Undervolting Quadro FX3700M, mobile NB9E series be doable? - 2010/02/24 15:20Hello to everyone, I'm getting high temperatures on my Quadro FX3700M while using GPU intensive tasks and that brings me to texture errors or blue screen. This card is installed in an HP EliteBook 8730w laptop. I can tell the problem comes from overheating as if I removed the keyboard and put a fan on top of the graphics heatsink and the temps will stay way lower and I get no errors, nor blue screens. Given that I can't keep the laptop without keyboard with a bigger fan, and that I already disassembled the heatsink to put AS5 everywhere I could, I was thinking about undervolting the graphics device.
The latest NiBiTor opens the BIOS correctly and detects the frequencies correctly. Do you think I can safely change the voltages table and flash the new BIOS? This card costs a lot of money and is very rare to be found. I wouldn't like break my laptop for this. Anybody tried a similar modification to other NB9E series cards, such a the GeForce 9700M and GeForce 9800M versions which are based on the same chip as far as I know. The thing that scares me more is that it seems that HP laptop BIOS has a sort of check on video cards installed and I'm afraid this could prevent the change form working. Any help is really appreciated.
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Mavke
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Re:Undervolting Quadro FX3700M, mobile NB9E series be doable? - 2010/02/24 15:52Well if you want to be sure you better share with us the original BIOS cause I don't know what you are planning exactly, but we rather check the BIOS before we give any advice. And don't compare workstation version with the others, as they often have a different voltage regulating circuitry. So can you attach on this thread your own original BIOS and give us some extra details on the specs of the graphics device?
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rcboyit
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Re:Undervolting Quadro FX3700M, mobile NB9E series be doable? - 2010/02/24 17:59Thanks so much for the super fast answer. The card is an MXM version with 1GB of memory. I'm discussing overheating problems at a notebook related website with another user that has the same problems I have with my board. The core, shader and memory frequencies are the rather standard as it runs at 550/1600MHz with the shaders at 1375MHz respectively. Basically I just want to lower voltage on the Extra mode from 1.03V to something lower. Thanks once again for your inputs!
Also, I just tried to read the BIOS with NiBiTor on a Quadro FX2700M device but it doesn't work, says that card is not a known ID. I was thinking about testing the modification on this other Quadro first as I have a spare one but seems I'm not able to do so?
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Mavke
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Re:Undervolting Quadro FX3700M, mobile NB9E series be doable? - 2010/02/24 21:59Okay, so I just checked the BIOS that you have attached and this one has several voltage levels you can use, you can even go a little higher then it is set now for he Extra mode. But you want to go lower and that means you can only set it at 1.00V as that is the next lower voltage available after the default 1.03V it is currently set. So yes, you can go ahead to just change the voltage and save the BIOS after which you can flash.
Related to the Quadro FX2700M you are mentioning which is not supported, actually you should say not yet supported. Cause the reason is that we can add the support as long as we haven't received an original BIOS as very single BIOS is different and support has to coded for each individual version. If you can provide us the original BIOS with the specs, we can certainly take it from there and add it in a next version.
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rcboyit
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Re:Undervolting Quadro FX3700M, mobile NB9E series be doable? - 2010/02/24 23:54Okay great, but can you give me a high percentage of success? I am so afraid I could break the card. Regarding the Quadro FX2700M there are two different BIOS's. One is from mine and the other one was found on the net. But it's fine as I flashed mine with that. Both are from HP original cards and are for units with 512MB memory.
Last thing I'd like to know as you seem to me a guru of the videocards! This 2700m works perfectly fine on the vga out of my laptop but has a strong red tint in the lcd panel. One day it did this strange behaviour and never got back to normal life. It's not anything else in the laptop (lcd cable, inverter or whatever) since with the 3700m colors are fine. Here is picture so that it's clearer. http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/7334/dscf0003p.jpg
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Mavke
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Re:Undervolting Quadro FX3700M, mobile NB9E series be doable? - 2010/02/25 15:35What do you mean rate of success? Sorry but it is very simple the tweak is fully possible and will work, the only thing that can go wrong if the flash fails and that is something that can happen at every single flash. So if you have a good BIOS or not you have as much change that the flash will just go bad, as flashing a graphics card is always done at your own risk and are still not flawless. So you just have to take the risk, the one thing you do know is that the BIOS with the lower voltage is just fine. Though as you lower the voltage, I would also lower the clocks just to be save and try via software overclocking if at that lower voltage your graphics device can still work at the default clock speeds.
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rcboyit
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Re:Undervolting Quadro FX3700M, mobile NB9E series be doable? - 2010/02/25 17:44Okay, I have done it and it seems to work. Thank you very much! The graphics core gets lower when running ATITool but I get texture problems anyway. It seems it depends on the memory maybe? Is there a way to change voltage on the memory too? Or are both voltages changed at the same time so as you said I have problems because I'm trying to push the memory too much for that voltage? Also, do you have any advice about the red color problem I described before?
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Mavke
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Re:Undervolting Quadro FX3700M, mobile NB9E series be doable? - 2010/02/25 21:28rcboyit wrote: Okay, I have done it and it seems to work. Thank you very much! The graphics core gets lower when running ATITool but I get texture problems anyway. It seems it depends on the memory maybe? As I said you have to make sure to not stress the graphics device while running at a lower voltage. So bring the memory clock down and see what that gives. What you all textures are what we call artifacts and that is to be avoided at all cause as those mean that it could easily lead to permanent damage. And the BIOS has no voltage selection for the memory, and normally it is not linked with the core voltage but might be different for notebook versions.
About your red color problem I have no real clue except some bad connection somewhere as problems with colors are typically due to the interface towards the display. But not certain and those things are very hard to determine, as it could be a rather small thing interfering and as such showing a strange behavior, in your case that red color scheme.
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NiBiTor v6.03
