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[Guide] M15x with AMD 6970m / 6990m - everything you need to know


svl7

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Ok, but there is still 1 problem, when on battery power it's constantly at 400/900,

wich causes the 6-cell batery to drain in 1/2 hour, and the temps on battery are over 60°C :S

i'll fiddle with RBE a little to see what i can do :D

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi,

I just read the starting post about the 250/900mhz clock issue on external monitor, I had been flashing and changing my vBios lots of times and coudnt find out why it woudnt go to 100/150mhz...

And now I know.. thanks!

Oh and I am using only a 120W psu combined with an overclocked i7 920xm and 6970 and it works fine, it never shut off while gaming for hours..

It only shut down once at benching 3dmark11 when I had it overclocked my cpu to 3.466ghz on all cores and gpu at 830/1150mhz

The machine woudnt turn on for a few minutes lol. (I am using a clevo w860cu, its almost the same as the alienware spec wise)

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  • 2 months later...

Hi, after a year of thinking and researching [i.e. reading about this upgrade], I think I am ready to finally get that card. One thing I need to know is roughly how *hot* would a 6990m get?

For benchmarking purposes, if any at all, I am currently playing assassin's creed 3 and here are my specs/temps on the following settings:

Environments: high

texture/shadow/AA: normal

Paste is ac5

STOCK gtx 460m: idle at 53C, maxed at 90C. *** Maxing at 76C with those settings in an air conditioned room.

STOCK i7 740qm: idle at 54/55C, maxed at 77/78C. ***69/70C with same settings in an air conditioned room.

These are my normal temps in a room without air conditioning.

if it matters: my boot temps are 33-38C on CPU and 43C on my gpu. That's after a night's sleep/shutdown in an air conditioned room.

average temperature in my country:

Manila, Philippines weather and forecast

or 34C ambient temp

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Reporting in again

So I got the 6990 [yay!]

6 hours ago, I finally got it fit tight and cozy. it was a eurocom card and my xplate/heat sink had trouble installing it. I had to unlock the locked screws on the m15x heatsink and use the ones my supplier/dealer sent with the gpu [which worked. Hassle but worked].

I installed m17x drivers [that didn't work for some reason] then installed official AMD ones and yay I got my resolution back. Playtime~ Tomb raider tested with everything on and apparently tessellation really really taxes a gpu even one as good as a 6990. FPS was at 25-30+ with tessellation and no tressfx. I ran assassin's creed 3. Apparently Ubisoft hates AMD or something because my old gtx460m performed way better at lower settings, i.e. no frame rate drops and stable at 30++ *overall* whereas this 6990m gets a lot of fps loss when I look forward but then I regain all the lost fps if I look a little to the road and less to the horizon. Great. I head home.

Fast forward to about an hour ago, I got my first thermal shutdown. I was playing diablo 3 with everything maxed out and for some reason my temps hit 90C. it went a little higher it as my HWinfo32 gadget says there were 91.5 and 91 on I think the memory module or something when I booted up again.

-insue panic

I realize I could have done a bad paste job but if I did, I'd be hitting 90C even in an air conditioned room because... I used to have a really bad paste job with my ancient 5850m until I learned somehow.

what else could I do? google's first hit was somewhere in this thread as well. undervolting. so I did, apparently stock volts were at 1.1 at max performance. I reduced it to 1.0 and the 1.05 down to 1.0 as well. Both were done with RBE and atiwinflash. So far, at maxed out playing settings for d3/creed 3 in an unairconditioned room, I'm maxing out at 84C.

That's a good thing, yes?

Can I now rest easy and say I've *completed* my upgrade?

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Reporting in.

Still getting the shutdown but... I don't understand the primary cause. if anything, I tried and used kombustor just to fire up the 6990m's heat to 90C and see if it would shut down. It did not. Should I have tested this a little longer? so far I'm stable at 85-86C. It's just that in some parts of the game, it gets too visual heavy and I spike up to 90c and a little more to shut down.

If anything, my specs are:

-500gb hdd 7200rpm

-6gb stock ram from dell

-Clevo/kapok 6990m with 13.1 drivers

-vbios flashed to undervolt. Bios version: 013.011.000.017.040794 (BR40794.004)

-Still needing an alternate download link for svl7's dell vbios for DP/HDMI sound.[i can't as I am under 5 posts atm]

-740qm CPU, stock clocks. I've never OCed these and the height of temp on these with the AS5 on it at full load in a really really really hot place is 77/78c.

I've read about possible power draw issues and... that isn't it. I have my power brick led lit up if and when it shuts down.

my temps are fine I think. Maybe it's just that on some parts of where I stay, ambient temps are too high? I idle at 51-56C depending on where I am.

Would appreciate insights.

