hello all, and thanks before you even read. I've researched this site and it seems like the right place for help. First of all, I bought an alienware m7950 last august and it has been working great until a month ago. It has 2 m7950 gtx 512mb cards, 2 x 1.0 gigs of ram, 2.0ghz intel duo core 2, and originally windows vista x86. I was running several apps in a chemistry lab and all of asudden microsoft office froze and a BSOD appeared. I tried to reboot; no mode would work, including safe mode. booted up the vista disk, wiped the drive, and tried everything again. Updated all drivers and by this point, i didn't know what had happened. system said sli was ready to be enabled. i enabled it and upon reboot, bsod. Returned to safe mode, uninstalled drivers, installed the earliest forceware available. Same problem. The drivers would install successfully but by enabling SLI, system bsod'd. Diagnosis continues... I then wiped the drive again and tried all drivers; came to a point where (I still don't know why), windows vista would not boot whenever a new driver (even whql) was installed. Ended up disableing the 2nd card, thinking it was burnt out. This worked for all drivers, I've been using the system for a while now on one card. Found more time between school and loaded xp on the system for the hell of it. All drivers worked (2nd card did not have to be manually disabled from device manager); however upon enabling of the sli, the system immediately crashed. (Unlike vista, xp does not require reboot before applying changes, hence the immediate crash of xp). Several days ago I bought a new hard drive, 250 gig seagate @7200 rpm. My alienware m7950 laptop has 2 slots for hard drives. I inserted this into the second slot. Immediately installed xp. Installed the drivers (whql btw) and clicked on enable sli. Same behavior... screen flickers, bsod comes up. reboot. ....... SLI is enabled!!! even though the system crashed, sli was enabled on reboot. Checked everything, all diagnostics, system was A-OK. Then i tried to get my vista to boot from the first drive. I ended up removing the second hard drive from my computer because i couldnt get vista to come up. Windows said it could not load. (I was a newb and later realized that one needs to make several changes to do the dual boot.) point is... upon reinsertion of hte 2nd hard drive, and resetting the 2nd hard drive as priority in the boot process, it wouldnt load. I loaded safe mode, unistalled vid card drivers, and xp booted once again. now i am experiencing the same problems with the second newer drive as the first. I originally thought i would have to buy a new card, but bc of the way it worked (just hours ago) im beginning to believe i have a real problem on my system's bios. I did commit a very clean install when i had only one hard drive. I reseated cmos, flashed bios, reinstalled windows etc. The specifics of the BSOD are n4d_disp has stopped working; system went into an infinite loop. It's incredibly strange how I had it working just hours ago, but now it is not. I do not want to buy a new card to find that the card is not the issue. can anyone help me? thanks in advance; i'll check back tomorrow, i have an early classs.
graphics well correct me if I am wrong but it sounds like just a driver issue. start off pressing F8 before the system starts then log in to safe mode uninstall just the nvidia display drivers. Then run driver cleaner with nvidia selected then reboot going into safe mode again and install the new set of drivers 180.48 then boot normally hope this works.
After reading your post carefully, wzb5012, I think it's safe to assume that you have a hardware problem. You already reinstalled the OS, tried both XP and Vista, and even multiple different display drivers. Since it only seems to happen when you enable SLI, it's most likely related to your graphic card(s). Needless to say that hardware problems with a laptop are a lot harder to diagnose than the ones of a 'regular' PC. Are you able to run your laptop without enabling SLI without any problems? Try a few stress tests like Prime95 (for 1 - 2 hours), for example. You could also run memtest (http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic62524.html) for a few hours to make sure that your RAM is fine (which I don't think is causing your problems, but you never know). Also check your system's temperatures with tools like CPU-Z, GPU-Z or Everest. p.s.: Welcome to Guru3D!
thanks guys I am going to try the 180 drivers now. Also, I did have nhibitor and nview running several days ago, when sli was enabled. Temps were ok and everything seemed fine. Alienware has shipped a new cable that connects the two cards. Hopefully the cable is the problem, although that seems very unlikely. Trying new things now... Also, I am going to uninstall my chipset drivers then reinstall the vid drivers. Perhaps there is an error there.
I have exactly the same problem as you, our m9750 has the same exact specs too. Did you manage to fix your problem? I tried almost every mobile driver out there and would either: a.) black screen after the windows loading screen b.) black screen after enabling SLI c.) bsod on restart after enabling SLI I'm also running Windows Vista x86 SP1 btw.
Update If anyone else is having this problem, please leave me a private message. Right now I am running vista 32 bit and have SLI enabled again. THe trick? more RAM. I upgraded from 2 gigs to 4 gigs and can get SLI to work. Downside: I just reformatted and did a clean install to get this to work. I have windows aero disabled and i can not run ANY games. That means windows games like chess titans. SLI is enabled and its quite possible that when i use newer drivers (I'm using 156.xx something) the system might be all better again. I really don't think so though. It seems pretty bad. All that i have installed are the chipset drivers and nvidia's first sli drivers for vista. I'm using SP0. Maybe SP1 will resolve the issue. Last point: called alienware. i was told that the newer 8700M graphics cards have much better cooling systems. Considering that alienware no longer offers the superior 7950 gtx cards, I would place bets these cards are actually pieces of junk that overheat very easily. Alienware probably stopped offering them with new systems because they found themselves replacing them too often. They refuse to give me a good price break, (10% is all) If my problem seems elementary of you have any ideas Please leave any suggestions.
