Alienware M15x - Freezing after installing Nvidia

Could be related to the same issue the M17x R1 users are having. Any of the Nvidia Verde (2xx.xx) drivers are hard-locking at random time, whether it's GPU accelerated movies (WMV, Flash etc...), 3D games or even Windows Aero (3D desktop).

Only solution we have so far is to disable a setting in BIOS called PCI Express Gen 2.0 (but it halves the available bandwidth to the card). But our laptop is Nvidia chipset, M15x is Intel isn't it? Not sure if the setting is called the same thing or would even work for you.

Hello Krac :)

Thank you for the quick reply.

I don't think i got the option in BIOS to disable the PCI Express Gen 2.0 (A08) on M15x, i have go through every options but so far, i don't see that any options to disable that.

Do you think i can reconfigure back my M15x and change the gfx to ATI or something like that?

Thanks.

Chris,

DELL video card drivers still causing my laptop to hard lock and freezing, now you let we know what is the final solution for GTX 260M for M15x ?

PS : I am not the one who are dealing with this..

Thanks you sir :)

MyAlienware,

You must go back to using our video card drivers. We did not validate the retail drivers.

Bios A09
Command Center 2.5.54.0 A07
OSD Application 1.12 A04
GTX 260M 257.38 A01

I don't have a final solution, that is why we are troubleshooting. What do you mean by, "I am not the one who are dealing with this.."?

Google for "Alienware M15x hard lock or freezing issues"

It is quite frustrated for me, my system keep freezing, and most of answer is related with the Nvidia Geforce 260M GTX.

I hope you can help me on this Chris.

Thanks

Chris, this is also a major issue for M17x R1 users. All Verde drivers *including* the Dell supplied 257.38 drivers cause this issue on the M17x. There are dozens of threads, usually per driver release, on the notebookreview forums. The only way we can get around the hard-locks is disabling the PCI Express Gen 2.0 setting in BIOS, but that halves our bandwidth to the card. My post on here about the issue was ignored.

Doesn't look like Myalienware can even do that since he's on an Intel chipset motherboard with different BIOS options.

There is definitely an issue with Nvidia 2xx series cards, or at least those supplied by Dell, when used on PCIX Gen 2 bus with all the Verde drivers.

Dear All,

I managed to avoid this issues by using the 197.xx nvidia drivers (beta) one , at least it is survive more than 2 hours or so. But..the peformance of my M15x is really really bad! For example, i'm using 3dMark03 to do the benchmark, i got 21k score for the drivers from dell and 3k from the 197.xx drivers.

I hope Chris can do something about this. Agreed with Krac, lots of issues i can see in notebook forum review.

Thanks!

That definitely agrees with the same experience the M17x users have had. Pre-Verde drivers (i.e. 1xx.xx) do not have this issue, but are so old they lack the bug fixes and games profile support to make them really useful. All the Verde drivers suffer from this problem (btw, the Dell 257.38 drivers are some of the worst for crashes, lol).

Krac,

I am doing the cleaning install (again for 9 times) and load the Windows 7 Ultimate on my M15x

1 : Installing the chipset drivers

2 : Installing the Geforce drivers from Dell , and guess what ? Its not freezing for more than 40 mins now, but..when i do the 3dMark03, the performance is very very bad, i got about 3k only for the score..

3 : I suspect the problem is not about the nvidia drivers, but others drivers maybe is the caused!

Will update here by time to time!

Thanks!

Bump! :)

What version of the drivers from Dell are you using?

The official drivers from dell.com.

I am thinking maybe overheat is the caused about this too..

I am having similar issues, and have had nothing but problems with my M15x since I got it a little over a year ago, have had the GPU replaced multiple times, the motherboard replaced multiple times, even the GPU's heatsink, but nothing has solved the wonderful problems I continue to have with this system.