Alienware 17 P18E GPU upgrade fail (BIOS mod?)
Good day folks. Hopefully someone has a clever idea on this little f-up this joint I work in made. A soon-to-be colleague of ours, brought in this dead Alien for one of our guys to look at. Long story short, it had a shorted input FET caused by the GPU dying. Luckily, as is the case with most of these high-end laptops, the GPU is mounted on a removable MXM slot and can be swapped out. This older chap tried reballing it, but of course that wasn't going to just get rid of the short, since he wasn't actually smart enough to measure the power input pins to the MXM board while the GPU was off to rule out the possibility of this being a bad cap or shorted FET on the card itself, so when he put it back in, no surprises there, the input FET shorted again.
He then gave up, concluding the GPU chip itself must be shorted (which I don't dismiss, neither agree with, unless the card was measured while the chip was off the balls - USE YOUR BRAIN PEOPLE ! !
), so the new guy, not wanting to give up on the laptop, but not wanting to go second-hand either, went ahead and actually bought a new card from Amazon. When it arrived, after a bit of butt-clenching and finger-crossing, the laptop came on and worked........to a degree, because there's a little problem.
See, the GPU doesn't match. This is where these guys decided to bite a bit more than they should in a situation like this and tried to upgrade the MXM card while they were at it, so instead of going with the original 780M the laptop came with (LIKE THEY SHOULD HAVE !), they thought this would be a good opportunity to step it up to a 980M. I didn't want to point this out straight away, just so I'd be proven wrong and get it rubbed in my face, but I had my doubts about upgrading MXMs on laptops to begin with, and I was partially right: the laptop turns on and works, loads Windows, but only thanks to the Intel Integrated Graphics - the driver for the 980M does not want to be installed for the life of it. A clean install of Windows didn't solve it, which makes perfect sense, since the error message in device manager clearly explains it: it's listed as "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter", with the error message "The driver trying to start is not the same as the driver for the posted display adapter". Common sense tells me this means "while there's a 980M card in the MXM slot, the firmware for the laptop still points towards the original 780M the damn thing came with, so it refuses to load the driver for the 980M".
Nvidia's installer simply refuses to run and Windows' driver, while it does install and requires a restart, causes the laptop to freeze on startup, no doubt when the driver tries to actually load up and the only way to get it going again is to go in safe-mode and uninstall the 980M.
Obviously the BIOS (firmware ?) is the issue here, but I had no luck finding any mods/solutions to this issue. Below is the latest BIOS installer this guy managed to find, should someone ask for it, but there's nothing useful inside of it (to me at least) when I open it with 7-Zip (I don't see what looks like a BIOS image we're used to seeing, like an .fd or .rom file). I don't even know if this "lockdown" happens in the EC or the MAIN region . I was hoping it could be somehow modified or ünlocked to accept a different GPU, so this is where I'd like a bit of help to help the poor guy out, since he's become a good friend of mine and I'd also help me learn something new. Cheers guys. Thanks for any ideas.
He then gave up, concluding the GPU chip itself must be shorted (which I don't dismiss, neither agree with, unless the card was measured while the chip was off the balls - USE YOUR BRAIN PEOPLE ! !
), so the new guy, not wanting to give up on the laptop, but not wanting to go second-hand either, went ahead and actually bought a new card from Amazon. When it arrived, after a bit of butt-clenching and finger-crossing, the laptop came on and worked........to a degree, because there's a little problem.See, the GPU doesn't match. This is where these guys decided to bite a bit more than they should in a situation like this and tried to upgrade the MXM card while they were at it, so instead of going with the original 780M the laptop came with (LIKE THEY SHOULD HAVE !), they thought this would be a good opportunity to step it up to a 980M. I didn't want to point this out straight away, just so I'd be proven wrong and get it rubbed in my face, but I had my doubts about upgrading MXMs on laptops to begin with, and I was partially right: the laptop turns on and works, loads Windows, but only thanks to the Intel Integrated Graphics - the driver for the 980M does not want to be installed for the life of it. A clean install of Windows didn't solve it, which makes perfect sense, since the error message in device manager clearly explains it: it's listed as "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter", with the error message "The driver trying to start is not the same as the driver for the posted display adapter". Common sense tells me this means "while there's a 980M card in the MXM slot, the firmware for the laptop still points towards the original 780M the damn thing came with, so it refuses to load the driver for the 980M".
Nvidia's installer simply refuses to run and Windows' driver, while it does install and requires a restart, causes the laptop to freeze on startup, no doubt when the driver tries to actually load up and the only way to get it going again is to go in safe-mode and uninstall the 980M.
Obviously the BIOS (firmware ?) is the issue here, but I had no luck finding any mods/solutions to this issue. Below is the latest BIOS installer this guy managed to find, should someone ask for it, but there's nothing useful inside of it (to me at least) when I open it with 7-Zip (I don't see what looks like a BIOS image we're used to seeing, like an .fd or .rom file). I don't even know if this "lockdown" happens in the EC or the MAIN region . I was hoping it could be somehow modified or ünlocked to accept a different GPU, so this is where I'd like a bit of help to help the poor guy out, since he's become a good friend of mine and I'd also help me learn something new. Cheers guys. Thanks for any ideas.
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