% was with Section250 so i changed the string to : %NVIDIA_DEV.13D8.0551.1028% = Section250, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13D8&SUBSYS_05511028, removed the drivers with DDU and installed the drivers with new string and it WORKED, my 970m was not only detected but now when i opened heaven benchmark the nVidia gpu load would go to 100% and massive increase in fps suggested that it really worked. So i suggest you give it a try if you still cant get it to work.

Hello everyone,

My Alienware m17xR4 has official A13 bios. After the update i noticed that my laptop has slowed down by A LOT. And then i noticed that once i load my cpu fully the clock speeds go to 2.2 Ghz. Right now all i can do is use software like Throttle stop to increase my cpu freaquency by increasing current limit (changing multipliers does nothing in bios) and that software is annoying because once the update is released you are forced to update and once you do all your settings are gone and you have to do everything from start...

My question is if i were to install unlocked bios could i make such changes in the bios without having to rely on software ?