naightmehr

I thoroughly explained everything you need to know in this post 

I believe someone got a 1060 working in an m18x r2 but I assume the proces is the same for the 1070, basically running the laptop in optimus mode.

If you get into Windows with PEG mode then at least it's not a faulty graphics card so that's a good thing, just getting the appropiate drivers installed can be a tedious proces, it took me about 4-5 hours to figure out how to correctly mod the inf for my gtx1070, but now that I know how it works I can mod the newest drivers in less than 5 min.

17 minutes ago, Skyl3r said:

Oh I see. I saw that GeForce experience was on the desktop but I never tried opening it. I'll see if it works.

 

I did disable Windows drive enforcement before trying to install the INF modified driver. I am very uncertain if I did it correctly.

Is there a certain age of driver I should be looking for? And just out of curiosity, why would an older drive work?

Geforce experience doesn't really give a good answer to whether the drivers are correctly installed though, if you right click on your desktop and you're able to open the NVIDIA control panel with all the options allowed then it's properly installed.

http://downloads.eurocom.com/support/drivers/upgradeyourlaptop/Alienware/ - You can find some older drivers here, they're primarily to test if they install or not since they got the correct modified inf. If they install, then your own modified inf is incorrect. If the older driver does not install then it's a different problem, but I suggest testing an older driver first before we get to that. In case none of the above works I guess you can run your laptop in PEG mode, not sure why you'd run it in optimus anyway considering it means you're going to have to specify for each game when to use the 980m.

Oh and in case whether you're uncertain if you properly disabled driver enforcement, you can also turn windows testsigning on

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/install/the-testsigning-boot-configuration-option

If testsigning is on it'll show a watermark in the bottom left corner of your screen, that way you'll be 100% sure that the driver will be installed (unless the inf is incorrect)

15 minutes ago, Skyl3r said:

I'll try disabling it when I get back to my laptop.

Nothing that should use the graphics card seems to detect it properly. The installer went through "Detecting hardware" then said it would install Graphics Driver, 3D Vision, etc. After that it installed and gave no errors; but the GPU still has the yellow exclamation point on it and applications aren't able to use it (IE, I tried to run a 3d benchmark, just to see and it said it failed to initialize the video mode)

But have the NVIDIA drivers even installed? When my nvidia installation goes wrong I get no errors the program just closes but nothing has been installed, that's why I'm asking if you see any nvidia programs installed anywhere and what happens when you open those. 

Make sure that you disabled the windows driver enforcement and that you modified the nvdia inf properly, if you're unsure whether you modded the inf correctly try downloading an older version of the gtx 980m drivers and see if those work for you.

I believe Windows 8 fast boot should be turned off.

Are the nvidia drivers correctly installed? Does the nvidia panel work etc?

Does your gtx675m show lines after you installed the correct drivers? If 3 gpu's show lines then it might be something else

Looks like a faulty graphics card, where did you buy the 980m from?

51 minutes ago, FirebirdTA01 said:

That's excellent news, I was not expecting that. I didn't think the onboard intel gpu would drive a 120hz screen (Isn't the HDMI input a pass-through from that chipset?). Thank you for all of your help and the time you've taken to answer my questions. It's much appreciated.

Since you mentioned a console I actually tested my own ps3 and ps4 just now but unfortunately those don't work through the HDMI input, a PC however seems to work fine

13 hours ago, FirebirdTA01 said:

I mean the HDMI input, not the output. I use this laptop every once in a while to hook my ps4 up to when I go to some friends' places. I prefer it over lugging a TV around. Do you know if your HDMI input still works? Can you test it? Thanks again for all of the help

HDMI input works fine as well.

3 hours ago, FirebirdTA01 said:

@naightmehr, thanks for your responses. They really are a lot of help. One last thing, does your HDMI input still work? I figured it would be incompatible with a 120hz screen since I think it ran on the integrated intel gpu.

Every port works fine with the gtx1070, HDMI, Mini-displayport and VGA. I personally got 2 screens connected through the HDMI and mini-displayport so you should be good.

I purchased a lot of items from taobao through yoybuy, such as the gtx1070, the nebula red covers and the 3-pipe heatsink. It's basically a regular heatsink but fully made from copper and an extra pipe added on top. I actually compared it to the original heatsink and it makes a 5-10 degrees difference.

For the gtx 1070 I purchased a 5-copper heatsink, though you don't need one actually, the 3 copper one works fine but I wanted to buy a 2nd heatsink since I had to mill out a small portion for it to fit on top of the gtx 1070, if I have to go back to my hd7970m I can just take the old heatsink out the closet. ( see image below for comparison )

I am using the latest version of Windows 10 64-bit and I have the A11 unlocked bios. I went from stock A12 to unlocked A11, should work fine if you properly follow the instructions.

