Dell Precision M4800 - Can GPU be upgraded?

I discovered a bit of a weird flaw with the M4800 if the WX-4150 card is installed, but I'm not sure if it's been mentioned.

If you leave the laptop to sleep and wake it, with HDMI it'll have the internal panel asleep and disconnected until you hit Fn+F8 to go from duplicate and back to extended. This appears to only happen with HDMI, and DisplayPort is absolutely fine.

 

Are you up to selling your WX 4150?
I have a 7510 and it would be greate to upgrade it with a better GPU.

 

Not for now, sorry.

 

Hey guys, first off thanks for all the wonderful info in this thread. It motivated me to upgrade my own M4800 (4k screen version) with a M1200.

I have been having trouble getting my card to work properly though. The system detects the card fine and once I modified the INF file, the driver seems to install okay. The problem I'm having is that the screen only displays for a few seconds at a time before turning black (the backlight is still on however). The only exception to this is when I connect it via HDMI to my TV and either mirror or extend the display. Then the display is actually stable.

Any ideas on what might be causing the instability? I'm not confident I modified the INF file correctly, and when I tried booting into a live linux distro the display is stable.

 

Do you know if you have the LVDS or eDP version of the M4800?

The INF mod that I think would be correct is this find-and-replace on the entire/original INF file:
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13B6&SUBSYS_07B01028 => PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13B6&SUBSYS_15CC1028
PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13B6&SUBSYS_17B01028 => PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_13B6&SUBSYS_05CC1028
(I can check more carefully if you post what device ID your system is reporting, and whether you have graphics switching enabled or not.)

If you enable graphics switching / Optimus that would probably "solve" the problem (by having the Intel GPU drive the internal display).

 

Thanks for the reply! I have the eDP version of the M4800 - HWINFO reports that my screen is the Sharp LQ156D1. I don't believe I can enable optimus on my machine since I have the 4k screen.

Here's a screenshot of GPU-Z with the device ID (sorry not sure how to embed screenshots in the post just yet). I'll try modding the INF file as you suggested and report back.

 

Cool. With this, I believe that the INF mod I posted above is correct. Technically only the second line/replacement is necessary if you won't be using the system with Optimus on.

 

Thanks again. I'm unfortunately still having the same issue - the driver installs successfully but once it loads, it glitches out shortly after that. The screen kind of flickers/flashes and then goes blank. Any ideas as to what might be causing that?

 

Hey guys quick update! I think I may have figured out a solution to my problem. Sharing it in case others run into the same issue. I seem to have fixed it by going into the NVIDIA control panel settings and setting the Power Management Mode to "prefer maximum performance". I also disabled vsync. So far my M4800 has been pretty stable though I have yet to stress it for long periods of time.

 

Hi, This is my first post here on notebookreview. I went and bought a m2200 and did the inf mod and installed stock nvidia grid drivers and so far seem to be working well. performance over the k2100m is great but my gpu temp in task manager seems a bit high to me. under load im getting quickly up to 91 deg C. I cleaned all the old thermal paste off and replaced it. I did not replace the silicone conductive pads that contact the surrounding chips on the gpu. I was wondering if that temp sounds reasonable to you all? Idle is around 44 deg C. I think I may pull it apart again and check for gap between heatsink and GPU chip with a feeler guage sometime soon. if anyone has done the swap to a m2200m I would love to know what kind of temps you get.