Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

You need a bios that allows you to use unlocked multipliers though and the one on the M6700 doesn't allow that if I recall correctly. When you need stability, the clocks are often locked pretty tight.

nVidia cards have a turbo function, a little like turbo boost for Intel if I understood things right. If you want to OC a nVidia card past a certain level, you'll need to modify the vBios in order to bypass some of the built in safeties. For the firepro, I'm not sure, I will have to try to OC it and see if I hit any limit with the OCs I try.

As for modding the vBios, that depends on the card, RBE might work on the firepro, but I prefer to avoid messing with the vBios if possible since there's always the possibility of bricking a card.

 

Ok, so to flash new vbios there are few steps that are required to be made.

1. Make a bootable flash USB with THIS software.
2. Download the ROM (vBIOS image) (You may need to be registered forum user with 5 posts.)
3. Boot to DOS and make backup from your current vBIOS with nvflash
4. Flash new bios with nvflash
5. Reboot and you are done

 

Shouldn't you include the WARNING/CAUTIONS... should something go horribly wrong?

 

Yeah, flashing a vBIOS is always a bit risky, if the flash goes wrong or if you flash the wrong vBIOS, you won't get anything to display on screen. It is possible to do a blind flash sometimes in order to put the original vBIOS back on the card, but that ain't easy either. If you really brick the card, you'll need to flash the vBIOS using specialized equipment, either something meant for MXM GPUs or you'll have to desolder the vBIOS chip and use a chip programmer to flash it, then resolder the chip on the MXM board.

Whatever you do, always back up your original vBIOS first, bricking a GPU is rare, but the modded vBIOS may not be stable so it's always good to have a backup.

 

Hello everybody, after a half a year of use I got a few questions (I didn't check the thread for a long while, sorry if they were answered a bit earlier):

Where do you guys get your parts? Like the hard to find heat sink with 2 heat pipes for XM or a advanced docking station but with the better pricing?

Does the docking station come with the Express Card slot as well? There is an expansion slot in the description, but it sounds rather obscure.

I believe nobody was able to get (new or as an exchange) a perfect IPS screen? While it isn't a deal breaker I'm still a bit annoyed by the bluish tint mine has.

There are 2133 DDR3 modules available. Did anybody try them? I recall someone reported an improvement with 1866 vs 1600, I wonder if 2133 is possible with 3740QM (or better models)?

Do you think it will be feasible to upgrade wi-fi to ac? Right now performance of ac is pretty far from an expectation, but still [at times] significantly better than n. I hope to use wire-lessly attached nas in a near future but 10-20 mb/s kind of stops me.

Any new steps for mobile Ivy Bridges are expected before haswell completely takes over?

With both NV and AMD stuck with their mobile graphics architectures it seems like none has an upper hand (780 and 8970), but upgrade to a better AMD card from M6000 doesn't require a new heatsink while upgrade to a NV card requires new sink, correct?

It appears I still can't get 10bit working on my IPS with M6000, is it just me or...?

Thanks a lot in advance,
Mikhail

 

Heatsink is from dell directly. Old usb 2.0 dock from ebay. I have the pr02x and pretty sure none of them have express card slot.

I try 3 screen from third party(2 vendor) , they all have it.

Ac upgrade should be plug and play, personally still waiting for a real 3x3 card.

I haven't done the gpu upgrade but people that did it say that how it works.

 

I've done some vBIOS flashing with the K5000M so here's a couple things.

If you have Optimus available (i.e. you don't have the IPS display), you should always be able to boot up even if the vBIOS is flashed wrong. Since the Intel GPU is used to drive the primary display, this gives you a little bit of a safety net. If you had the machine set not to use Optimus, pull the battery and it will reset all of the BIOS settings to default (and Optimus is enabled by default).

Note that when Optimus is on, nvflash will likely complain that the video card is not correct when trying to flash it. You'll need to use the "overridesub" option to get it to flash anyway.

 

The 1866 is the maximum supported RAM on a mobile system. According to reports I've read, the small advantage difference shows up in tests, but is negligible in daily computing.

 

Yeah, negligible in every day computing, but if your workload involves swapping a lot of memory from and to RAM, then it could make a difference.

 

Thanks guys!
Mikhail