**OFFICIAL** Dell XPS M1730 Owner's Lounge, *Part 4*

Continuation of M1730 Owners Lounge - Part 3 is here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...21-dell-xps-m1730-owners-lounge-part-3-a.html


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Hi,

My laptop had a hard time today. (brought in march 2008)

Whilst having SC2 on background, and watching the tennis live stream, I think my graphics card died: the screen went black, then back to normal with a error message in taskbar (driver has crashed/restarted) and the screen had artifacting on it (just random pixels garbled/short horizontal lines that spazz out when you do anything)

Could a faulty motherboard also cause this (because I have a few minor motherboard related issues)

I think this means the graphics card has died however when restarting, all seems fine, I have called Dell and they are going to get me a replacement graphics card/motherboard.

This is the first time i'm having an engineer come around and I'm a little weary of getting refurbished parts, if it's just the motherboard thats faulty/causing problems then I would prefer to keep the current graphics card (8800m gtx, cause I'd imagine despite laptop being three years old, its probably in better condition than a refurbished version)

Of course I could be thinking too hard about this and it could be that both motherboard/graphics card are dead.

Anyone have any experience with the engineers Dell send to your door in UK, anything I need to watch out for?

 

Amazing they are still swapping motherboards and able to replace GPUs on this system. Best of luck with the repair - let us know how it goes. When the tech does arrive, don't 'watch him like a hawk' - let him do his job. If he botches anything or the replacement parts have issues, have him contact support ASAP (before he leaves, check everything). They should either arrange for a second attempt at resolving the issue with another round of parts or they can replace it with another system. Since you still have coverage, don't worry.

If you run into issues with support, check here -
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...s-m1730-problems-dell-replacement-issues.html

 

Niceeeee... part 4, has any other laptop have this many parts???

 

I got my graphics cards changed for the 1st time about 2 weeks ago and its been fine since but I'm not holding out too much hope on these ones. Seems they are all re-furbished cards that are being fitted now so the reliability levels have got to be even worse than they were before. All I can say is I'm glad I still have 1 year + warranty on it. I'm certain I am going to need to use it in the near future.

 

Duke nukem is the bomb, man!

we've all been waiting for this for a long time

btw, long time no see, good to see some familiar faces

 

We're on part 4 already? Damn, until I'll get another laptop we'll get to part 6.

 

Just an update.

Tech came over today and replaced the motherboard and graphics card. System seems to be working fine, however.

In replacement for the 8800m GTX SLi, the replacement part is a 9800M GT SLi, checking Notebook check for graphics card (Mobile Graphics Cards - Benchmark List - Notebookcheck.net Tech) the 9800m GT has exactly the same performance as the 8800gtx. (still 2x 512mb)

I guess it could be worse but should I say anything about this? About to check SC2 since the system is using different drivers now.

edit - It seems the gfx card makes a slight buzzing sound when it doing work (ie running a game), this could be the fan I guess, but something else perhaps?

 

9800M GT is rebranded 8800M GTX, so it is exactly the same card.
The buzzing sound you hear is transistors. I don't know all the technical details, but basically NVidia is using some cheap transistors in our cards (compared to AMD), which make buzzing sound. The loudness differs from unit to unit. One of my replacement units was so loud, I could hear buzzing over the fans that were set to high blast.

 

The buzzing isnt really an issue, its a common thing on our gpus.
Sometimes it gets louder and sometimes it doesnt. It really depends on how much stress is applied on the gpu itself.

Oh and btw lets look at the facts:

- the beast now is, what, 4 years old? It still holds his ground firmly
- its not afraid of newer games as long as it delivers eyecandy and performance
- Shift 2, Witcher 2, Crysis 2 performance are bold statements of the dell invention: a good system powered by great parts (x9000/9800m gtx) with sli
- xp friendly, seven friendly, probably win 8 friendly

Doesnt matter how you put it: it still a system that can kick some new gaming machines

 

Definitely Kingpin, every new game works really good on it with good eye candy and 1920x1200.

The 9800m GT do run colder than their 8800m GTX counterpart. The bios is more optimized on the 9800m GT? So definitely be glad you got the 9800m GT instead of the 8800m GTX SLI.