Can you identify 980m g-sync vs 980m non g-sync by the board alone?

Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to help a mate out who's bought a GTX 980m to go in his M18X R2 and looking for a little advice.

Basically the story goes that this card has come out of a Clevo P870DM-G (and therefore should be the gsync version?), and the seller said he tried it in an Alienware and it didn't boot so he sold it for spares / repairs.

I've tried the card in the M18x R2 and indeed it doesn't work - running UEFI / legacy disabled with SG only the intel shows up and when you boot PEG you just get the 6x beeps.

So next step I desoldered the vbios chip from the 980m and read the contents on my CH341A eeprom programmer. Turns out its currently flashed with Premas "GTX980M_8GB_MXM_OC_PM_v2" rom. ie the non G-Sync version.

So could this be the fault? It's been flashed with a non g-sync vbios when in fact it should be running the g-sync version? Is there any way I can visually check the board to see if its genuinely g-sync or not? (have read there should be a resistor somewhere?). Would like to know for certain if / what rom I should be reprogramming the vbios chip with before soldering it back onto the mxm card.

Thanks in advance,

Jon

 

Well I learned something here, I thought that the laptops had separate G-Sync modules but discovered that no it's just a matter of the card itself doing it.

Two questions:

1. I wonder if the card was flashed with the wrong vbios, i.e. the non G-Sync vbios and promptly bricked

and

2. Can we run a G-Sync 980M in the M18x R2 and benefit from G-Sync?

 

Hi Vulcan,

From what i understand you need 3x things to get g-sync working

• G-sync version of the nvidia card with g-sync vbios
• Laptop panel that's gsync compatible and on nvidia's supported list (which I believe are all edp, no lvds)
• A cookie in the main system bios

I'm sure one of the pros could maybe insert the cookie into a modified M18x R2 system bios but since the motherboard has no edp connector I don't think you'd ever be able to attach a supported gsync edp panel.

That said - I think the 980m (normal and gsync version) both support g-sync via an externally connected monitor. I wonder what would happen if you somehow installed an edp panel and connected it to the mini display port output.

Jon

 

Is there anyway to transplant the display out of something else and into the M18x R2? Probably not because of it's unique size, the 18.4" isn't very common, but I imagine there are other technical hurdles as well.

I'm already thinking about getting my hands on a slightly used 17" unit with a GTX 1070, G-Sync 120Hz 1080p display and half-decent CPU for hopefully $1k in the next few years. I'm sure that when Volta arrives the market will be flooded with such 17" units by people with more money than sense, I imagine it won't be that difficult to find one of the above in good shape for around $1k.

But yeah, I'm really happy my M18x R2 is lasting as long as it is, it's going on 5 years of age! I'm also happy that we at least have 980M as an upgrade path, back in 2012 I would never have imagined having nearly the power of 680M SLI on one GPU.