Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

I understand where you are coming from.

Just for kicks, I tried to lower the the max power state, but it did not seem to have any effect on the GPU. Are you sure that you set the p-state back to "auto" after forcing to P8 with nvidiaInspector?

 

Yeah, maybe I made a different power change that affected it, or something else, because I'm now running P8 with the max power state set to 100%. If I switch my power profile to "High Performance" it immediately goes back to P0. Switching to "Balanced" puts it back in P8.

I did make sure I set the P-state back to auto. In fact I also rebooted the system which should have cleared out anything NVIDIA Inspector did.

 

Interesting setup, I think I see how you're able to get such low GPU temps: Optimus. Your screenshot shows that you have both integrated Intel chip and the K5000M working in tandem to drive the displays, something that is not yet possible on Linux (or at least not easily so). I didn't think the Intel chip could drive multiple displays at all, , you guys have it good on Windows

That's a near perfect setup, multi-head, low GPU temps, and can switch to high performance with the click of a button. With my vBIOS mod the GPU is hardware underclocked, thankfully am not a gamer, or engineer requiring CAD et al, would be screwed otherwise.

GPU 57c is the magic number...to avoid if you want a quiet machine.

You guys might be right, maybe it's not a click, but the max power fan-on burst make it sounds something like that.

 

I'm okay with tweaking, but technically speaking, isn't all that what Optimus was designed to do?

BTW, have you been able to get anymore out of your GPU with Nvidia Inspector? I chose my GPU strictly for editing. Still, I wouldn't mind a bit more grunt if I can do it safely.

 

The Intel GPU can drive the laptop display and the VGA port. HDMI and DisplayPort require the use of the NVIDIA GPU. In this case, the NVIDIA GPU can still render things on the Intel GPU displays if needed, using Optimus's fast frame buffer technique.

Yeah, I was just checking on the need to run the NVIDIA GPU in P0 with multiple displays connected (something virtualeyes brought up and I've heard a few times before) --- never really looked at it until today.

As for extra performance, in P0, I'm running the K5000M both core and memory speeds 20% overclocked to 720/900 MHz (so that the speed matches the GeForce 680M) and, in GPU-heavy applications, performance increases accordingly. I haven't seen the temperature go much higher than 60 C under load, it does start throttling down automatically if it gets too hot which I've seen happen with FurMark, so I don't think there's any risk with this configuration.

 

I just discovered the "Multi Display Power Saver" feature of NVIDIA Inspector. It will automatically control the pstate based on GPU usage.

 

Where are you getting this? I'm by bewildered by all the gobbledygook in the Inspector (guess you have to be a gamer?

Anyway, I have discovered though that it has given me several profiles for my installed software, i.e. After Effect, Maya, etc.(who told it to do that?), but I'm not sure how it's better and/or different or if it conflicts with Dell's new software optimization tool.

Also does this replace the Nvidia Managed 3D setting from Nvidia Control Panel?

 

Would someone who owns a Dell/Samsung PM830 mSATA SSD be so kind as to post the part number?

 

If you right-click on the "Show Overclocking" button a menu will appear with a "Multi Display Power Saver" option

No, the "Mluti Display Power Saver" just controls the pstate based on GPU load thus overriding NVIDIA's decision that the card needs to operate at the highest performance level just because there are multiple monitors attached. The Managed 3D setting controls the use of certain 3D features and allows overrides for specific programs.

 

Anyone managed to get WWAN card working in Win8? I installed Dell driver but the card is not correctly detected, showing as MbmLowExt with a "!" mark under Network Adapters. uninstall and reinstall also the same.