Alienware m9750 SLi Workaround - XPx32

[Grey728]

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=185060

I thought I'd post in here as well since the instructions are buried in a thread. This might help more people. I've used this workaround and it's worked fo

r all the latest drivers released from Laptopvideo2go so far. This might work for other configurations as well as the premise should be the same. Good luck!

Hey guys, I don't know if this is posted anywhere else, but after struggling through installing new drivers onto my SLI laptop, I did it!

Here are some quick steps (Though Chaz has a good instructions already):

1. Download desired driver from www.laptopvideo2go.com (go into the forums for the absolute latest)

2. Download .inf file that comes with driver.

3. Uninstall your current driver and reboot.

4. Unzip driver into a folder.

5. Move .inf file into driver folder. This WILL overwrite a file. (Good thing)

6. Install by selecting 'Setup'

Next step is important! as this caused me MANY black screens with no output!!

7. Install 1 card only. When the driver asked you to install and you click 'Continue Anyway' Do this only once!

8. Cancel install for second card. This cancels out install process

9. Reboot

10. GO to Devicde Manager, and select 2nd card that didn't install. (Most likely called 3D Hardware and not recognized as a video card, I can't remember exact name)

11. Update driver and select folder you unpacked in step 4.

12. When the driver installs, click "Continue Anyway"

13. Reboot and done!

The second card process was killing me as every time I would try and install it at the same time as the first I'd get a blank display screen. Windows would work properly but I couldn't see anything. I kept having to uninstall the new drivers in safe mode to use my laptop again. I hope this helps anyone who might be runing into the same issue I did.

3dMark Score of 8727 using 169.04 drivers ^^

[Guyver1]

this will need to be verified by other SLI users and across various driver versions.

due to the n100 chip on intel 945/965 based laptop motherboards the actual driver code is different to normal forceware drivers. If this 'hack' can be verified to work everytime across multiple laptops on multiplae driver versions then nVidia's driver team are incredibly sloppy.

If its inconsistent and works occasionally and only for some people, or some driver versions then again nvidia are being sloppy in their coding work

[Grey728]

I really wouldn't call this a hack as it really doesn't require anyone to do anything special. Basically, install one card first, reboot, then install the other.

I had a pair of desktop 7800 GTs that I put in SLi and while I can't find the proof just yet, I had read somewhere either in the motherboard or XFX user manual that it was recommended to install one graphics card at a time to reduce the risk of driver conflicts. I just put that advice into practice when installing the laptop driver.

For those who want to search for the advice I read, I was using an XFX 7800 GT and Asus A8N32-SLI delux board. One or the other talks about installing one card at a time.

Since it wouldn't be practical for laptop users to physically uninstall one Graphics chip from our system, by simply NOT installing the driver for is effectively not installing it and thus reducing the potential conflict. In my case, MANY blank screens of death after the second card installed.

I urge everyone with an SLi laptop to try this out. The worse that can happen is what? Reinstalling your old driver?

Drivers I've tested the install process thus far:

169.04

169.01

163.76

163.71

Out of the 4 tested, 163.71 gave me the lowest 3dmark score of 5600 (expected 8500ish) and I suspect SLi wasn't working right, but 163.76 seems rock solid so far. No crysis or UT3 SLi boosts though.

[Guyver1]

your missing the key issue here.

your A8N32-SLI has a genuine nVidia nForce SLI chipset on the motherboard, this means that any driver would have given you SLI however you installed those drivers. SLI on desktops with an nforce chipset will always work 100% correctly.

laptops dont work like that. I've tried installing drivers by installing each card seperately through Device Manager and only once i ever got SLI enabled, and then the performance was shockingly bad. laptops that use a non nforce chipset require an nvidia n100 chip to enable SLI code and SLI features, they also need unique driver code supplied by nvidia to the laptop vendors via a Driver Development Kit (DDK).

IF this work around can get SLI working on non nforce chipset laptops then its down to sloppy coding, because the n100 chip requires unique unlocked drivers to work properly.

out of about 30 attempts to install drivers in various different manners only once did SLI work, but it didnt work properly and the laptop performance was halved, making me think it didnt work correctly even tho it was shown as being enabled.