Sorry not to reply in a while, but as for the stress tests: Without SLI, computer runs fine. Stress tests, mem tests pass with flying colors. With SLI ENABLED: cannot even get the most basic windows assessment tool to run without BSOD and driver crash. Trying to start a windows game generats this error : "Failed to create Direct3d device." I am going to try and install the latest directx drivers too.
Same hey man i got the same problem. i cant get past this. every time i try to enable SLi i get a BSOD with the same error as you and when it reboots the screen is either black or it does another BSOD before logigng in, i have installed 3 different versions of windows and all the drivers are giving me problems. each version of windows having slightly diffeent problems. like in vista the video drivers all make ym screen go black. yep. all of them completley throw mycards out of whack and i cant see anything, a common error i get also is that the drivers are also telling me they were written for a previous version of windows... WTF? is there a specific version of windows we need to sue to enable SLI? the medai centewr edition the laptop came with or what? this is bogus as hell!!! im going to go buy more ram and another hard drive today and se eif it helps... LOL i will let you know if i figure anything out.
the drivers from that site dont work on the M9750, you have to get them directly from alienware because our motherboard as a proprietpry Nforce chip and nvidia and or 3rd party programmers dont have the ability or even copyright's to create a compatible driver. so in a nutshell. its AW drivers or nothing. well you could use the other driverss but it would be a very poor choice *EDIT* i found a web site that is selling M9750 recovery disc's im going to see if this will fix it. ugh.... another format....
i might have the soloution, does it make sense to instal the video driver on each card? installing it once should of been good enough right? it should apply to both ccards right?
I'ved tried this with no success. Updates though: I have installed windows 7 and actually had both cards enabled (using nvidia's new drivers specifically for windows 7. latest was 169 or something now its 179 i believe.) I enabled sli and got the bsod again. Another fun find: I pressed f3+fn to output video to watch a movie on a tv. I forgot to press this after the movie ended. I simply shut the pc down. Later i started playing a somewhat demanding game and it got choppy. I pressed f3+fn and the game worked fine again. I've tried doing this many times when installing drivers and enabling sli etc. to no success. There is certainly something fishy with this behavior though. I suspect that it strains the gpu pretty bad. I have physically removed the parent card from the computer and am running soley on the daughter card. I have a question though which will be of tremendous diagnostic help. Should I be able to run with the daughter card inserted in the parent slot? RIght now I can not. The computer will not boot. If I should be able to, then i know that my slot is fried... not the card itself. I plan on replacing the card but need to know the answer to this question first. thanks
Do they both look like this? Did you try running the card that you took out, in the slot which is working right now? In case that is working, it's basically as you already said: "then i know that my slot is fried".
1. the cards do not look like that. one is labeled Parent and the other Daughter. 2. each card has a set of connectors where an SLI cable is attached; connecting the two cards. (I got a new cable. that is not the problem) 3. I did try placing the parent card into the daughter slot and that did not work. The daughter card is the "leader" card as i've found out from alienware. The bios for each is unique. (Daughter ~ Primary, Parent ~ Slave in other terms) Therefore the Parent will not work on its own. Only the daughter can do that. I have tried inserting the daughter card into the Parent slot with no success. I'm wondering if this means that the slot is fried or is it that the daughter card will not work in that slot under any conditions.
Interesting. I guess, they are custom cards then... NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX Preview http://hothardware.com/Articles/NVIDIA-GeForce-Go-7950-GTX-Preview1/ It seems you were able to successfully limit it to either the "parent" card or its slot, but the only thing you can do now is to either buy a new set of those cards, just a new "parent" card (and risk that it's not the card, but the slot), or send the laptop to Alienware to get it fixed. :frown:
hey, well im still stuck with this same problem. i have physically removed both of my video cards, and ram and CMOS and laptop battery and left it like that for a few hours. i cleaned out the dust. i wiped the connectors with the same cleaner that comes with Arctic Silver 5, and i put my laptop together again and it has the craziest error i have ever seen. but it restarted its self and was fine again... BUT my SLI wont work. here is a fun find of mine, using the original alienware drivers i get the BSOD Page fault in Non Paged Area.... well that sucks.... cant enable SLI and if i use a newer driver i get the nvid endless loop bull crap BSOD. i have installed windows XP, XP PRO, Vista and they all wont let my SLI enable. so im pretty sure this is a hard ware problem. you got a new cable so its not the cable... i am left with this idea... is it our Nforce chip? it is proprietory im sure. because we cant use the NVIDIA drivers due to aleinware customizing it right? what if the Nforce chip went bad.... that tiny chip that looks like a mini processor between the video cards... get back to me! owen_c86@yahoo.com. or on here
also i think i might buy a new M9750 Motherboard. if it is the Nforce chip that is the only way. and i am leaning more and more to that little bugger. i dont think that it is a video card burning out. device manager would say its not working correctly, or it would not show up at all right? well i guess ill replace the MOBO wonder if i can find one cheap
