Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Yes, I have always kept the screws in. While it is supposed to be safe to run the system without the screws, it always seemed a bit odd to me, especially since the Samsung drive is a bit slimmer than a regular drive (I did not install it with a spacer), it would have more room to wiggle around in the tray thing.

 

Hi all.
I've updated my machine to BIOS version A15 and got issues with turbo boost. Processor is stuck at 900MHz and won't move. Noticed in BIOS settings that there is option to save battery and that processor can enter low power state after predefined period of time, eg 30min. After that there is no way I can make it to go over 0.92GHz. Ticks in Performance tab to disable "power save" are grayed out, all I can do is set timer to highest number, that's it. BIOS update went smoothy but after a while I notices that machine is very very slow, finally saw cpu freq. is stuck at 0.89-0.92GHz.
I've installed two files, Chipset_Driver_GJVHD_WN_9.5.15.1730_A02.EXE and M6700A15.exe (BIOS).
Tried to disable C states and cpu freq. is locked at 2.65GHz at High performance mode, at Balance mode it's varying between 0.89 to 2.65GHz. Tried also to disable turbo boost, restart and then re enable it, did not help. Alsto loaded defaults from bios, nothing.
Anybody can help? Don't understand what happened...
Thanks!

EDIT:
It seems after one night it fixed itself. I've turned it off and removed power cable. Now it turbo boosts till 3.5GHz (3740QM). Huh.

 

Sounds like the embedded controller simply needed a good ol' reset from lack of power and all is back to normal.

I'd also make sure you didn't enter into overheat and teh CPU downclocked hard to prevent damage and wouldn't reset until you fully turned it off.

 

Mine a couple of times has been stuck in a low performance state like you mentioned, persisting even after reboot, and I've been able to resolve it just by removing the power cable and then plugging it back in.

 

Hi all

have anyone had tried to run K5000M on dell m6700 with clocks over than 720 mhz on core(gtx 680's standart)
please post here your results, temps, throttling if was, problems etc

Thanks

 

My K5000M has a custom VBIOS that puts its normal max core speed at 750 MHz (a little higher than the GTX 680). I haven't had any issues or throttling (I actually installed the custom VBIOS to avoid a throttling issue), but under load it hits the mid-to-upper 80's in temperature and the fan makes quite a bit of noise.

There was discussion of this in this thread just a few pages back (maybe around November), I posted two different custom VBIOS's.

 

I used to overclock my K4000M to 950 MHz, but can't remember if it throttled before (I don't recall it did in the beginning when I tested it running stable in 3dMark 11, but can't be absolutely sure; IIRC it reached close to 5500 points there in the graphics test from the 3800 points stock). Recently I noticed it did when I removed the FPS limit while testing some game, but that could have also been due to the thermal interface material Dell used becoming hard and dry in the meantime. This I discovered when I was replacing it with 980M so I didn't really try to run the K4000M again with the new thermal paste installed.

There's also one of the enhanced Dell power profiles which allows even higher fan speeds IIRC so that might help keep the temps down. My K4000M had a thermal limit set to 87 degrees C in the unlocked BIOS which seemed low, but could be standard for those Quadro cards, not sure.

 

Your upgrade to the 980M went well I take it? (Sorry if I missed another post about it.) Did you have to do anything special in order for it to work, muck with the drivers or whatever?

 

Yeah, the post is actually on the previous page or here.

Long story short, had to use the X-bracket from the K4000M and add an extra piece of thermal pad for the extra inductor on the 980M (it has three of those compared to two on the Kepler cards).

Regarding the drivers, I just had to add a few lines in the inf file.

Oh, and there's a beep on reset and maybe two beeps on power on (I guess it's reporting an unrecognized card), plus some corrupted graphics screen after the storage devices are listed (non-UEFI boot as I couldn't get the Windows 7 to install and boot on the mSATA SSD in the UEFI mode) and before it shows my DOS-like Windows 7 Boot Menu (I have a dual Windows 7 installation).

There's an unlocked BIOS for the 980M available, but haven't tried it yet, because it requires the drivers to be removed first so haven't bothered with that yet. The card did work at +135 MHz core, but noticed some errors with the memory clock OC at +500 (Nvidia inspector). Afterwards, I lowered it to +400 as some forums mentioned that +250 core and +400 memory is the safe bet and IIRC it worked. Didn't really play with it much since it managed to provide 60 FPS in QHD in DCS World with vsync on. I might toy around with it some more if I increase some graphics settings and my FPS rate dips too much.

 

I changed the bios boot to UFEI by mistake, now the machine can't boot up,
the screen remains black while I pressed the on/off switch. How can I make
it work again ? Thanks in advance.