M90 GPU Options - Page 2

Cool.

cheers ...

it has the most beautiful semi glossy matte screen but the gpu/mobo sucks. Design flaw all the way. My gpu blew out 1 year ago and its $400 to replace the gpu. Not worth it. I can get a new alienware for 1500.

all of my dell laptops have broken.

m90 video fix

I repaired 2 of mine using Artic Silver 5. had to remove the Video card, you will need a # 6 Torx driver and #1 9/64 phyllips. Clean off the old paste with 91% rubbing alcohol. there are videos on Youtube on application of the paste. Make sure it is thin-thin. also there is a program called, Fanspeed 443 is is free ware and will monitor the processor temps and fan speed. While you are fixing the video card, you might want to put the silver 5 on the CPU also. YouTube has video on this also.
Good luck.

M90 video fix

I repaired 2 of mine using Artic Silver 5. had to remove the Video card, you will need a # 6 Torx driver and #1 9/64 phyllips. Clean off all the old paste with 91% rubbing alcohol. there are videos on Youtube on application of the paste. Make sure it is thin-thin. also there is a program called, Fanspeed 443 is is free ware and will monitor the processor temps and fan speed. While you are fixing the video card, you might want to put the silver 5 on the CPU also. YouTube has video on this also.
Good luck.

Dell precision M90 Nvidia 2500M graphics card failure

I've had my M90 since April of 2007 and yesterday January 14th, 2011 it finially failed. The graphics card (Nvidia FX2500M)went "tits-up" on me. The screen has alternating horizontal bands of blue random dots. Random characters pop up on the screen all over when the bios is going throught its POST checks. Then every time windows starts I get the BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) and it reboots. I can't get it to do anything. I took it apart and looked at the graphics card but didn't pull it out. It looks perfect of course I could only see it from the top since I didn't pull it out. I am going to take it apart again tonight. This time I am going to completely pull out the graphics card and look at the fans and or heat sinks. I tried to buy a used on on ebay (the entire laptop) but was out bid. IT went for $370. I'm not willing to pay more than $400. I was VERY happy with this laptop. I used it for electrical engineering work. I've run MATLAB and Mathematica and done a lot of 3D modeling in AutoCAD. It handles all those tasks very easily. It originally cost me $4,200. I hope I can fix it soon. At this time a comparable laptop is the M6500. Man that thing is expensive.
But then again I thought this laptop was VERY expensive when I bought it. Now a days you can get a laptop for $400 (on the low end) so when you tell someone your laptop cost $4,200 their jaw hits the floor. A M6500 quad core i7 1.73Ghz with a 17" screen and 1GB Nvidia Quadra FX3800M and 32GB of system (on the mother board) RAM and 3 hard drives costs $9,000!! Just the extra 16GB (16GB is standard) of ram cost $4000!

I just don't think you can put a high end graphics processor in a laptop and expect it to last more than 4 years. If you buy a laptop with a high end graphics card you better be prepared to take it apart occassionally and clean the heatsinks and fans. Or if is gauranteed to fail. We all know HEAT is the enemy of electronics.

Good luck to anyone who still has a working M90. It's only a matter of time before the graphics card fails.

Bake the graphic card whilst waiting for the replacement

cheers ...

Good luck to anyone who still has a working M90. It's only a matter of time before the graphics card fails.

 

I don't have my M90 FX2500M yet (in the post) but I have ascertained the following from looking at Google stuff.

 

The FX1500M GPU doesn't seem to have this issue (slower speed so only 45W vs the 100W+ of the higher two GPU's?)

 

I have a way to assist my M90 when it comes NOT to fail.

 

Underclock the GPU using Coolbits/Rivatuner to as low as possible

Monitor GPU temperature thru 18kfangui sensors (M90 compatible) - Normal Run - and then underclocked - and make sure it runs COOL
 

Get it so it runs 50% of the speed (say 256MHZ max)

 

Good idea?

Most (if not all) Dell machines will fail on the GPU

cheers ...

OK I could have got the FX2500M equipped M90

 

I actually insisted on a lower spec FX1500M (even though I got a Core Duo 1.83 instead of a Core 2 Duo 2.0...)

