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updated my Inspiron 9300 with a 7800..problems

post #1 of 16
10/25/07 at 7:31am
Thread Starter 
Hi

So I updated the graphics card for my Inspiron 9300.. Lots of money, and lots of time wasted, and now I'm having huge issues with my laptop. First off, I ended up buying two Dell AC adapters (both rev02) and with both I get an incompatibility error when I start my laptop.. Now, I get around this by unplugging the AC and pluging it back when I'm inside windows... good enough

Well, now I have another problem. In windows, if I were to even drag a window and pan it around, I would lose my display .. I would get these diagonal patterns covering my screen. and then after a few seconds the screen turns pitch black.. I've tried different things and everytime I seem to get the same result.

The drivers that I'm using for the 7800 is the ones recommended here for the initial installation of the card.. I've also tried others but to no avail.

I've flashed my bios more than twice but the same result.

I've even bought a new 9 cell battery even though I already had one to begin with(but it was functionally weird)

7800 card: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...MEWN:IT&ih=005

My spec:

inspiron 9300

pentium 2.13(something like that)
2gigs of ram
initial graphics card was geforce 6800

Any help is greatly appreciated!
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post #2 of 16
10/25/07 at 5:50pm
Thread Starter 
bump.. desperately need help
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post #3 of 16
10/25/07 at 9:25pm
Curious. Have you tried replacing your old card to verify that it still works correctly?

Somehow it seems like it is not getting enough power.

Did you flash the BIOS with the old card still in the computer?
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post #4 of 16
10/26/07 at 9:24am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by JonSolo View Post
Curious. Have you tried replacing your old card to verify that it still works correctly?

Somehow it seems like it is not getting enough power.

Did you flash the BIOS with the old card still in the computer?

Hey, thanks for the reply!

Yes, the old card is working fine, and yes, I did flash the bios with the old card already inside.

I'm not sure why it would still not recognize my Ac.. I bought two of them, and they're both rev02 and from dell.. But it still tells me that it can't recognize them.. very odd
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post #5 of 16
10/26/07 at 12:49pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by sonn View Post
Hey, thanks for the reply! Yes, the old card is working fine, and yes, I did flash the bios with the old card already inside. I'm not sure why it would still not recognize my Ac.. I bought two of them, and they're both rev02 and from dell.. But it still tells me that it can't recognize them.. very odd
It's not so odd, a couple of years ago when the 9300 upgrade to 6800 Ultra/ 7800 GTX was at it's height of its popularity, there were many threads here from others like yourself who had power supply issues after the procedure. I'd go as far as to say that power supply compatibility was one of the largest problems. At that time there were several entrepreneurial individuals who were selling power supplies that were "tested and guarantied" to work on the XPS Gen2 in the "for sale/wanted" forum. At the moment your rig is running in some type of throttled-down power saving mode. Until you get an adapter that is properly recognized by your machine it will continue to have problems. It may cost you more money but you need to make sure that any vendor you're dealing with is willing to guaranty XPS Gen2 compatibility. I hope this helps. Ciao
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post #6 of 16
10/26/07 at 10:59pm
It sounds like your AC adapters aren't compatible.
What normally happens with a 90w or incompatible AC adapter is that it will refuse to boot off it. It will however boot off the battery, and charge using the AC. But it operates at reduced FSB and GPU clock speed.

Where did you get your AC adapters from? A lot of the Non-Genuine ones from eBay apparently won't be recognised as a 130w. Are you sure your power adaptor is a real Dell one?

Oh and BTW. The card you've got is a 7800 GTX. The '7800' (vanilla) is a different, newer, slower card.
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post #7 of 16
10/27/07 at 3:07am
when I have "faulty" bricks they exhibit the characteristics you mentioned megaphat, but they dont charge the battery. Just wanted to mention that.

I'm with the idea of trying another revision adaptor.
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post #8 of 16
10/28/07 at 3:23pm
Thread Starter 
Thank all .. I've already ordered another AC straight from dell.. It was expensive, but what the hell.. It should Arrive monday..
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post #9 of 16
10/28/07 at 3:27pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by megaphat View Post
Oh and BTW. The card you've got is a 7800 GTX. The '7800' (vanilla) is a different, newer, slower card.

Hmm... How do you know that? Isn't 7800 gtx what it's supposed to be? Anyway, that would totally suck.. how slow is it compared to a.. older 7800??
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post #10 of 16
10/28/07 at 3:45pm
The 7800GTX is definitely faster than the 7800 vanilla. The reason he is sure though is because the heatsink would be hard to fit in your machine and there is no BIOS support for the 7800 vanilla.
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post #11 of 16
10/28/07 at 4:01pm
Thread Starter 
Hmm. But it says in the auction that the graphics card is a 7800gtx, and it doesn't say anything about a "vanilla"... it was the only one on ebay, or anywhere else actually..
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post #12 of 16
10/28/07 at 5:23pm
Yeah...He said that you had a 7800GTX NOT a vanilla. Its just that from the name of this thread, it kind of seems like you are talking about the 7800 vanilla since you didnt specify GTX. Dont worry though.
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post #13 of 16
10/31/07 at 9:36am
Rofl vanilla just means plain or 'by itself'. That isn't a problem for you because you have the full 7800 go GTX. The 7800 go (NOT GTX) isn't compatible with the 9300, and unfortunately thats final...

And yeah the Dell genuine 130w power adapters are expensive/overpriced. Considering they have a habit of fraying or shorting out internally (happened to me), its a bit of a pain. But oh well...

Anyway interesting point there zzpulp. The faulty/non-genuine power adapters don't work at all? I was just going off what I remembered from some forum threads last year when 7800gtx upgrades were popular. Apparently they just ran the 7800gtx in low power mode (a la 90w).
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post #14 of 16
10/31/07 at 11:46am
A computer with an XPS BIOS and a 90W or lower adaptor is usable but it pushes it IMO. You will be running a reduced FSB on the CPU and your GPU will only run at Low-3d settings. Might not seem like too big of a deal but my processor was struggling hard with flash animations in people's signatures here even at 1.5 GHz. The reason I was running 1.5 GHz was because the FSB was reduced from 133 to 100 and that was the max clock speed at the 15X multiplier. Even 1.5 GHz shouldn't have been struggling like that though. Seemed kinda like a bandwidth issue but I doubt it. The FSB wasn't that low so I guess something else was to blame.
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post #15 of 16
11/3/07 at 2:44am
Thread Starter 
just wanted to say that I've finally got the 7800 working. Awesome. It was all because of the ACs that I bought that were not compatible. The one from the dell website worked. Big thanks to all that helped!!
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post #16 of 16
11/3/07 at 3:10am
good for you.. time to overclocked that bad boy...
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