Maxware79

The system will hold residual power in the capacitors after you unplug the power adapter so you really need to do a power drain before touching anything on the motherboard. It's possible you gave the system a small static shock. Also, I've had the dreaded 7 beep error which turned out to be a bad CMOS battery. I've had countless 5 beep errors from the CMOS battery but only once have I got a 7 beep from one. It was on the Alienware 18. I was going to do some repairs on it but it ended up being shelved for quite some time. When I finally got to it, I got the 7 beep error and it made no sense. I remove the RAM and got the RAM beep error and then I removed the CMOS battery and got the 5 beep error. To get past the 5 beep error you just need to do a hard shutdown and then power it on again straight away so I did this without the CMOS battery installed and it powered on perfectly. When I put the battery back in, I got the 7 beeps again. I replaced the CMOS battery and the system worked great. In 12-13 years messing with these systems, this is the first time I've ever come across it. Have you tried a brand new wired CMOS battery? There's a slim chance this could work. My guess is you gave the board a shock though.

Most people opt for something like the GTX 1070 as it's usually a pretty simple upgrade, if you get the standard MXM format card. The MSI 1070 PCB is designed a little differently and usually requires some chassis modifications. A few guys have also had good results with the Quadro RTX 3000. This will be superior to the 1070 but also more expensive. I'm not sure if they have tested this card in the M17x R4 but it has been well tested in the M18x R2 and 18 so there is no reason why it wouldn't work. You need to run a modified Nvidia driver in any Nvidia upgrade you go for. AMD cards don't require this. You can use NVCleanInstall to help with the driver. I've heard it's way easy than the way we used to do it by manually modifying the driver inf. The old Notebookreview forum archive can be found on this site if you want to spend a few hours digging through old posts. If you're happy with something from the same era then the GTX680M is the best upgrade that doesn't require driver modification as that card was released with the laptop. The 780M was much better than the 680M but then you need the driver mod. I'd stay away from the 880M but then the 980M is a great card, if you can get one for a decent price.

I can confirm, I had no luck in one of my 17's when I tried a few years ago. I thought it would be the same in all machines so I never tried an M17x or M18x. Wish I had now.

Windows will use the Intel graphics until you boot up a game, I don't think you can get around this as the 1070 needs the Intel graphics to run. If you force the 1070 to run for everything then you are basically running the system in PEG mode, which it cannot do with the 1070. If you find that you are getting really bad performance when you try to run a game then you are getting the weird power throttling issue that most (or all) of us had with the 1070. You can reboot into the BIOS and switch to iGFX mode, then reboot back into the BIOS to select SG mode again. This usually gets the card running properly. You may find that you have to do this every time you turn the laptop on to play a game. It's annoying but it only takes a minute or so.

Have you tried booting with the HDD/SSD and dedicated GPU removed?

So there is no need to use SG mode in the R1 or R2 these days if you have a compatible card in the primary slot? Unless you want to use an NVMe adapter of course.

The 460M was released with the R3 so you will have to run a modded Nvidia driver to get that card to work. AMD cards don't have this issue so they are much more PnP than Nvidia. Since you already have the ATI card, the heatsink bracket you already have should work fine with the 8970M. If you switch to Nvidia you will have to find the Nvidia bracket for the R1/R2. From memory, the standoffs are shorter than those for the R3/R4 and later.

Great job and thanks! I'm sure he will understand.

Hopefully @ssj92 can assist you with this. You seem to have got further than other people with the 10 series cards so I wish you luck getting it working properly.

The 675M will work but it's not plug and play. You will require a modified Nvidia driver to get the card to work. It's not overly difficult and there are plenty of guides out here on how to do it.

Lot's of people have tried bypassing the UEFI issue but unfortunately with no success so far. The 880M's are the best Nvidia cards. The AMD R9 M290x is also an option and doesn't require modifying the display driver like the Nvidia cards.

Awesome! I'm glad another board has been resurrected! If only Dell released the information on how to fix this issue 15 years ago!

I just used an old 4-pin fan cable so you should be good with anything that matches up.

I have never worked on an R1 before, I have one but the board is dead. I've worked on a few R2's though. I was under the impression that the 600M series worked in the R1 but I'd have to do some research before I'm sure. The old NBR archive is available and it will have plenty of information that can help you.

That's what I found as well. I know it works in a Dell M6800 as I guy here on eBay was selling them with the Tesla. He wouldn't tell me how he got the card to work though.