 

I can see many many complaints of the FX2500M failing on the web... but NONE of a FX1500M failing :)

 

As I stated before maybe the 45w power consumption vs 100w made the heat issue much much less...... if the case was supposed to be able to dissipate 100w... it can easily do 45w :)

 

So probably the FX1500M is OK... if not I'll have to go with the ATI card that I hear works.... but I believe that is a 40W card so not much of a difference!

 

i8KfanGUI says the GPU is running at 45C... I am finding it hard to get above 50C... and that's with fans on LOW mode (can't even hear them).

 

 

Well. First off, lowering the speed is going to do jack shit to your idle temps unless you reduce the voltage. It'll keep it cooler when it's doing any processing for sure, but that's about it. And it's not heat that kills the components, it's the thermal shock of cooling and heating cooling and heating on the ball grid array and with the newer cards (the ones supposedly fixed but kinda not cause they're skimping on a critical layer that goes on the chip) I'd imagine seeing lamination problems with temperature.

The card is totally fine at whatever it is, best thing you can do for it is to make sure that if you heat it up alot, let it take a while to cool down. There's not much you can do for that other than having low idle temps, which 45C is damn low (mine's at 67C, but there's stories for that)

You could get lower like I said up above, by lowering the voltage, it's pretty easy, not sure if the stock 'new' drivers have this function but try to find something called powermizer and set it into balanced mode (max battery won't make a difference) to lower the card voltage to 1volt. You'll probably notice about a 5 C drop further or more.

PS. I've ran my fx3500 for over three years by adhering to that.
PSS. OH and if it DOES (and will) fail, baking the video card as qhn said does work. It's easy with an oven, look around the forum or google to learn more.

thanks for that

 

excellent advice with the powermizer stuff... I'll go get it now.

 

Yes, various utils are showing the GPU at 44-48C (on bootup the max reaches 51C and then settles down) - so I'm pretty happy with the temperatures and the card in general.

 

The MOST taxing stuff I do is watch movies occasionally (and then the GPU only gets up to 49C max). the M90 is used mostly for software development so I like the 1920x1200. I don't do any 3D work nor play games. I wouldn't know where to start with 3D - and it's not my expertise area.... in short I'll never ever likely go above 50C in practice!

 

I used RivaTuner and it allowed me to clock 2D from 100/100 default to 80/80 MHZ. So in 2D mode as I always run it the card is running at a mere 80MHZ.

 

Ironically this is replacing my 6 year old (and ULTRA reliable mostly) D800 with a Sharp manufactured LCD 1920x1200 15" screen and an NVidia FX Go 5600 128MB card. The problem it developed was the screen started going (pixelating/lines) and needed flexing the LCD Screen Covering by hand (kinda bending it) to get it to work.... once it started working it was fine until I shut down... this was easy at first (just 2 wiggles :)) but now it takes me 20 minutes or so to get it up and running.... but then it is perfect... however I can't afford the 20 minutes every day!

 

I disassembled the LCD panel but it all looked OK, reassembled and still had the problem. It doesn't seem to be the cable, or the GPU but who knows? I can say the D800 I *loved* as it was fantastic.... I considered an D820/D830 but then some cheap (for the UK...) M90's for sale on ebay with 3 month warranty  :)

 

My first impressions of the M90 is "built like a tank", and I thought the Latitude D800 was built well....

 

Greetings from Edinburgh.

 

Ed Austin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by edikat - 6/23/11 at 10:46am

My M1710 and M6300 are still running fine although I am an off and on gamer (mostly off as of late). I prop my laptop up most of the time, run low ambient temperatures, and occasionally use an external fan when gaming.

Anyway, just wanted to give my own personal opinion. I will forewarn you that I am not an Electrical Engineer but I have taken some EE classes. From what I recall, the frequency is directly correlated the the power which is directly correlated with the heat. So lowering your frequencies will lower the amount of heat however it will not matter much for 2D (idle) clocks. This is because 2D clocks are already running pretty close to the minimum required. If you lower your memory frequency too far you may begin to see artifacts and if you lower your core frequency too much you will most likely experience thrashing (this can be true for the memory as well). Thrashing is the condition where your GPU spends more time switching power states than it does actually doing work. For instance, if you lower your clocks to a core/mem frequency of 80/80 then you may be able to sit and idle at your desktop running those frequencies. But as soon as you start dragging windows around on your desktop at a high rate of speed then the clocks will switch from 2D to Low Level 3D which uses a much higher clock. However, if you would have kept your clocks at 100/125 then your card would have stayed at 100/125 when you did the same task. So going too low on your clocks can have a negative effect on power consumption and card stability.

