mixing 6900 series cards/vBIOS in crossfire

[imsolidstate]

Hi everybody, been really busy for a while but finally got another card for a potential crossfire setup. I have a Dell 6970m that will only run the Dell vBIOS, the Clevo vBIOS gives me a really ugly picture. I hate that the computer won't shut down by itself, so I wanted to test it as a secondary with another card running the Clevo vBIOS.

I got a Dell 6990m, which had the Dell vBIOS shipped. What I want to do is run the Clevo vBIOS on the 6990m as the primary. Problem is I am having trouble finding a crossfire cable to test it. eBay and google are only turning up the old cable and they still want like $60 for it. The heatsink and fan are also really expensive at eBay prices. Can anyone tell me where I might be able to get this stuff for relatively cheap? I searched the marketplace but didn't find anything. Thanks.

[imsolidstate]

Okay I had the same nasty screen issue flashing the Clevo vBIOS on the new card. Does anyone have a hash of the Clevo vBIOS that is downloadable from this site? I must have a corrupt vBIOS.

[svl7]

Link to the vbios?

Also you can ask mxm-upgrade.com for cf cables, they should have some, no idea about the price though.

[Brian]

Another place for CF cables could be Dell Laptop Parts | Dell Parts | Dell Laptop Repair | Dell Repair they tend to carry a lot of Alienware/Dell spare parts. So you're trying to run a Dell 6990M with a Clevo 6990M vbios as primary and a Dell 6970M as the secondary? Theoretically it should work and force both to run at 6970M specs but I'm not sure if AMD allows for this with their mobile parts.

Attached to this post are Clevo 6990M vbios files (master + slave though I doubt there's a difference). Credit: @DR650SE for the vbios files.

6990M.zip

6990S.zip

[svl7]

Yeah, you're right, there's no master / slave - both are the same.

It might be necessary to run the 6990m with a 6970m vbios, but since both cards have the same device ID I think will even work with different vbios, but downclock to 6970m speeds.

I have some more 6970m and 6990m vbios on my system if it is of any help.

[imsolidstate]

I just tried diff/dhex with the file I downloaded from here and the file at notebookreview and they are showing as the same. I'm not sure where my problem is. The Dell vBIOS is fine on both cards. When I try to run the Clevo 6970CX0.bin vBIOS its fine in the POST/BIOS screens but as soon as windows loads I get an ugly screen. I've tried different Windows drivers but right now I'm running the mobility driver. The problem exists in Linux as well, the screen looks the same and it crashes at the login once I restart after installing the proprietary driver.

[imsolidstate]

A HUGE HUGE thanks to Brian! The 6990m vBIOS you posted works perfect. And since the failure mode was identical to my first 6970m, I tried flashing it to that card as well. Works. So I wonder if the card I originally had was a 6990m, but someone flashed it to a 6970m for some reason? Or are some 6970ms capable of flashing to 6990m? Maybe they are speed binned and I got lucky, who knows. I didn't try it under load since I don't have the heatsink/fan so maybe it won't work under load. We'll see.

Once I get a crossfire cable and secondary heatsink/fan, I'll be testing out 6990m crossfire.

[svl7]

The ES versions of the 6970m can be flashed with the 6990m vbios, which results in all the shaders available, but if you do it with a regular 6970m you'll just end up with a black screen and need to flash back blindly (at least that's what happened when I tried it).