[Guest laberlaber]

i cant confirm that!

i am usina a alienware aurora m9700 with an gf4 sli chipset and 2x7900 gs cards.

i opend the system and replaced the cooling pads with arctic silver (which was VERY usefull btw :) )and am now trying to find the best drivers.

the ones which were installed by alienware (84.74) i can oc easyly by using coolbits. the driver build in sliders worke fine then, also do sowerstrip or ati-tool.

i then tryed 165.o1 from this forums and 163.xx and several others: i can use sli on all of these drivers, without having to install the cards seperately as mentioned above. sli works properly. i just cant get ANY changes on the clocks done: no tool will change the core or ram settings. i had also difficulties to get the ntune working, now i found a stable version that at least will start, but is also not able to do any changes on the graphic cards or the mainboard.

im still working on the problem to see, if i can find any better driver the the 84.74 with sli and oc. i might report if i found one.

hf.

btw: my max fsb is rocksolid untill 208.

gpu tested with 438 and graphic ram 631 with still room left for more

ram not optimised yet

ht-clock? have no idea yet if it will bring some benifit

[Grey728]

Please, If you own an SLi Laptop with an Intel chip, please list out your specs and let us know if this driver method works or not. There are at least 4 people I know that say this works and the more the merrier. If not it doesn't work for you, please still include your system specs.

[Grey728]

your missing the key issue here.

your A8N32-SLI has a genuine nVidia nForce SLI chipset on the motherboard, this means that any driver would have given you SLI however you installed those drivers. SLI on desktops with an nforce chipset will always work 100% correctly.

laptops dont work like that. I've tried installing drivers by installing each card seperately through Device Manager and only once i ever got SLI enabled, and then the performance was shockingly bad. laptops that use a non nforce chipset require an nvidia n100 chip to enable SLI code and SLI features, they also need unique driver code supplied by nvidia to the laptop vendors via a Driver Development Kit (DDK).

IF this work around can get SLI working on non nforce chipset laptops then its down to sloppy coding, because the n100 chip requires unique unlocked drivers to work properly.

out of about 30 attempts to install drivers in various different manners only once did SLI work, but it didnt work properly and the laptop performance was halved, making me think it didnt work correctly even tho it was shown as being enabled.

Actually, I think you're a little too focused on this nv100 chip as the sole cause of not being able to use SLi. I'm sorry I don't mean to sound like a know it all because you've obviously done a lot to try and solve this problem, but from I can see is that when you use pretty much ANY driver from laptopvideo2go, your screen goes black after the second card install and this is more indicative of a driver conflict than anything else. Now it LOOKS like your computer hanged with a black screen but in reality it did not. What you probably haven't noticed was that actually, the driver did install but was having a monitor output issue. I could shut down the system and hear that windows was functioning properly by pressing the windows key, up arrow, and enter would make the laptop shutdown (try it and see it happen visually). While you couldn't see the laptop shutting down, you would at least hear it happen.

More than anything, I think it was the "Display Monitor" installing between the cards that caused the driver conflict. After the second card installs, the display monitor is again detected but the screen goes black because of this driver conflict. Rebooting in between card driver installations resolves the issue.

Edited November 10, 2007 by Grey728

[Guyver1]

of around 30 differernt attempts, both by standard installation of clicking on the setup.exe and alternative of installing each card seperately through device manager over about 10 different driver versions i've only ever had one instance where SLI was actually enabled throught the control panel. only on the latest 169.xx did i ever get the balck screen and that was only after the second card installed, on reboot the screen was normal and i could use windows just fine but SLI was never an option inthe control panel, it was either not there or i got the message as shown in the image below:

the n100 chip is the crucial element in this whole mess, SLI on anything other than authentic nForce SLI chipsets requires specially coded drivers written by nVidia. buy a SLI desktop motherboard and SLI installs everytime via the normal driver installation process. Buy a laptop with a genuine nforce chipset and SLI install correctly everytime via the normal driver installation process. try installing SLI on a mobile intel chipset and your pretty much screwed except for the odd occasion or workaround (which doesnt work for everyone) and is probably down to sloppy nvidia coding. Yes i have done alot or work on this, but tbh I really sholdnt have had to. After paying £2300 for the 'ultimate' gaming laptop i expect to be able to install normal forceware drivers normally like every other nvidia user and not be force to used hacks/workarounds or wait for some half assed driver support team to update 9 month old drivers via a DDK lisence agreement :)

[Grey728]

Since we both have the same laptops simliarly configured, I wonder if your system is in some way physically different than mine. I recently purchased mine and recieved it Nov. 2nd. You've had yours for a few months now. Hmm.. out of all the driver installations I've tried, I ran accross this multi-GPU once and that was while trying to install the drivers normally. Afterwhich, I kept getting black screens of death. I will try the normal install method on sub 169 drivers and see if I can replicate your issue.

