Dell Precision M4800 - Can GPU be upgraded?

Hello everybody!

I signed up just to be able to answer to this thread which has helped me so much getting my Quadro M1200 to work.
Thank you very much everybody!

This here is my story. I have posted a HowTo as a new thread.

This story is for everybody who wants to know, and of course to intersperse keywords for future users of search engines, who might run into the same problems as I did.

These posts where almost three weeks in the making, and I'd like to write this so others might be spared the hazzle I had.

Why did I want to upgrade?
My favourite game series is the Mass Effect series. Although my main OS is Gentoo Linux, I have a (genuine) Windows 10 Professional installed as well just to play ME 1-3. (Well, officially for testing and cross development, but that's happening rather rarely. )
The K2100M is big and powerful enough to run all three titles with maximum settings and solid 60FPS. However, I like to tweak (aka mod) my games, and the most important modding is to add high resolution textures. My favourite modding tool is A Lot Of Textures (ALOT).
And if you believe it or not, even with ultra-high-res textures, plus reShade mods for ME1, all three games run almost perfectly fine on the old K2100M. Some of the additional Shaders in ME1 had to be disabled, and some close up dialogs in ME3 had some "stuttering", but the normal game-play was still just fine, between 45 and 60 FPS.
However, there was one big problem with ME1. The Ingame-Menu became unusable. About one frame every 2 to 3 seconds. And there isn't even something special on it!

Why did I choose an M1200?
So after trying whatever I could came up with, I searched for upgrade possibilities of my Precision M4800, and ended up here. I read the whole thread, and then went to search for a Quadro M2000M. But the cheapest I could find was at €449, way above my budget. A total of €350 was all I could (barely) muster.
But before giving up I remembered that someone wrote here, that there was a similar model, the Quadro M1200. So I searched for that and found an offer from silvieaudi20010 on ebay: An "NVIDIA Quadro M1200 N17P-Q1-A2 4GB GDDR5 MXM PCIe3 Maxwell Video Graphics card" for $299. Even with the transportation fees and customs the result would be ~350 Euro, and thus within my budget. Upper end, sure, but there wasn't anything else I could afford.

(Note: While writing this, there are offers under $200 for both M1200 and M2000M on ebay.com at the moment!)

But before I ordered the card I went researching. Benchmark reports drew a picture of the M1200 being only about ~3% more performant than the M2000M. Something you wouldn't notice in day-to-day use anyway. But then it is basically the same card, just with a 2 years newer design.

On the other hand the M2000M is spec'd for 55W, just like the K2100M, while the M1200 is spec'd for 45W. This eventually convinced me to go forward and try it out. Maybe the smaller power consumption may lead to a bit less heat? Well, most probably not, but that would be a nice side effect...

What where the problems?
Upgrading the card was easy. Dell provides very thorough instructions for every single step, and this wasn't the first time I upgraded the card. My laptop originally came with a FirePro.
However, getting the card to work was a different story. I cleaned (with UDD) and re-installed all sorts of nvidia drivers over and over again. Drivers for the Precision M4800, Precision 5x10, Precision 5520, Precision 7x20, HP zBook G4 and the official nvidia Quadro Grid Drivers.

Everything ended in the Quadro M1200 being recognized, but halted with the infamous "Error 43".

So I booted into Gentoo Linux and tried it out there using Bumblebee. (A means to use a discrete nvidia card only for applications that need it.) But everything I tried ended up with some obscure error message that didn't even make sense.

Finding out what's what
As the PCI subsystem reported was 15CC1028 (The 1028 indicating Dell, as HP uses a 103C postfix here), I was completely at sea. But then I remembered that someone here wrote about HP using cards without a Video BIOS. And sure enough, when I looked into the Xorg.8.log it stated that the "video BIOS could not be loaded".
Back in Windows 10 I fired up GPU-Z, and it confirmed my suspicion: "BIOS version: Unavailable"
The only Dell I knew of with an M1200 and disabled discrete mode was the Precision 5520. I learned that here in this very thread, too.
So I wrote to the seller of the card, asking which Model this card was pulled from, and then went downloading the latest Precision 5520 BIOS.

How did I get the Video BIOS?
Using PhoenixTool I disassembled the Dell BIOS download (which hangs the computer, so TaskManager must be opened beforehand!) and went searching (grep'ing) for the VBIOS keyword K7400. I found it. A search for gm107 (The M1200 and M2000M GPU) showed me which file it was.
Then I only had to rip of the 20 bytes header by Dell and could check the result with the Maxwell II BIOS Tweaker. Looked good!
Using "nvflash64 -6" on the disabled card, I flashed the VBIOS. A reboot and re-enabling of the card later, it was no longer stopped with that wretched error 43.

What about the drivers?
Well, I am gaming, so I want to use the most recent official nvidia drivers. Unfortunately the nvidia Quadro Grid Drivers do not include PhysX. But after now having a card with a proper VBIOS, the latest nvidia drivers from Dell, patched almost (see below) as instructed here in this thread, installed everything I needed. I decided to go for the TestMode, so I wouldn't have to reboot into special modes over and over again.
Nicely enough, even without a restart, I could then upgrade to the latest, also properly patched, nvidia Quadro grid Drivers.

What about the "patching" of the drivers?
Well, everywhere I looked there wasn't any research into what to substitute where.
The Dell drivers list the M1200 with four subsystem IDs in three different sections, the nvidia drivers even have five different subsystem IDs in four different sections.

