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9300 SATA board with 7800GTX?

post #1 of 14
10/9/08 at 9:24am
Thread Starter 
I just purchased a 7800gtx for my 9300 IDE board. I then come to know that the new 9300 board comes with SATA. My doubts are:-

1) Is this SATA board using the same Sonoma chipset?
2) Will the 7800gtx fit into this board?
3) Will the xps2 bios work on this board?
4) Do i need to buy extra hard drive caddy for SATA drive?

Thank you!
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post #2 of 14
10/9/08 at 11:24am
I do not know all th awnsers but a few i can.

Yes there was two versions of MB one IDe and one Sata for the 9300.

The Video cards are compatible with both.

Not sure about the BIOS

You need a Sata Drive your IDE will not work.

I am sure if you search this forum your will find more info.

Cheers
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post #3 of 14
10/9/08 at 1:38pm
Everything still works the same but there is a minor issue with the BIOS. Since all XPS2 BIOS'es were PATA and the new 9300 boards were SATA, the computer sometimes does not recognize the drive and you may have to use the thorough boot option in the system BIOS to resolve this. The thorough boot obviously takes much longer than the quick boot which is a bit unappealing.

Reference: http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=191457

And question 4 doesnt make sense to me. If you choose to use the newer 9300 board you will have to use a SATA HD as your primary. It is up to you whether you choose to buy a SATA or PATA secondary HDD bay enclosure for a second hard drive.
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post #4 of 14
10/9/08 at 2:25pm
Thread Starter 
I am not sure how SATA hdd is connected to laptop. PATA drive need a caddy with something like connector in front and slot in. If i switch to SATA drive i don think the connector for PATA drive will fit, so my question no4 is how to connect SATA drive to new motherboard, do i need a special caddy for SATA drive?
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post #5 of 14
10/9/08 at 6:47pm
Oh.....the primary caddy. My bad. Yes, there are SATA caddies. The caddies should be the same for a majority of Dell laptops such as 9400, M1710, M6300. A search on ebay should get you what you need.

Personally, I don't think this PATA to SATA issue is worth a mobo change. You could just get a SATA secondary HDD caddy and use a SATA drive that way. Of course then you couldn't use the HD and the DVD drive at the same time unless you got an external enclosure for the cd drive.
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post #6 of 14
10/9/08 at 7:20pm
To the OP (iieeann): if you have an original i9300 (PATA) there is no way to connect an SATA drive to your machine internally, only externally via an enclosure and USB port. The wiring is different for the two and not compatible with one another.

The chipset for both versions of the motherboard are identical, as this was the first mobile Intel chipset that contained native support for both type of drives, however the traces on the moboard to the connectors for the drives are different, allowing the use of one type hard drive vs. the other. Since everything other than the type of drives were the same on both boards the same BIOS works on both.

Now I have some great news I've recently discovered, at least for those of us who own the SATA version of the i9300 with the BIOS flashed to the XPS Gen2/M170. I upgraded to a newer generation, larger (200gig vs. 100gig) Hitachi 7200rpm SATA drive and now it boots-up in "fast" mode. So it appears that the boot-up problem was more drive related than BIOS related. This is a very good thing I believe.

I hope this helps,
Ciao
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post #7 of 14
10/10/08 at 11:11pm
Thread Starter 
All right i will stick to PATA board. If i need performance i might just grab a PATA SSD later. Still using the old Hitachi 100Gb 7k.

I just installed 7800GTX and it was sucessfully done, with XPS2 bios A05. Benchmark not run yet, need to reformat the hdd.

It is confirmed that the A00 and A01 brick is not compatible with 9300 (before xps bios). Everytime switch on the notebook a warning message about incorrect adapter will come out. It took me a while to get A04 and it works with 9300 before xps bios. The 130W brick is so heavy...
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post #8 of 14
10/11/08 at 10:08pm
Yeah the 130W brick is a ton compared to the 90W one. Make sure you keep your vents clean, it can get like an oven if clogged. I tell you going for the 7800GTX was a great decision for me and well worth it. Good luck.

Ciao
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post #9 of 14
10/15/08 at 11:26am
Well my 9300 had a SATA drive in it and both the XPS2 BIOS flash and the 7800 GTX card worked fine for me. OTOH I seem to remember someone saying the newer 9300 BIOSes (I think it was A05 and later) available at dell.com included support for the 7800 GTX but I could be wrong on that one. Never tried it, by the time I had seen this post, I'd already bought a 1705 and sold the 9300.
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post #10 of 14
10/15/08 at 1:34pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by dougadamsfan View Post
OTOH I seem to remember someone saying the newer 9300 BIOSes (I think it was A05 and later) available at dell.com included support for the 7800 GTX but I could be wrong on that one. Never tried it, by the time I had seen this post, I'd already bought a 1705 and sold the 9300.
I believe that was me...

Yes when I had my 9300, I just used the A05 bios and my 7800GTX card worked perfectly well. Not sure if anyone else had that good luck though, but I would certainly give it a shot before you flash the hacked bios.
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post #11 of 14
10/16/08 at 12:27am
Thread Starter 
Really? that could be true because i was having 9300 A05 bios when i installed 7800GTX. The bios displayed the display card as Go 7800GTX but i did not think much and proceed on the XP2 bios. If that is the case, it is better to flash back to 9300. I have experienced very rare and random display problem with this 7800 without OC (screen blank off; blur/discoloured image etc. Very rare anyway)
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post #12 of 14
10/16/08 at 4:52pm
I've got a very-late in the production run i9300 w/SATA. I thought I remembered reading back then that there was a sound reason for flashing to the XPS even in the newer BIOS.

So as an experiment I spent yesterday flashing back to the i9300-A05 BIOS and ultimately the tedious job of flashing back to the XPS/M170 BIOS and using system restore to get everything back correctly.

The i9300 BIOS DOES NOT CORRECTLY IDENTIFY the 7800GTX. The BIOS lists the card as "unknown". Windows does however correctly identify so the correct drivers are installed. The problem comes with the power management and corresponding clocking of the GPU. Since the GPU isn't recognized by the BIOS the fan isn't controlled properly, the card gets under clocked and under volted (with the corresponding under performance) because the correct operating parameters aren't known by the BIOS.

Using the card this way resulted in greatly reduced performance whether plugged in or not. However, on the plus side, since the card was running way under spec I got about an extra 1/2 hour on battery.

I hope this helps.

Ciao
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post #13 of 14
10/16/08 at 10:27pm
Thread Starter 
aha, yesterday i did the flash test too, it did not show 7800GTX, my mistake. Flash back to XPS2 bios at the end.

I just installed the latest Xtreme-G 177.92 driver and no problem so far. Benchmark slightly lower than the driver in nvidia website, but i have no choice because i need 1360x768 resolution which is not available in official nvidia driver.

The heat sink fins get blocked by dirt very fast... every year need to open and clean it up, including the fan. No idea if the fan is available if it fails one day.
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post #14 of 14
10/17/08 at 12:24pm
You can find replacement fans no problem. Just about any part can be found either here in the For Sale/Wanted forum, eBay, or Dell parts (also don't forget Google is your friend).

Now as far as the resolution you need, don't limit yourself for driver choices. All of the recent Nvidia drivers have a feature in the Nvidia control panel entitled "manage custom resolutions". There you can create any resolution you need that doesn't come standard with a particular driver.

I hope this helps.
Ciao
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