Also, I think I'll download this NERD thing and compare your system with mine. I'll check back in a few hours and post an update. So far, I have indeed verified that I have SLi enabled on my system and have run benchmarks and have compared sli enabled and disabled.

[Guyver1]

I also used the latest Intel chipset drivers from Intel.com and not the drivers on the supplied Master CD that came with the lappy.

God help us if the intel drivers are also 'special'

[Guest trias10]

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=185060

I thought I'd post in here as well since the instructions are buried in a thread. This might help more people. I've used this workaround and it's worked fo

r all the latest drivers released from Laptopvideo2go so far. This might work for other configurations as well as the premise should be the same. Good luck!

Hey guys, I don't know if this is posted anywhere else, but after struggling through installing new drivers onto my SLI laptop, I did it!

Here are some quick steps (Though Chaz has a good instructions already):

1. Download desired driver from www.laptopvideo2go.com (go into the forums for the absolute latest)

2. Download .inf file that comes with driver.

3. Uninstall your current driver and reboot.

4. Unzip driver into a folder.

5. Move .inf file into driver folder. This WILL overwrite a file. (Good thing)

6. Install by selecting 'Setup'

Next step is important! as this caused me MANY black screens with no output!!

7. Install 1 card only. When the driver asked you to install and you click 'Continue Anyway' Do this only once!

8. Cancel install for second card. This cancels out install process

9. Reboot

10. GO to Devicde Manager, and select 2nd card that didn't install. (Most likely called 3D Hardware and not recognized as a video card, I can't remember exact name)

11. Update driver and select folder you unpacked in step 4.

12. When the driver installs, click "Continue Anyway"

13. Reboot and done!

The second card process was killing me as every time I would try and install it at the same time as the first I'd get a blank display screen. Windows would work properly but I couldn't see anything. I kept having to uninstall the new drivers in safe mode to use my laptop again. I hope this helps anyone who might be runing into the same issue I did.

3dMark Score of 8727 using 169.04 drivers ^^

I can confirm that this method WORKS for me.

I have an Alienware m9750, 2.33GHZ, 2x 7950 GTX running XP-32bit SP2. I followed the instructions exactly as specified by Grey's method and I was able to successfully turn on SLi in the control panel and verify it was working by running 3DMark06 and some games with the SLi indicator enabled.

Bravo to you Grey, as I'm now running my m9750 in SLi using the 163.75 drivers (I wanted to use 169.04 but have heard some bad reviews).

One point of note: when I ran DriverCleaner after removing the 94.23 drivers, I ran cab cleaner, and then only the Nvidia filters. I did _not_ run the nForce cleaning filter. I am very, very curious to know if running that filter would allow this trick to work. My guess is that the 94.23 drivers installed some sub-driver for the nForce 100 chip, and if you run the nForce filter, maybe it kills that driver and then makes it so Grey's Method won't work. Just a hypothesis.

The bad news: my very first run of 3dMark06 on the 163.75 drivers in SLi gave me worse results than my 94.23 drivers. On 94.23, my average was around 8200, with a fresh boot giving around 8500. My first 1-pass run on 163.75 gave me 7812. Not too happy about that :)

I also deeply suspect that you need to be running the XP BIOS for the m9750 to make this work. Most people don't know this but Alienware actually has two sets of BIOS for all their laptops, an XP version and a Vista version (for BIOS). If you ordered your laptop with Vista installed, then you are running the Vista BIOS. If you ordered the laptop with Vista but then installed XP on it yourself, you know you're in bad shape if you open up your device manager and see 3 Unknown Devices that never go away. You need to install the XP m9750 BIOS in order to make those Unknown Devices go away, and it's also something Alienware HIGHLY recommends you do for system performance and stability. I'm also pretty positive the BIOS change affects the SLi in someway. What I mean by this is that if you've got the same laptop as me, and Grey's Method is not working for you, then a possible solution might be the BIOS.

Thanks again Grey.

[Guest Darren Gordon]

Hi there all firstly thnx to Guyver for all your research i have been reading thru for the last 2 weeks and thanks also to grey for the new method. I have M9750 with vista 32 (was intending to downgrade to XP but wanted vista licence) havnt so far as the curent AW drivers for vista and much newer than for XP 154 or something compaired to 94 on XP, and all games i have tried (inc bio-shock, which has to be run after clean boot otherwise slightly laggy) are working nicely with graphics maxed. Now where was i going with this... oh yeah systems same as most twin 7950 gtx, 2 gig ram, 2.4 processor. I will try this tonight when i get home and see if it works, one quick question i have the AW drivers at the moment will uninstalling them clean enough or do i need a driver cleaner?