So I downloaded the latest nvidia drivers for the Dell Precision 5520 and the HP zBook G4.
The Dell package only lists one subsystem ID, which is the additional one I found in the nvidia driver package.
The HP package lists a lot more, but one exactly fits the subsystem ID of the ROM file.

I compared the sections these two used, and although the Dell one was a bit more thorough, they were almost the same.
Then I went through the sections within the driver package for the Precision M4800 and the nvidia drivers, and only two sections matched:

• Dell M4800 Drivers: Section232 - 07b01028
• Dell 5520 Drivers: Section220 - 07bf1028
• Nvidia Drivers : Section142 - 07bf1028

These numbers are used in the HowTo.

What about the performance?
Great! The ME1 menu is still slow, but I get at least 6-8 FPS. That's enough for them to be usable. Within the game even with all but three extra shaders (which I do not want anyway) ME1 is nailed to 62 FPS, no matter what I do.
ME2 runs great as ever, and all stuttering in ME3's dialogs with ultra high-res textured heads is gone.

Anything else?
Yes. GPU-Z said, that the card would only have 2GB of VRAM. Was I tricked? Did I damage something? On Linux, nvidia-smi said the same: 2GB RAM...

Further the temperature rised up to almost steady 90°C, and the fan was always on 4200RPM. So playing was only possible with headphones on.

The first was resolved by the seller, who told me that the card was from an HP zBook G4. The PCI subsystem tricked me! Of course! It was imposed by the PCI bus and not the card!
So I extracted the latest M1200 VBIOS from the latest HP zBook G4 BIOS download. I had to erase the EEPROM on the card first, as the adapter ID was different (of course, or all components on the card would have been the same and it wouldn't've mattered which VBIOS I used). Then I flashed that BIOS on the card, rebooted, and had the full 4GB VRAM! :-D

The second was the fault of the old and ancient "Arctic 3" thermal paste I used. I had already orderd some "Thermal Grizzly Kryonite", but wanted to get started, so I used the old paste. After ~8 years it surely had deteriorated much!

So the next step was removing the heat sinks, cleaning up the CPU, GPU and the sinks, applying a thin layer of the new paste, and putting it all back together.

The result: In 3 hours of Mass Effect 3, the temperature rose to a maximum of 71°C and the fan was never over one third of its maximum speed!

 

Brilliant! Great write-up. Thanks for sharing.

This is the first success story that I have heard regarding the M1200 or M2200 in the Precision M4800. Because the M1200 works, the M2200 should be fine as well with a similar procedure.

 

You are all very welcome!

If I hadn't had this thread and its useful information, I wouldn't have had any clue about where to start. ;-)

 

Good read. Glad you sorted it out. Unfortunate for me that I didn't have this level of detail experience write up or report back when I attempted my m200m upgrade on my precision m4800 earlier in the thread.

Never got it to work, may have been A dodgy card I'm Not sure... just didn't want to work with my particular model of. M4800 - and on that note, Dell made too many variations of them and even confuse their own tech support staff with that could or couldn't work! It's disappointing we need to go to such extents t o do a simple card upgrade and even more disappointing Dell can't sell obvious spare parts for their highest end. Models trying to get this model current for longer. Anyway, glad the result worked for you and I'm sire with the detail provided it will help future upgraders.

RoOSTA

 

Hello I manged to pickup a m4800 for free. I am excited to start upgrading it as it has a i5 and HD panel these parts are easy to upgrade.
But its got a k2100m in it but want to upgrade to a m2000m.
I just want to confirm the importance of the GPU itself, do i require to purchase a Dell version (so with a dell vBIOS) or could could i use a Hp card?
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-ZBOOK...266222?hash=item3b1873172e:g:m6cAAOSwykRbcb7D

 

Typically the HP vBIOS doesn't get along well with Dell, but if you can get the card flashed with a Dell vBIOS you should be good.
(With graphics switching turned on it should be possible to flash the card, with the Intel GPU driving everything.)

 

Anyone know of a forum for flashing a gpu?
I have only ever flashed a usb and learned how to do that from a Russian and Chinese forum the Google translate was fun

 

The tool to use for flashing is called nvflash. I believe that TechPowerUp has a searchable database of vBIOS images. I can't be much help beyond that but hopefully that can get you pointed in some direction...

 

Hi just a question regarding system display type, I have QHD version which is non LVDS and is IDP, I have tried m2000m on mine for about 300$ shipped, but had black screen in and out, meaning internal display didnt show signs of life. I now understand that it must have been VBIOS issue but if I to repeat this I am curious how would one go about firmware rewrite on unit that has no video output? or this means the only option to upgrade m4800 is to have LVDS dual gfx mobo?

thanks in advance.

 

Ehh. Is it the case that in this model, you can't enable graphics switching in the BIOS if you have something higher than 1080p? Do you know where the card came from? Dell vBIOS is the best for compatibility and HP is normally the worst. Here is what I can think of but there's not really any great options... You need to get the card working in a system where you can see what's going on so that you can flash a Dell vBIOS onto the card.

* Have you checked to see if you can use an external screen with the M2000M installed? If it does, you should be able to flash the card
* Turn graphics switching on in the BIOS (may require 1080p panel) — the Intel GPU will drive the built-in display and you can flash the card
* Move the card to a different system where it works and flash the vBIOS before moving it back

The best thing is just to make sure that the card that you get was pulled from a Dell system when you buy it, then it will already have a Dell vBIOS on it.