The copper shin mod, in my case, doesn't seem to be necessary. No contact with that weird coil thing on my heatpipe.

Here is what my gpu looked like after my first paste job.

Image - TinyPic - Free Image Hosting, Photo Sharing & Video Hosting

I had reduced the amount of paste by a bit for the second paste job but my temps are the same. maxing out at 85/86C until I fire up kombustor and force it to hit 90c. I stopped the test immediately after it hit 90. was afraid of a thermal shutdown and what other effects might happen to my lovable gpu chip.

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Your GPU paste job is almost perfect, that definitely isn't your problem.

Idling at 51-56C is not normal in my experience, how high are your ambient temps?

To make sure it isn't a power draw problem, start a CPU loading program such as P95 or linpack, then run kombustor. You should get a pretty fast shutoff if that is your issue.

*BTW, in your spec list it says 6gb RAM, How are the modules organised? 4+2/2+2+2? If it's got three sticks in there it's generally considered to be bad, as it forces the system to run in single channel mode.

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Ambient in my country is 34C or thereabouts. My room though is a little hotter than that. Not to mention my room has bad ventilation and is naturally dusty thanks to my surroundings. Still, I manage and keep the place friendly for cpus.

my ram is 4/2. 2 sticks.

I'll report again maybe tomorrow when I land on my friend's place and see what temps I get there on idle.

Philippines is a really hot country imo.

*edit

-it seems that shader clocks are what heats up the most in my set up though everything, every small black block thing on my card makes full pad contact. Pads are 0.5mm thick/thin.

-What would be the highest core/memory clocks I can get with a .95 undervolt? I could experiment but.. I am afraid of screwing the card around. I find it very very uneasy to flash vbios at all, much less experiment/play with it.

-I played a good long full day of gaming [where full day is mostly idle work day and really just playing all the time] where I had fully maxed out assassin's creed 3's video settings just to push the card to its heating limits in my air conditioned office. it maxed out at 86C. Not a single shutdown.

Also there's this on battery:

3506ru9.jpg

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More reports from me:

I tried reflashing my m15x 6990m's clevo vbios a second time. This time to a dell bios for that HDMI sound. I succeeded in flashing but... after a reboot, I was welcomed with no display and successful boots. I did a blind flash to restore my clevo vbios to get my card working properly again.

Now, here I am asking why that happened =\

I attached an image of what I THINK is a successful vbios flash along with both my dell and clevo vbios files.

bios.zip

post-11212-14494994493414_thumb.jpg

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  • 5 weeks later...

hy

i get inexpensive the hd6970m.

but i find it to hot.

have someone try to flash to the hd6950m? they have only 100mhz less and maybe less voltage?

and can someone give me a driver that works... the old at the start post are offline and the new dont worked....

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  • 1 month later...

I have got a problem with my 6990 instalation. If I put the laptop to sleep then try to wake it up the keyboard and fans come to life but the screen stays black and I have to power it off and then back on. I'm sure I neverhgad the problem on my old nvidea card but thats gone now so cant check. any ideas please, my 6990m card is a Dell one removed from a 18x

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Sounds like an acpi issue, simplest solution would be to just not use the sleep mode, assuming you haven an SSD a normal boot is almost as fast...

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hey, Great guide.

I am having issues replacing the card. First, I was unable to download the drivers because catalyst was saying that it was only for AMD products. So i went ahead and replaced the card, Hoping windows would discover it and then I would be able to download the drivers!

Well, i was wrong. Windows has not discovered my 6990m that I replaced, but I am on the computer I replaced it with so obviously something is working right. I went to device manager and there are no AMD products. There is only an Unknown VGA compatible device, which I don't even know if that is the card...

Any help would be greatly appreciated, If you need more info or screenshots just let me know!

Thanks.

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You just need to install the driver and the card will be there. Download the latest driver from AMD directly, if it doesn't install let me know.

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  • 1 month later...

I just recently purchased a m15x with 6990m for 700$ but I bricked the gpu I think :(... It kept crashing randomly at idle within 5 minutes. This only happend when ati drivers are installed. So I went into vbios and changed it to .95v and 680/900 clocks which still caused the shutdowns. I then tried lowering 2d voltage to .8 an that's when it crashed :( what to do now? It worked with a severe downclock... To like 500/900 but that's not how I should be running this kind of card! Any help appreciated

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  • 1 month later...

wow!, fantastic thread, helped a lot fitting my new 6990M (bought as 6970 on ebay and.. surprise!, gpu-z showing 1120 shaders and higher clocks, yep, hard to believe)

If i may, two question for svl7 regarding the "heatpipe hammer fix"... Are the board picture ok? green spot points to lower area coil, but hammered heatpipe seems to be in the same area when the heatsink is upside down. When turned in place don't seems to match... may be the green spot was misplaced in the picture?