[Guyver1]

best way i've found to uninstall drivers without a driver cleaner issimply to boot into safe mode, then unistall the drivers while in safe mode, then reboot and then install your new drivers

[Guest Darren]

Well im not sure if this is good news or bad news (for you guyver) or just plain weird, i did as per instructions and downloaded the latest drivers ie 163.67 for vista 32 bit (explained why on vista in last post), i rebooted to safe removed old drivers booted installed new with modified inf file and it just ran, asked me the question once (not twice) finished, rebooted i ticked the sli button and it worked perfect (didnt even need to reboot where as the alien ware drivers insisted reboot after sli tick). Gone into device manager and running the 7.15.11.6367 drivers on both cards. So it def is latest drivers benchmark score 7909 / 3807 / 3478 / 1812 (did have virus checker etc running so may be bit higher if off and obviosuly would be higher with xp) Big difference i notice is that fan didnt even kick in untill near end of bench test! Bioshock seems to be running fine with no hesitations but then it did run okish with the old drivers from alienware provided it was run strt after boot.

With the old alienware drivers my bench was about 7680 i think ohh i did install the 7.15.11.6501 as they appeared to be newer at first these installed exactly as above with no second question and gave me a mark of 7349 / 3300 / 3315 / 1803.

Hope this helps u in some way guyver & grey if u need any further info on my machine details ask and i will look and revert back

[Grey728]

Guyver1,

I'm sorry, I had a very busy weekend and didn't have much time to experiment with other drivers. I started with 163.51 and I was having trouble getting those installed properly without black screens with any method. After a lengthy and buggy installation, I finally did manage to get SLi working but performance was really poor.

I'll keep trying with more drivers and try to find out at what point did Sli start working reasonably well.

[surdanis]

I'm curious about this workaround. I seem to have gotten SLI to work on my M590KE with dual Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX's, but, alas, I'm not so sure. You mentioned that your cards have different bios numbers. When I check out the specs on mine via the Nvidia Control Panel, I do not see that. However, there is an option to enable SLI, and, yes, I've gotten the green bar to appear. However, I wonder if the whole system is working properly.

I am running Vista, and I wonder if your method will not work on Vista. Any thoughts?

Regards,

J

[Grey728]

You can test if SLi is working by running test software with and without it on. CHeck your framerate using a free program called Fraps.

ALso, SLi works best with at least 6 month old software. The new stuff like CoD 4, UT3, Crysis are still too new to show much improvement. Wait for drivers to mature for these newer titles.

[Guyver1]

ALso, SLi works best with at least 6 month old software. The new stuff like CoD 4, UT3, Crysis are still too new to show much improvement. Wait for drivers to mature for these newer titles.

not 'technically' true. Sli works best when the development team specifically works and tests with SLI as part of their engine/game design/development and Q&A process. In conjunction with the game engine itself being designed and optimised with multiple GPU's as well as a single GPU, the dev team must also have regular communication with nvidia to ensure nvidia is aware of any issues so they can release fixes via beta releases.

Also most people who buy 2 GFX cards just dont realise HOW Sli works and end up running SLI in 1280x1024 and then dont understand why they arent seeing this awesome performance jump. they also dont understand that their rig will be CPU bottlenecked BEFORE it becomes GPU bottlenecked.

[Grey728]

not 'technically' true. Sli works best when the development team specifically works and tests with SLI as part of their engine/game design/development and Q&A process. In conjunction with the game engine itself being designed and optimized with multiple GPU's as well as a single GPU, the dev team must also have regular communication with nvidia to ensure nvidia is aware of any issues so they can release fixes via beta releases.

False: No developer save maybe Cryotek, wrote any code specific to SLi. All a developer cares about is if their game can run reasonably well on an average spec'd system and throw in extra eye candy for those with higher than average systems and possibly for their game to age well. Games like Doom 3, Unreal 2k4, Half Life 2, Oblivion, Bioshock, UT3, etc are NOT SLi hardcoded and no, it doesn't go into some special QA process nor is there a dedicated team of programmers and engineers slaving away trying to get the most out of SLi or Crossfire for that matter. The SLi and Crossfire performance rests solely in the hands of nVidia and Ati as it's them that stand to gain from it and the performance improvements come from their driver implementation. These game developers aren't in the business of trying to sell extra video cards. They're trying to sell a game and make it enjoyable and accessible to as many people as possible. To think they expect people to use SLi an in turn optimize for it in order to run their game is naive.

