Alienware Aurora R4 GTX 690 Problems

UN-'Dell deletes my post even if I put in some astrixs and  -ing because patrolling their forums and deleting posts that are even suggestive of an expletive but don't actually contain expetives is SO much more efffective than taking care off the customer and fixing a his machine so he doesn't wait THREE MONTHS for a single part swap to fix his machine and get frustrated to the point where he might type something suggestive of an expletive'-BELIEVABLE!  

The tech finally showed up-----with a broken repair part. THREE WEEKS after the SECOND CALL for NEXT BUSINESS DAY SUPPORT.   THREE MONTHS with no resolution of the original call.

UN-'Dell deletes my post even if I put in some astrixs and  -ing because patrolling their forums and deleting posts that are even suggestive of an expletive but don't actually contain expetives is SO much more efffective than taking care off the customer

It's the AI in the forum software that catches those and quarantines them. No, that is not allowed as well as other things. Follow the rules and you can tell your story ... it won't be deleted.

your best bet is to buy an alienware with a crappy video card and guy an evga gtx 690, one that has a warranty too. i hear the kepler gpu has high DOA

I usually do just that, but I made the mistake of trusting Dell this time.  Apparently they went with the "bottom bidder" for their gtx-690 cards, because I've seen a huge amount of problems posted in some IT foroms I'm in for a relatively small number off machines.

No matter how you cut it the following things are unacceptable:

• THREE MONTHS WITH NO RESOLUTION. 
• Three weeks to ship a part ffor a system in Next Business Day Support.
• Telephone support people who speak broken english in sentence fragments.
• Telephone support people eho don't update contact info when given the correct inffo.
• Closing calls with no resolution. 
• Telling a customer the part that's probably bad in their expensive system is well, expensive, so they might not replace it even though support has no other clue to fix the problem. 
• Pointing the finger at windows software and saying you can't fix it, when you are a reseller and responsible for windows support.
• Calling the issue a driver problem and saying you're not responsible for fixing it, when you supplied the system and hardware, preconfigured.
• Getting mad at a customer who held his temper during three months off support bungling without a resolution.
• Sending your tech a bad part, after a three week wait
• Not understanding when the customer who bought a $1200 monitor so he could get 2560x1600 resolution insists on the replacement part having a functioning display port interface so he can actually get full native resolution instead of 1920x1080.
• Not using email when you can't reach the customer by phone.
• Breaking a customer's system during a support call, insisting you didn't, and then having the customer tell you what is wrong and how to fix it.

I have a dozen or more, but I'm going to do something more productive like bang my head against, watch anime or write .Net-Micro software.
 

fyi after 2 weeks of waiting i noticed the replacement gtx 690 i got was "refurbished" and considering the fact that if it powers the monitor then it "works" no matter if its running at 30% of its supposed speed. i suspect that whatever cards they have are just going around and around in circles as replacements.

lol not to make light of your problem, but in my case the replacement gtx 690 benched 4000 graphics in 3d mark 11, slower than my ancient gtx 480m. it is supposed to score 17,000+ in 3d mark. in unigine, dell's preferred benchmark it scored 36 fps on average settings. when i talked to the tech agent he practically was in shock "what?!? only 36 fps? you sure nothing else is running?". then he said he'd talk to engineering. after about 45 minutes on hold, he came back and said engineering had said 36 fps is perfectly acceptable for the worlds fastest graphics card, despite the fact that other people are benching 120+ fps on the same card, and despite the fact that my old gtx 480m benched higher. needless to say i was within the 21 day return period and the next day got the return label to send it back.

"lol not to make light of your problem, but in my case the replacement gtx 690 benched 4000 graphics in 3d mark 11, slower than my ancient gtx 480m. it is supposed to score 17,000+ in 3d mark. in unigine, dell's preferred benchmark it scored 36 fps on average settings. when i talked to the tech agent he practically was in shock "what?!? only 36 fps? you sure nothing else is running?". then he said he'd talk to engineering. after about 45 minutes on hold, he came back and said engineering had said 36 fps is perfectly acceptable for the worlds fastest graphics card, despite the fact that other people are benching 120+ fps on the same card, and despite the fact that my old gtx 480m benched higher. needless to say i was within the 21 day return period and the next day got the return label to send it back."

My issue seems part heat related and part game (hitting bad v-memory location).  Some games(the less demanding ones) almost never cause a problem, others(newest most demanding) blow within a minute of starting every time.  BAsically if the card can coast below 50% utilization and there aren't a lot off complicated textures it seems to work.  If it has to run above 50% and/or the game has a lot of complex textures, it usually slows down suddenly losing half it's frame rate. The first drop usually seems to be the video driver crashing because one of the cores crashed, and there is an event log entry.  The second event is either the game totally crashing amd usually a period of black or checkered screen, or in more intensive games the conputer going black and becoming totally unresponsive, it has to be hard booted not even tapping the power switch to signal windows to begin an orderly shutdown works.

Are you using P15 and P17 Power supply connectors?

That should enable as many 12v Rails as possible.

I know it sounds weird, but did you try it in the bottom slot?

What drivers are you running? Where did they come from? Are they Release or beta? Did you clean install them?

What BIOS version are you running?

Heaven Bench is 36 fps with standard options? (4x AF, NO AA, NO TESS)

Is your native res. around 1080p or is it much higher?

Sounds really low but a high res would lower it. What monitor are you running and it's native res.

yes for sure only one gpu is working, i used evga precision tool to log the cpu mhz and only one gpu would go faster than the base 324mhz that it stays in low power mode. on the replacement gpu it was the opposite gpu that only worked. and yes dual gpu was enabled in nvidia control panel. on one card it ran half as slow with single gpu mode, but the other card ran twice as fast with one gpu disabled, about full speed on that gpu but still 1/2 what a gtx 690 supposed to get. 1080p resolution, average settings, tessalation off. drivers tried both latest dell drivers, and latest nvidia drivers. its the hardware. i tested both cards in another non-dell custom built system. same benchmarks in that system. tried it in both slots in mine, no change. in the other non-dell custom built system we put in dual gtx 670 and got 18,000 3dmark vs 4000-8000 with the two gtx 690 cards.

there is some junk gtx 690 hardware floating around at dell for sure and they are not treating it serious.  we pay $2k+ for an alienware not so it 'boots' but because its supposed to perform

hello there let me just get straight to the point ,its your gtx690 that is broken your gpu's are unsynct i kno that for a fact sins i have had the same issue aswell i did allot of tests and found out that both gpu's still work but they dont work together anymore cuase of this damage (during shipping desktop crashes ,overheating)  only solution is buying a new card ore play on 1 gpu sins it gives u a gtx680(witch is still a very fast card)

for those who are still looking for fixing this stop wasting your time,it cant be fixed(its hardware problem not software).

regards jet

I'm seeing the same thing Blacklab909 is.  Gpu 2 clock never moves off the base 324 mhz with dual GPU's enabled.

but whats even stranger is on the replacement card it was opposite, GPU1 was stuck at 324mhz and GPU2 was hitting full speed. so i know the evga precision software is able to see both GPUs.