And the second one: Did this problem happen always? I'm using a M17x R3 6990M (i guess, no label but vbios dell for sure) and my original 5850 mobility heatsink and backplate.

Ask this because looking at the marked green coil I didn't see the heatpipe being close, but if graphic is wrong may be the upper one could lead to problems, I didn't checked that particular spot for touching.

First test shows temps 56C idle and 85C full load (furmark, buf after reading complete post I promise not use it again).

Anyway, thanks for the guide, great work

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Hi all, i have installed 6970m in to my laptop.

Now i have a problem with analog display output - it limits me to 1600x1200 and recognize my external display as "Non plug and play monitor" . I think my gpu is from "Clevo". Bios version is 013.010.000.011.039419 according to gpu-z.

Is there something i can do with this issue ?

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Hi all,

I've got my 6970m recently, the card salvaged from clevo notebook :smug:.

Only major problem i've got is connecting secondary display to my laptop:

Display resolution limits to 1600x1200 and i've got some flickering.

Flashing the bios from alienware 6970m can solve this problem ? If yes, can someone send me a link, for the vbios files, because i can't download from this thread(don't have permissions :( ).

Thanks

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Thanks for response, i've got 5 messages, so i was able to download bios, that you provided :).

Tried to flash the bios an succeed on second try. The "Boot from usb" option was the second one, and not third, as i thought :).

Now all works fine, i've got my second display with normal resolution.

Sorry for flaming in this thread, i think i got all issues i can get with this card :).

I saw a weird thing with GPU and GPU Memory clock.

When i stop playing - GPU clock returns to 250Mhz, but memory remains on 900Mhz (According to HWInfo).

I go to TRIXX, make some little overclock, or just push "reset" button, the clocks returned to 100 GPU, 150 Memory, but screen begin to flick, when i type something or surfing internet.

I have win 7 64bit, Catalyst version 13.9.

Is there anything i could do with this ?

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Thanks for response, i've got 5 messages, so i was able to download bios, that you provided :).

Tried to flash the bios an succeed on second try. The "Boot from usb" option was the second one, and not third, as i thought :).

Now all works fine, i've got my second display with normal resolution.

Sorry for flaming in this thread, i think i got all issues i can get with this card :).

I saw a weird thing with GPU and GPU Memory clock.

When i stop playing - GPU clock returns to 250Mhz, but memory remains on 900Mhz (According to HWInfo).

I go to TRIXX, make some little overclock, or just push "reset" button, the clocks returned to 100 GPU, 150 Memory, but screen begin to flick, when i type something or surfing internet.

I have win 7 64bit, Catalyst version 13.9.

Is there anything i could do with this ?

Fighting against the many card throttle problems i've found in mx15, first with my oc 5850 and now with the 6990, some tricks that helped with it:

- upgrading or downgrading drivers. No version worked flawless, but some worked fine with stealth trick (see below)

- on drivers energy menu, changin to performance profile atiplay settings. Same thing, not real fix itself but to help stealth trick.

- the good one: entering and leaving the stealth mode. With 5850 this fixed all problems, returning always clocks to full 3d speed.

- starting Ati Tray tools. With 6990 stealth fix is no longer working (need to try other drivers, but i'm too busy gaming), yesterday gpu remained stuck at 400Mhz and that was the only way to fix it. (Can't remember if needed to press "apply" on hardware->overclock with the default speeds to make it work)

I always use to check if all is ok at full speed Atitool with 3d view box open (not installed, just an old version without low level drivers). Opens fast and forces card to 3d mode showing current fps:

1.050/500fps on 5850 overclocked full/stealth

1.700/1000 on 6990

In a second you know if card is at full speed or fix is needed with no need to enter game or look at afterburner/gpu-z current speed. This loads faster and requires no clicks to enter 3d.

For me is the easiest and faster way to check speed previous to enter gaming.

Said all that, I've never had problems with mem speed, so not sure if it will fix your problem. Hope it helps, good luck

---

some additional info regarding the 6690. Power consumption of my system:

i5 M560 / 8Gb / 256 Samsung 840Pro + 750Gb Barracuda + 6690 std clocks/vcc

No 3D load - 45 to 70watts

3Dmark vantage/MOH full - 125-135watts

3Dmark vantage and other test on stealth speed: 100watts (while solving the gpu throttling at 400MHz). At this speed were 7200 3dmarks, not bad at all.

So theres room even at stock voltages to a safe i7 upgrade. Nice.

Key point: Not even a single crash or bsod during many hours gaming by now. Works hot hot hot but stable as hell.

Next chapter: undervolting tests and checking if some modding in bottom cover could improve air flow (peak temps around 95C seems too high for this season). Will inform.

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