( My laptop wasn't plugged in when I took the photo, the 330W psu works fine and it's enough juice to fully power an overclocked i7-3940xm and gtx1070, I measured it with a watt meter before, it drew around 280-300 watt when fully loading both the cpu and gpu. )

I haven't really played much with the memory and this is primarily because my laptop has 1 set of 2 1866mhz and a set of 2 1600mhz sticks, so I don't feel comfortable overclocking the memory.

You pretty much require the A11 unlocked bios and the 120hz display, I couldn't get the gtx1070 working without putting the video option to "PEG" but once I got the unlocked bios it was literally plug-and-play. Put the bios on PEG, install gtx 1070 and it should fire right up. Keep in mind that you'll have to mod the drivers, in case you need some reference material I thoroughly explained how to mod the drivers in this post: 

I've had the i7-3940xm and gtx 1070 combination with the 330W psu working fine for around 7 months now, never had any trouble with bottlenecking, both my cpu and gpu are overclocked as well. Bios recognizes the 330W psu, it's a regular 330W watt psu with no modification whatsoever. Though keep in mind the i7-3940xm is a hothead, I was only able to cool it properly after several modding projects, e.g. the m14x fan, 3 copper heatpipe mod and I used liquid metal as thermal paste.

Another thing to keep in mind which also seems to be quite inconsistent is that in some cases the gtx1070 won't run at full power unless you put your laptop in hibernate first, my own laptop suffers from this.

On 5/15/2018 at 6:58 AM, hackz said:

 

 

My question is:

• why do we have to install modified drivers?
• Is there a way to install drivers directly from the official nVidia website? Modifying the BIOS and inserting UEFI drivers, or modifying the vBIOS? in order to use the official drivers?

1. We need to install modified drivers because the laptop was never intended to have a gtx 980m, if you try to install the drivers on a machine with an ID that has never been shared with NVIDIA then it won't recognise the machine. By modifying the the drivers you basically add your specific laptop ID to the driver so it'll recognise it as a compatible machine.

2. The only way to get drivers working is to download the official driver from the NVIDIA website and modding the .inf file, there is no other way.

The m17x R4 works fine with the 330W power supply. I personally tested this by having the cpu and gpu (both overclocked) run at full speed while monitoring the amount of power it pulls from the socket. It seems to work fine. I got an i7-3940xm and a gtx 1070.

Modding the nvidia inf for the first time can be quite difficult but once you know what you're doing it's actually quite simple and straightforward. Now I'm going to try to explain as best as I can how to mod your nvidia inf by using the newest nvidia driver (397.64) as example.

First you want to get 3 ID's, your GPU model, laptop model and laptop brand, by using your ID PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_11E1&SUBSYS_05801028

GPU Model code

Laptop model code

Laptop manufacturer code

Now using these 3 ID's we can make your first string, which is the string that defines what video card you have. 

NVIDIA_DEV.11E1.05A9.1028 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M" <-- this is an already existing string but now we're going to change 1 ID so it matches your laptop which is the 05A9 to 0580, your specific laptop model. 

NVIDIA_DEV.11E1.0580.1028 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M" <-- this is the string that you want to save on a text document somewhere, you'll need it every time you mod the nvidia inf for the newest drivers.

Now to find the correct section is actually quite easy, just use CTRL+F and look for an existing string with 11E1, in the newest drivers you can use section24, this is the existing string  %NVIDIA_DEV.11E1.05A9.1028% = Section024, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_11E1&SUBSYS_05A91028 

Now we're going to modify it so it'll work for your laptop by replacing the green ID's with your ID's

%NVIDIA_DEV.11E1.0580.1028% = Section024, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_11E1&SUBSYS_05801028 <- this should be the correct string.

Make sure that you got windows driver enforcement turned off. Or what I personally do is run windows 10 in test mode.

Helpful links:

https://www.howtogeek.com/167723/how-to-disable-driver-signature-verification-on-64-bit-windows-8.1-so-that-you-can-install-unsigned-drivers/

http://null-bin.blogspot.nl/2015/08/how-to-modify-nvidia-notebook-driver.html

I found this bios: https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/172551/172551

It's used by a guy on this forum: https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?75387-Overclocking-the-GTX970M

He got 1400mhz on the gpu and 1493 on the memory. He used a program called asus gpu tweak, maybe give that a try before you flash your vbios. 

The gtx 970m should be overclockable by default, what program are you using to overclock?

Thanks a lot

Does anyone got a copy of the PRR tool for the unlocked bios? The download link doesn't work anymore

Does anyone got a copy of the PRR tool for the unlocked bios? The download link doesn't work anymore

What gpu and screen (the 3D or the normal one) do you have?

The gtx 780m should be able to run in optimus mode with the intel gpu turned on. If your bios doesn't detect it, either alienware doesn't support clevo cards or the card is broke. I think it's the latter

You need to turn off driver enforcement again, it doesn't stay on permanently.

https://www.howtogeek.com/167723/how-to-disable-driver-signature-verification-on-64-bit-windows-8.1-so-that-you-can-install-unsigned-drivers/

Would anyone happen to have the prr tool? Can't download it from the link anymore