Now, if there is ANY development team working on improving Sli performance, it's behind the doors of nVidia who *might* be working with a game developer. In that respect, yes, there is a team of programmers working on performance gains, but those gains are realized only through driver implementation. That takes time and hence ~6 months would be a reasonable time assumption. The whole point and promise of using an SLi rig is that you will get up to twice the performance without thinking about it and YES, you will see performance gains in an SLi rig without installing individual game patches that better utilize the code. Take a look at a few release patches from game developers and tell me if you find any SLi specific optimizations. I'll bet you'll be hard pressed to find any. Then take a look at Nvidia's release notes on WHQL certified drivers. See a difference?

I'm not saying SLi IS twice the performance as real world testing has proven otherwise but there should at least be some performance gains. 60%-75% seems to be the norm.

...they also dont understand that their rig will be CPU bottlenecked BEFORE it becomes GPU bottlenecked.

I don't think you give people enough credit. Hell even in simple terms, it's much cheaper to purchase a higher clocked CPU than it is to get another video card. I would also find it hard to believe that ANYONE would drop such a large amount of coin without first doing some research. Besides, this is more of a desktop issue than a laptop issue and may change when the 8800m GTX come out and people seriously consider SLI. If you're running a 2.0 Ghz dual core machine or more, the bottleneck will still be the GPU even with a single 8800GTX installed. Since you have two ultras, you are now being limited by your CPU hence, a 3gHz machine or Quad-core would be more beneficial. I use your single 8800 Ultra card as an example because a 7950m GTX in SLi does not even meet the performance of a single 8800 Ultra card.

To test for CPU bottleneck, lower all visual quality settings to Low and start with a resolution of 1024x768. Use fraps to check your average frame rate and document each resolution setpoint. Then increase your resolution until you hit your native resolution or you reach an unacceptable framerate. This pushes your cpu while easing the load on your GPU and limiting it primarily to fill rate speeds.

Repeat the test again starting at 1024x768 with maximum eye-candy and record your average FPS with fraps. Compare each set of trend data and compare it's slope. If the slope takes a nose dive at the higher resolutions, it's your GPU. If the slope is essentially the same, then it's your CPU that's bottlenecking your system.

A fine reference for this information would be from www.hardocp.com. Please do a search on it on their website for real world testing, benchmarks, and conclusions.

Edited January 3, 2008 by Grey728

[Grey728]

Actually, upon thinking about your reply some more Guyver, you're right. SLi is best when developers program their games with SLi in mind and build those optimizations into the engine itself. However, while this is true, in the real world this is not the case. Both developers and video card makers adhere to standards like DirectX and OpenGL. Video card makers do their best to optimize their video cards to those standards and game developers use their given platform, be it DirectX or OpenGL to program their games in.

[surdanis]

not 'technically' true. Sli works best when the development team specifically works and tests with SLI as part of their engine/game design/development and Q&A process. In conjunction with the game engine itself being designed and optimised with multiple GPU's as well as a single GPU, the dev team must also have regular communication with nvidia to ensure nvidia is aware of any issues so they can release fixes via beta releases.

Also most people who buy 2 GFX cards just dont realise HOW Sli works and end up running SLI in 1280x1024 and then dont understand why they arent seeing this awesome performance jump. they also dont understand that their rig will be CPU bottlenecked BEFORE it becomes GPU bottlenecked.

so i should probbly get a faster cpu? i have a tl-60 currently and was looking at tl-64

[Guest Musste]

Guys , every driver I tried till now has some stupid bugs on it , I can't seem to find a working driver for my m9750.. who can help me? I have an AW m9750 geforce go 9750 sli enabled.. 2 GRam, 2,16 itelcore 2 duo and I'm runing VISTA ULTIMATE.. please someone I need a working driver .. and a good one

[Guest Razvan]

Hi,

I own an Alienware 9750 (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0Ghz, 2GB of RAM dual 7950GTX).Laptop came with Vista on it and at that time SLI was not an option fo Vista.Installed XP and used the BIOS update for XP from Alienware Hive to make those 3 unknown hardware go away.

