*HP HDX DRAGON Owners Lounge, Part 1*

I think he sort mentioned where he got it from:

I took this to mean it's a pull from another notebook. Though he ought to keep that card and buy his friend a new one from RJTech because the new one from RJTech is guaranteed not to work.

The new ones from RJTech do not come preflashed. They have to be flashed in a Clevo system.

 

And if we can get the same vbios that he's using then the new cards from RJTech should work too right? If properly flashed of course.

 

Going to have to wait to see if it the one he has works. Not an easy feat.

 

About a year ago or so I took apart a HDX9k that had an Ati card to check if an Nvidia Quadro FX (don't remember which one exactly) I traded from a friend worked. It didn't. But neither did it in my FSC Amilo which I had at that time. I managed to get one card working in that Fujitsu laptop - had an Ati X1800 originally but as 90% of those cards it got burnt - it was an Nvidia 8600 GS.

I'm just saying changing cards in laptops depends on sooo many things. It could be that he was lucky with a good vbios and now the gtx is working in his hdx. Btw 2.0 did you try more vbioses when you tried the gtx?

 

Indeed, it does depend on a lot of things. But I couldn't try a different VBios because I had no means to flash the 280.

 

Feels like blacklisted instead of whitelisted, lol.

Laptops really ought to come with an extra bios chip, like an extra button for a shirt. Too much depends upon such a volatile component. Even a senior comp engineer advised me to just leave the lappie alone.

-

 

Do you recall what that key combo was? I still have yet to update my BIOS. Was afraid to do it, and wouldn't want to unless I got the extended warranty first. I still have yet to get the warranty. Make sure any potential problems are taken care of first by them, especially if the BIOS update causes problems, then if it was verified that the 280 card works I can get that installed, but Lord knows if that will happen. If not, I'll likely just get a larger capacity SSD with long warranty since no one seems to want to sell their top specs HDXs (with WUXGA and the X9000 2.8GHZ CPU) anymore.

 

How to raise a Dragon from the dead (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bios recovery procedure for HDX Dragon):

1. Download latest bios from HP and extract to a folder.

2. Extract either NV.cab or ATI.cab depending on your graphics card.

3. Open the ver.txt file and look for the string after '_ROM_' (for F.40 bios it was '68DVD').

4. Rename Rom.bin to 68DVD.BIN

5. Copy the 68DVD.BIN file to a freshly formatted (not bootable) floppy.

6. Remove battery from HDX.

7. Plug a USB floppy drive into the HDX and place the floppy with the bios file in it.

8. Hold down Win and B keys and turn on the power.

9. Release keys when floppy is accessed.

10. Sit back and wait about two minutes for your HDX to rise from the dead!

 

Just a quick heads up for those who want to try to get the max out of the video card (nvidia) in their HDX:
I tested 5 different drivers, official from hp, newest on HP site, 257.15 from laptopvideo2go, official that comes from Microsoft Update with Win 7 (quite good results but doesn't have the Nvidia panel ) and the 197.90 from lv2go and the last one is the best one. Good performance without any problems that I experienced with 257.15 (DiRT2 and 3DMark were "stuttering" oddly). Maybe this will help some of you

One thing I noticed: the bottom of the monitor where the inverters are gets hot, like 40°C or even a little bit more, is this normal?

Thanks! I will look for the T9500 then.

 

Still no word on the 280, huh? That's too bad, I hope he didn't fry the system.