Nvidia WHQL driver 285.62

Which one would you suggest? I thought the idea about the AMD 5870 might be good, might need help doing it, but I am willing to give it a go. Trying to ge the most out of this laptop while I have it.. If I had the money to get a new one, I would; but sadly I am limited in the monetary department.

 

The Dell mobility 5870, flashed with the latest vBIOS from Dell are plug and play apparently.
They are also DX11 capable cards.
Continue discussion on this subject here if you wish:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/610357-m17xr1-5870-crossfire-running.html

 

OK, bear with me, as I've become quite frustrated and want to be thorough as to what is going on. I'm running on an R1 w/ SLI 280s and 9400M. I recognize that these drivers are a little out of date now, but I had more or less the same issues with 290.xx, so I thought I would try these. As I'm not playing BF3 or anything it doesn't make much difference to me right now. I'm getting a black screen on login to windows. This is what I have done so far - Using katalin's modded INFs:

Disabled Hybrid Graphics and Integrated Graphics in BIOS A07. I only want to run my SLI GTX280s, as I really never use the 9400M.

Deleted the 9400M entry from the Device manager, rebooted, etc, so windows shouldn't know about it at all. As I don't use it, I don't really want the driver installed or loading on startup.

I installed the 285.62 drivers, first just standard Clean install, had issues, so I uninstalled, did the whole Safe Mode, Driver Sweeper, ccleaner etc. "extra" Clean install, same result.

I don't think there is a problem with my install, as Install goes smoothly, asks for reboot, takes me all the way through the login screen no problems, but once I login when I hit the desktop I either get a blank black screen, or the LCD display actually turns off. Still get the high disk activity of SuperFetch loading up and when I press the power button (which I have set for a soft shutdown) it makes the normal shutdown chime, and after a few seconds shuts down. Pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL does nothing, Pressing Fn+F6 or F7 does nothing. Everything seems to be working fine, except for some display setting/driver conflict that is not letting me see Windows a few seconds past login.

It seems to me that windows is loading/trying to load some other driver when I login, but I really have no idea where to go from here. I have searched these forums and google and found a few people asking similar questions, but did not find an answer. Does anyone have any idea what the problem is or what I need to do to fix this? Would deleting the 9400M entries in the INFs matter? I would think the installer should only be detecting the 280s after the steps I have taken to disable the 9400.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I find its easier to help people with more information and wanted to clarify what steps I have taken so far trying to remedy this.

Also, if this should be posted somewhere else in the forum, I apologize.
Thanks in advance for any help.

 

Hello, Lord Grishnakh, you posted in the right section, thank you, also giving more information is always better.
As for your issue, have you disabled PCIe Gen2 in BIOS? Generally that solves the issue you are describing.

Let us know.

 

Well, that was all for nothing I guess, because I uninstalled and again tried to remove every trace of everything having to do with the drivers and did everything the same as I did before, but this time I ran the installer in safe mode and when I rebooted back into normal windows, everything was fine, just re-enabled SLI and rebooted. And yes, I did have PCIe Gen2 disabled in BIOS after reading in various places your suggestion to do so, katalin, thank you and thanks for the quick response.

However, now when I login the screen flashes several times before settling down and becoming usable amd everytime a UAC prompt (Vista) comes up, the screen flashes twice, then when I make a selection and it goes away it flashes twice again. By flash I mean like the display is actually turning on and off rapidly. Doesn't seem to be causing any serious problems but it is highly annoying. This is only with SLI enabled. I had this problem with some earlier versions of nVidia drivers, but it wasnt nearly this bad, mosly just the flashing on login and not nearly as much of it. Is anyone else experiencing this and/or how do I make it stop short of disabling SLI?

Nobody else is experiencing this? I have had this issue since a couple of driver iterations back and still have it now after a "fairly" fresh install, obviously this is some SLI/Vista issue because it doesn't happen with SLI disabled and I don't have any issue like this in games. I've searched but not found any information about this kind of thing.



Ha, now I feel kind of dumb and confused. I rebooted again (and have several times since my post, making various tweaks) and as of the last reboot its not flashing anymore. I was afraid that my SLI was no longer working or something, but it's working fine and the issue has resolved itself. I still wish I know why it was doing what it was doing and why it isn't anymore, but I wont complain.

 

Remember: Always reboot your system after driver installs, even if you don't get a prompt to do so!

 

Just installed the 285.62 driver with the modded inf, and now for some reason the GPU fans don't spin up, no matter how hot the cards get, they just seem to sit at like 10% or around idle, even as the temps go above 100*C. Is this due to the driver or is it something else/what should I try to fix it?

 

Have you uninstalled old drivers first?
Try a full power drain removing the CMOS coincell battery in the process.

I didn't had any fan related issues with these drivers.

if all else fails try the 290.53 beta ones here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/633476-new-nvidia-beta-drivers-290-53-a.html

And as always, see instructions in my posts.
To clean older drivers, see the last line in this post:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/8200078-post76.html

Happy New Year.

 

You sir are awesome. I thought my brand new laptop had a DoA video card. I used your inf's with the newest drivers and it worked perfectly. + Rep!

 

I was looking for a few answers as to why my Alienware m17x never had compatible drivers to update and seriously you find no answers at all this is the closest I've ever come and I'm still on the same problem.
I've done all these steps but no dice I still get the error for not being compatible any ideas?
Getting tired on having spend so much on a laptop with 0 customer service My current driver is still from way back in 2010