HOW-TO: Upgrade your 9300 with the Ultra or 7800 "Photo Guide" - Page 41

Unfortunately, the 7800 is vastly superior to the 6800. Benchmark scores alone don't tell the whole story. The 7800 has 24 pixel pipelines and I think 8 vertex shaders, whereas the 6800 has 12 pixel pipelines and 5 shaders. That means that in higher resolutions the 7800 will perform much better... since the laptop has a pretty high res display, games will work faster with the 7800 at higher resolutions.

However, given the cost of the card... I'd take a regular 6800 or a 6800 ultra at the moment. You won't have any trouble running any games with any of those. If the 7800 would cost about 300 dollars then it should be allright, but it is absolutely ridiculously priced right now.

Is the 6800 Ultra worth getting over the 6800, how much better is the ultra?

The Ultra is significantly better than the 6800 GO. It's worth it because it's only about $50 more than the 6800 GO on eBay right now.

Help!!

Have installed the 6800Ultra card in my 9300, got the 9cell battery and the 130W brick. all seemed to go smoothly.

When I put it all back together and pushed the power button, the led panel flashed and then went off - laptop dead as a wotsit.

Put the old ATI X300 back in and all is fine.....I'm assuming I've bought a duff card from ebay?

Any help gratefully received!

Cheers,

Dave.

Aint it GREAT...

I just finished the upgrade a month ago after reading nearly every page in this forum. The things that seem to be most commonly missed are:
1. Card not properly seated, need to ensure that you press firmly on the "press here" marked on the card, but of course don't crush it.
2. Fubared loading the drivers. (I did this one, had to go throught the whole thing twice to get it.) Check the first 5 pages of this thread and you will see instructions for getting it right.
The link for the best driver I have found is:http://www.tweaksrus.com/index.php?o...163&Itemid=41/ I used the 97.44 it scores 10X better than the ATI X300, but from what I have read, it is still not that impressive for a 7800. From what I have read it will work fine on the 6800.
3. Bios did not install correctly. This one I am sceptical about, because on the Dell Support page, there are instalation instructions for the I9300 upgrade to 6800Ultra, but having not done it I can not be more specific than that.

Anyway good luck with, just be patient and it should work. I also did the jumper wire to a 1.8 CPU in my I9300, it is always turning 2.4 GHZ and scores insanely high on all CPU tests. It consistently performs at the equivalent of 3.0 to 3.4 Pentium 4. I would never have believed it if I had not done it myself.

I will also give props to Primus and Dissilusion in this forum, if you get stuck they seem to provide feedback that works. Not that I have gotten any bad poop.

Also this thread appears to be dieing fast, so good luck. There at three other forums that carry similar instructions for doing these mods.


Peace,
Jerimiah

FYI If an old econ prof can do it with no IT experience outside of being a COBOL programmer for life, anyone can do it. I had never seen the inside of a laptop before I removed my screws.

Can I flash the Bios with a 9 cell bat and a 90 watt ac adapter, still wating for my 130 to come in

Im not quite sure
You can attempt it, but i'd recommend waiting on your 130watt. so you dont hit a brick wall.
Wat video card are u using to flash it?
You gonna need it if you have a 7800gtx cuz it wont stay on to flash the bios with out your 130 watt PSU
You need %100 percent power so it dosnt crash when you flash the i9300.

with the 6800 vanilla or the 7800 GTX my 9300 wouldn't boot with the standard 90 W PSU after I had flashed the XPS bios. It would go through the post screen but before XP started its boot up I would hear a beep and there would be a black screen with print on it that said "Invalid power supply. Please connect the 130 W power supply unit and restart the system" or something very close to that.

You need a Xps Gen 2 130W PSU Make sure its Revision A02 Or higher

I know, my statement was in reference to someone above that asked if they could flash without the 130W PSU. I don't have my 9300 anymore.

And it get's better....then worse.

My new 7800 GTX arrived today. Flash the bios, whipped the old card out and slotted in the new one.

Booted up fine....and then 2 minutes later the backlight goes. Can still see images on the screen but only in certain lights.

Got home tonight - fire it up and it's working again.....until 2 minutes later (or so) it goes again.

Any thoughts? Something getting too hot? duff card (AGAIN!!!) or just pure bad luck and timing....

Cheers...

Dave.

Do you have the 130W PSU and 9 cell Battery?

You can trick the system by powering up on battery, then after OS boots plug in the power supply.

Yep - A little ebay shopping last month got me the goodies...

Well, put the old ATI x300 card back in and its all working fine......!

Grrrr.

Any thoughts? Duff card? Seller advertised it as new on eBay but card is marked refurbished. Should I ask for my money back? Paid through paypal so covered apparently....(!)

I'd rather it all worked.....getting to the point now when I'm just going to put the machine on ebay and buy a new laptop.....

Guys could use some help, tonite I went ahead and did the 7800 gtx upgrade and all went well, except when I tried to boot I got a message saying "the ac power could not be determined, the system can only boot with a 130w adapter or greater." well this is a PA-13 Rev. a02 I got off ebay, and it doesn't work? Any ideas.. is this a hit or miss with the power supplies?

I can manage to boot with just the battery but I'm assuming it's in low power mode as it seems somewhat slow. Anyways any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

I bought a 7800 GTX from the same guy as you (assuming your ebay name is the same as here). I'm having major problems myself. I had the pleasure of artifacting (both in Windows and DOS), complete blackouts of the screen, and system hang-ups. Right now it won't show anything on the display, despite booting up into Windows.

Also, I'm not a fan of people advertising blatantly obviously refurbished intems as new and charging a fortune for them. After reading "Refurbished" on the orange sticker, I opened up the heatsink and guess what I found: Thermal blackening on the board (around the heatsink screw holes) and a missing "heatshield" around the core. This card is nowhere near being new, let alone working.

If you decide to go through Paypal, let me know, we might be able to combine our cases.

Cheers,

Ben

Thank god its not just me. I'll e-mail the seller tonight and ask for a refund. I also had to pay £60 import tax on the damn thing as well to get it thru uk customs....!!!

Will let you know how I get on!

Dave.

You guys with the PSU' problems try

Yeah, same here. German customs charged me 80 euros on import tax, being American didn't seem to help me either. Then again, at least here I believe I'll get it refunded if I return the item. They better refund it.
My card has now entirely ceased to do anything. That after acting up for the accumulated 1h of running time. I'll contact the seller as well and will report back.

Now I bought a supposedly new 6800 ultra a few months back, which also turned out to be used, but at least it works and the seller didn't want a foot and a leg for it. Also, there wasn't the orange "Refurbished" sticker on it, so this time there's no doubt about the seller making a false description by accident.

I'm p*ssed off.