Z60M, Advanced Dock, and Asus AX300SE-X PCI Express video

[staticthis]

Hello,
I have a Z60M laptop, with the advanced docking station. Everything was working fine, had 2 dell 17" lcd screens, on DVI-D, the other analog, and no problems. Now they got replaced with two AOC 19" analog only monitors. Well, with DVI-D on the dock, the converters wont work (DVI-I only), so I looked into a PCI-Express video card. I got a cheap Asus, AX300SE-X PCI-Express dual head video card, and the machine will not see it. It doesnt show up in any hardware scans, doesnt show up in a PCI diag. Is there something Im missing? Is there a step I dont know about adding a PCI-Express video card to this dock?

[a31pguy]

Have you checked your bios settings on video preferences?

[kru-inc]

I tried an ASUS Extreme AX300SE-X/TD and even with the BIOS set to "PCI- EXPRESS," I got nothing. Lenovo techs said that the card may be defective. The card went back to the shop and tested a-ok. I ended up exchanging the card.

The shop exchanged the ASUS card for an eVGA e-GeForce 6200 TC. The z60t 'sees' the card IF I dock the notebook after boot-up. It installs the drivers, but ends up as a device failure - not enough resources, must delete another resorce - message. Again the BIOS is set to see the external display (when docked) as well I set the boot-up display every which way. If I boot (docked), there's no display.

What could I be missing?

[Thesp]

There's something very weird going on with the Advanced Dock and graphics card incompatibility. See the below threads

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=25584
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=22358
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=26109
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=26468

kru-inc - have you got your card working yet?

[kru-inc]

Posted: Fri Jun 02, 2006 12:33 am

Thesp - Simply trying to improve the display onto our Dell 20" widescreens, we ditched Advanced Mini's for the full dock. The chipset VGA out (from our z60t's) was just not cutting it. I was wrong to figure that with the Advanced Dock, any low profile entry level video card would suffice... In order, these are the cards I've tried:

1> ASUS Extreme AX300SE-X/TD > system boots, but system didn't see the card. (card tested fine)

2> eVGA e-GeForce 6200 TC > system would not boot no matter what.

3> XFX GE-FORCE 6600 > WORKS... though I needed to remove secondary heatsink due to clearance issue.


thibouille27 - a "compatibility chart" would have been great! And would have saved me some trouble. If it wasn't for this forum thread, I would have just gave up.



NOW, I just wish I could live with the 'dancing' fans. Plus, I need to find out how I can hot dock and undock the notebook (w/ the external video card running)...

The 6600 works fine. I've got the DVI-D hooked up to DELL 20" widescreen.
It was frustrating to have gone through two other cards before finding one that would work. My partner w/ the same notebook couldn't wait and returned his Advanced Dock.
Good luck.

[Thesp]

Funny. My PNY 6600 GS fails install due to a resource conflict...

[kru-inc]

I got a resource conflict with the 6200 which wouldn't boot at all. I would have to hot-dock the notebook then the system would 'see' the card and install. But it's status would be - resource conflict.
I thought the confilct was due to the (eVGA) 6200's shared memory requirements 128MB/256MB - onboard/shared configuration.

[Thesp]

But no hot-docking shenanigans with the 6600, right? I have the resource conflict with the 6600, definitely. I wonder, perhaps my onboard FireGl with Hypermemory is causing the problem...