SLI on XP:

As you probbaly now SLI is disabled by default on laptops.You have to manually enable it.The inf file from laptop2go worked like a charm for some forceware 15x version of the drivers or something like that.All i know is that it was the latest driver in September 2007.Installing both cards from the setup did not give me the blank screen.However whe using the 169.xx drivers the blank screen appeard after installing the second card.Further testing showed that the laptop did not hang.What happens, and i am not an expert because i donn't work for nvidia, is that since only one GPU is active by default, the diplay seems to switch to the second GPU the minute you try to install it.Here is where the OS craks.The driver wants to use the newer card as the primary diplay,but Windows sends digital signals to the older card which is suposetly disabled(IRQ conflict most likely).That's why you get the blank screen.I never used the install one card at a time technique,thought that is what the setup is doing with no reboots in between.Instead i tryed to memorize where the Finish button is located on screen when the setup finishes, so before the screen goes blank i positioned the cursor where the button should be.Given that it takes about 2 minutes per card to install, i waited another 2 minutes with the blank screen and then blind click.Once it worked,the computer rebooted and i could use SLI, just like it was supposed to.The rest of the times it didnn't because i miss calculated the mouse pointer position.Instead i used something else that never failed me.

Press winodws key + R.That will open the run window in the bottom left corner of the screen.Remember that you are blind.Now type in this command without quotes : "shutdown -r -f -t0".It means reboot computer, force quit any application that is running and wait 0 seconds before doing that.If you typed it correctly the computer should reboot immediately.It worked every time for me.Though i do not recomed using this approach, i used it just as an example to prove that there will be no severe damage to the computer performace it you get the blank screen.

I have seen that many of you argued about the n100 chip.What is it? an What is it supposed to do?

Think of the n100 chip as a hardware add-on to your laptop chipset. Intel chipset + n100 = nForce chipset.Look in the Device Manager tab.Do you see an entry that says n100 system driver.I donn't, and you wanna know why?Because windows doesnnt eve recognize the chip.For it, this chip never existed.Windows sees the intel chipset and intel chipset only in my hardare configuration.

Those of you who know the basics about CPU designing will understand best what i am trying to explain.Wen a company like nVidia designes a GPU it first designs a template.A template is the backbone of the whole device.Any additional features or performace improvements will be done on that template using an area called RESERVED.When a new family of processors comes out, a new template will be designed an so on.The same applyes for chipsets since they are also processors.By simply using the reserved space from the template nVidia was able to develop the n100 while beeing totally transparent to the driver.The n100 acts as a coordinator for the 2 GPUs.Whether you have Split-frame Rendering or ALternate Frame Rendering, the n100 decides what card processes what and then it combines the result so that the user sees one beautifully renderd image.

Those of you who think that nVidia designed a whole new chip for laptops with a whole new set of drivers, i would like to contradict you.My experiece from beeing an electronics designer engineer says that for a computer (laptop or desktop) that is supposed to be 100% IBM compatible, designing totaly new hardware for some devices and keeping the same for the rest is bad practice.And personally i think that nVidia will not do that mistake.If they had done that then this forum thread would have never existed, but instead there would be a thread about all of us cursing Alienware and nVidia for their mistake because all of us would have to rely on Alienware outdated drivers and we would all fell happy if we could play Mario or Solitaire.

SLI performance?

Ingame performance boost is not so obvious.Games use lots of different graphic effects for which SLI performance varies.The overall bost is somewhere arround 20% (i never saw any difference while playing Crisys), but i have seen some games that gave me as much as 75% in perfomance (EVE Online is an example, though this game officially does not support SLI;performance degradation happens when the game has to render transparent surfaces like clouds and smoke).

3DMark06 is going to give you a bit more detail of what is going on on your GPU.This application test every graphic effect separately.Performace increase was about 25% with Shader Model 3.0 which is the current DX9 game standard.Suprisingly there was an 100% increase when rendering Pixel Shader surfaces.As far as i know Pixel Shader is a technique where each pixel color is calculated individualy based on surface type and lightting.Pixel shader can be used for rendering terrain.Rendering sand is one of the best uses.In the test i was getting ~430 FPS without SLI and ~815 FPS with SLI.

The overall score varies, and is somewhere around 8750 points.The driver settingsin the nvidia control panel have impact on the final results.The score i mentioned is for default settings for both the driver and the 3DMark application.

Bottom line is that i see no harm in using the ForceWare driver with the inf mod and for those of you that didnn't work, the most common source of error is human error.None of us is perfect.Pay attention to the guidance rules and all ALienware 9750 owners should get the same results.These computers are the same.(CPU, motherboard and GPU)

[T0mat3]

thx

Edited February 3, 2009 by T0mat3