Need Advice with Alienware m9750 with 2 nVidia 8700GT Cards

[BJRubino]

:)

Hi everyone,

I have having some serious issues with my laptop, and advice/help you can give me is greatly appreciated.

I have an Alienware m9750; I purchased this system with 2 nVidia 7950GTX cards. Around the beginning of the year, I went for the upgrade to 2 nVidia 8700GT cards; this is when the trouble began. I run (try to run) my system in SLI mode running through a ViewSonic external monitor hooked-up through a Monster Cable HDMI cable. System is fully loaded; 4GM RAM, Vista Premium, etc...

The first change came when I boot-up my system; with the 7950GTX cards, when I would boot-up, all the boot-up screens would be displayed on the external monitor (laptop display is off). I can live with this change, but I am not sure if it may hint at the issues I am having. The serious issues come when I try to play World of Warcraft. I had no troubles with the 7950GTX cards running SLI enables. With these new cards, I have had at least 10 blue screen crashes; WoW has crashed at least 10 times; it will lock-up the system and I can not recover, I have to power down. And I have had Windows messages saying that the video drivers have frozen and recovered at least 30 times.

I have tried the drivers available from the Alienware site (71.51.15672), I have tried the new nVidia drivers available from the nVidia site (167.51), and 2 of the drivers here (167.45) & (167.62). None seem to work properly. They all at some point have caused a blue screen crash. I also noticed that the 2 from this site cause my video to "surge"; I will get maybe 35 fps in WoW, then it will surge up to 40-50fps, then back down to 35.

Does anyone have any advice on what I need to do? I have thought of going back to Windows XP, installing the older 7950GTX cards, or just shooting my laptop. I am so frustrated with this issue; I expect a lot more for a system that cost as much as this one. Alienware tech support has been worthless on this issue, so I turn here.

Thanks for any help you can provide...

BJR

:)

[®®®]

Try disassembling the laptop and clean all fans. They might be full of dust and not be able to get rid of the heat, that#s why the system is downclocking the VGA cards and/or CPU.

[Guest AW owner]

Try changing the drivers first. I own the same GPU combination in this notebook and i can tell you that any drivers pre 169 were a nightmare. Go with 174.93 it is great, both for stability, performance and overclocking capabilities. Might as well try tinkering with the software, before taking the thing apart.

Although maybe you do have a hardware problem as I have had only a single BSD with the stock AW drivers.

[BJRubino]

Well, so far the drivers seem to work OK. No "crashes", but I did have the screen go "fuzzy". I looked at the temp before I shut-down and the GPUs were at 76C. So I opened the system up and cleaned the fans and fan ports. I also set-up my laptop cooler so that it blows at the area where the GPUs are.

What is the limit for GPU temps? Is this too high? After cleaning and the cooler; I ran WoW for about 30 min; the temp when I closed WoW was 75C.

Thanks,

BJR

[Guest AW owner]

Np 76C is perfectly fine for the setup, on idle my cards run at 69/65 and on max load go up to 84/81 (if there is no OC).

Bear in mind that if you stress test with furmark you will get an extremely high temperature as it disproportionately stresses the secondary card. Im telling you this because on my stability test the cards ran at 70/96!!! and there were still no crashes/artifacts etc. So i think you're temps are perfect