Upgrading my old M18x R2

[Maxware79]

Happy to help if I can. Good luck, fingers crossed. 

[razor0601]

Try the Quadro card. Never had any issues with Quadros

[m3th0d1c4l]

So i finally got around to trying Windows 10, resulted in the same exact issue.

I just really don't know what else I can try to get this thing to work at the proper bus speed. It has to be a driver issue of some sort because it reports PCIE 3.0 x16 right before I install the drivers in GPU-Z.

 

I will try the other Quadro card in a few days when i feel like taking this thing apart again for the millionth time. In the meantime, any other suggestions of things I can try would be appreciated.

 

Perhaps I am modding the nvidia drivers incorrectly? Basically I just took the nvdmig file, added a line with the device hardware ID modifiers in the windows 10 driver section and the [Strings] section.

 

Is there anything else I needed to do?

[Maxware79]

Sounds like you've done it right and that's the way I do it. I always add the hardware ID line to each OS group in the .inf. For newer drivers there are two groups, one for Win10 and one for Win11 (which tends to be quite short). In the older days there were 3 long groups which was more confusing (7, 9 and 10). 

Some people these days use NVCleanInstall and apparently that works pretty well. 

 

A GPU without a driver is just running on very basic performance. Sometimes adding the driver brings out the issues that the card actually has. It's possible that the driver isn't the problem but it's just something in the card that only shows once the driver is installed. I hope not though. It will be interesting when you swap to the quadro. 

I'm no electrical engineer but maybe there is a bad resistor or another surface mount device that is faulty that is bringing the PCIe speeds down when more more is being sent through the card. I have no basis for saying this, pure uneducated speculation. 

[m3th0d1c4l]

Yeah I’m running out of ideas myself. Only way to really figure it out is by testing another card I guess or even my older 7970 again and see what happens. I’m wondering if there is some kind of bios setting after I did the unlocked bios that is causing it and I’m just not seeing it, or if it’s really the card itself. 
 

I guess only way to rule it out is by trying another card and seeing what happens. I’ll keep you guys posted if I come across anything new. 
 

Normally I’m really good about figuring these kinds of things out but this one has me stumped. 

[m3th0d1c4l]

So finally took it apart today and went to try the other card and the original 7970m card and I noticed this:

 

 

Looking at MXM 3.0 pin wiring diagram they seem to correlate to grounding pins. Not sure if that would be enough to do it, but my assumption is this is the reason it’s not working correctly. 
 

I put in my 7970m and worked right away without issue at 3.0 x16. Gonna try the quadro later today or tomorrow. 

[razor0601]

I don’t think that this is the reason.