I personally underclock my card in 2D and Low Level 3D. I then perform some quick tests to make sure that my card never leaves 2D mode from just dragging windows around and that my card never leaves Low Level 3D when just watching Standard Definition movies. Lastly, I'd like to just say that dragging windows around is just a common example of 2D graphics (unless your are using desktop compositing). There are other 2D graphics operations that can cause thrashing as well.

Yeppers, I didn't see any large gain when I downclocked as low as possible and didn't touch anything, so keeping the 2d and low 3d clocks at 150/150 seemed to work best for me. I do NOT know about the newer drivers, but the ones I'm using 92.64 or smth around those lines, I can switch modes in powermiser easily and it doesn't change the frequency unless I say run in max pref mode.

I'm just using basic P=IV to get the hang on that, the frequency makes sense for changing resistance, but personally I've seen a much greater reduction in temperatures when I change the voltage.

Don't know if this relates to what we're talking about but...
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=312315

found that pretty interesting to relate frequency and current (only in the Mhz regions, which works out perfectly for processors, though the wires involved are nm in size)

Yes Matchbox, you can go here for some relevant information. No need to bore yourself reading all of that though. I'll boil it down from my understanding. We're talking about a MOSFET here which is a particular type of FET which in turn is a particular type of transistor. Ideally it has an infinite input impedance (resistance) between the gate (G) and the Drain (D) and Source (S). The connection between the Drain and Source is referred to as the channel.

Thus more power.

very informative replies thanks.

 

The RivaTuner utility only allows underclocking to 80MHZ on 2D (from a default 100MHZ) - although I can also see 3D frequencies RivaTuner does not allow me to change these, as they are grayed out. Actually changing from 2D 100MHZ to 80MHZ makes no difference to temperature (49C plugged in, 44C on battery).

 

As mentioned I deliberately chose the FX1500M over the FX2500M as reported failures of FX1500M are almost zero, where FX2500M failures are through the roof... so I made a conscious effort to avoid any of the nightmares associated with the NVidia issue surrounding faulty GPU builds.

Of course this statistic could be entirely skewed if substantially more FX2500M models were sold than FX1500M :)

 

I would however like to alter the voltage as to cool even further, but the NVidia with ESA support utility only gives me two powermizer settings - basically "off" or "battery saving" modes (or words to that effect).

 

It seems the Dell BIOS for these GPU's restrict 3D overclocking capabilities (and therefore underclocking), but allow the 2D stuff to be altered.

 

Can anybody point me to a utility that can lower the voltage to my FX1500M GPU?

 

I don't want to spend my life debating GPU stuff of course :) :) but.. since I just got this M90 I really want to make sure I have done everything possible to extend its lifetime, as for me at the moment it was a big expense.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You're most likely wasting your time trying to change the voltage. I haven't seen any of our cards actually respond to voltage drops. The cards act as if the voltage never decreased even at 0.1 volts.

Hi All,

 

Hope you can help me!

 

My FX2500M card died in my Dell M90 (T7400 @ 2.16GHz, 1920x1200 + BIOS A08) + bought as replacement part the 7950GTX. Installed in the laptop, and .... zip, nothing. no life at all from the laptop screen or DVI output (checked that I had not broken anything by putting the old card in, and although lines etc on the screen, the card worked). Either the card is a DOA or some compatibility problem. Before I sent it back :

 

Question : is the 7950GTX compatible with the Dell M90? If not how to make compatible in the laptop????

 

Thanks!!! Want to keep the laptop working even though it is more than 5 years old!!

 

Tim

Have you checked out the threads of graphic cards compatibility in the Alienware section? Might be able to use them as references.

You mentioned that no life from LCD and DVU output, yet there are lines on the screen - updating the BIOS maybe?

cheers ...

I have a FX3500 and Intel C2D T7600 for $350.00 if your interested.

Hi qhn, I'll check out the graphic card compatibility section, thanks! The lines on the screen come from the old FX2500M card, not the 7950GTX, which gives nothing on the screen.

Cheers, Tim