Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

I must have missed something. Which are these new cards exactly?

 

The new GeForce 900 series GPUs are Maxwell GPUs. ("Maxwell" is simply the name of the architecture used by NVIDIA for this series of GPUs.) The Quadros we have in the Precision line since M4700/M6700 are Kepler GPUs, like those from the GeForce 600-700 series. The Kepler Quadros are identified easily as the model number always starts with "K".

We haven't seen any mobile Quadros based on Maxwell yet but they should be showing up eventually...

 

Yes, of course, but there were 9X0M Geforce cards available for a long time now, some of which were already installed by in the Precisions by their owners.

From his post, I understood there were some new additions:

so I wondered if he was referring to the recent 980Ti (with the 40% reference) which I feel would be of no concern to the mobile users as they further beefed up the number of processing units from the 980, the equivalent of which even was not available as a mobile part due to the limited TDP in mobile world (there were some rumors of a 980 equivalent in the form of a 990M, but nothing concrete as of yet AFAIK).

 

For the first time since I've had my unit I'm without a wireless network. What's worse is that I'm not near any hotspots so I can't even use those links either.

Since I'm without a smart phone I decided to invest in a Verizon Wireless 4G LTE USB modem but I can't get the SIMS card to work. I put in the sims card but I'm still getting insert sims on the manager. This is the second sims card I've tried.

 

Did you use the original Dell DVD for this? I just spent almost two days trying to install Windows 7 64 in UEFI mode on my mSATA and failed (always got some 0xc000000d or 0xc0000225 messages on windows startup). I didn't have my Dell reinstallation DVD at hand so used those clean MS X15 and X17 (SP1) ISO releases.

It was a b**** getting it all back to MBR, but finally up and running again. Too bad - I wanted UEFI to speed up the boot times ahead of the Windows 10 upgrade I'm considering.

 

I've actually never used the original Dell DVD. Back when I first got the M6700, I transitioned to Windows 7 UEFI using a stock Windows 7 ISO from Microsoft burned to DVD. (At the time, I got the image from TechNet, but that's not around anymore.) So, I can't speak for OEM media, but Microsoft media has supported UEFI on Windows 7 (64-bit only) for as long as it has been around, as far as I know.

I only ran Windows 7 UEFI for a few days before upgrading to Windows 8.

It is possible to switch from legacy/MBR to UEFI/GPT without trashing your OS install. I have done this a number of times now on various machines, without issue. Here is an article about it. Maybe this is something to think about doing after upgrading to Windows 10 (and performing a system image backup). You will need to boot Windows install media to reinstall the bootloader, but you can download the Windows 10 media for free.

 

I actually wanted to upgrade to UEFI before upgrading to Windows 10. I did use the Windows 7 ISO from Microsoft, both the initial release and then later tried the SP1, both from USB and optical drive, but all my boot attempts after the first step of the installation have failed. I could sometimes boot the restored OS image (after I've converted the disk to GPT and installed Windows in UEFI mode) only if I enabled legacy boot AND disabled the RAID hard drives in BIOS. If the drives were enabled, Windows would start loading, but then immediately report the 0xc0000225 error and something about the hardware change. If the UEFI was enabled only (no legacy boot), I would get the 0xc000000d error. Windows startup repair couldn't help.

If UEFI is supported on all the M6700's, I have no idea why an SP1 UEFI installation on the mSATA SSD (all other drives were disabled in BIOS) would simply not boot on my laptop in UEFI mode. Did your M6700 come originally with Windows 8 perhaps?

 

Nope, I got my M6700 at launch, shortly before Windows 8 was released.

 

@Krane, not a lot of people use the WWAN card, I know I can't help you unfortunately.y It might be drivers or it might be some kind of incompatibility with the M6700. If you could find the hardware that came with the WWAN versions you might have better luck.

 

OK, thanks. Then I'm clueless as to what went wrong.

BTW, that K4000M UEFI BIOS was unlocked for OC thanks to Klem at techinferno forums (here). That's what got me into trying to switch to UEFI boot finally (as beforehand I'd get a black screen and had to remove the CMOS battery), but no dice.. If somebody needs the same thing done for the UEFI versions of K3000M or K5000M (or the newer Quadros), I suggest to post them there.