Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Spent an hour disassembling and reassembling the system and now I have two brand new hinges installed. I can tell that my old ones were a bit worn out now, these are much more stiff.
From now on I'm going to try to have some spare hinges on hand in whatever system is my daily driver...

 

ok so i put that AMD Radeon R9 M290x which i only see as HD8970M, but the card shut itself after the GPU runs hot, tried the dell fan mod but it doesn't work, i click on it but it doesn't run, speed fan doesn't detect any of the fans? HWiNFO64 I set both fans on 4900 RPM but it doesn't work, and Dell Fan Utilty is not working too, i disable EC Control same nothing works, trying to play Battlefield 5 and laptop shuts down after 5 minutes while loading the intro. As i have been seen i am in the same boat as some Alienware users who reports the same behaviour, at first i tought it was that thermal pads were not very well over the mosfets, so i took a good amount and cover all of them, thinking it was the issue and put some good thermal paste and yet it shut itself when the gpu stress.

What can i do? Really i am getting tired of this game of GPU and just put that old K4100M and end this stuff and leave as it, still a big step from an old m5100. Even i still don't have audio from speakers going to buy the audio board, as i think the previous owner of the laptop was a bit savage destroying some components of the motherboard which i already replacedd.

 

Well. My display is damaged. It looks like dirt but it is inside, beneath the top layer of the display. I'm not sure if something happened while I was disassembling (screen hinge issue), I tried to be careful, but, there it is.

Spoiler

It's little but it is bothersome to me. This is my third LG panel that was damaged in this manner. The first two, I had replaced under warranty, but my warranty is now long dead. I purchased an AUO panel to install sometime next week (heard good things about them early on, and it looks like they're the only vendor still manufacturing 1080p/LVDS/17.3" panels),;we'll see if it is any better or worse. I've always had bad luck with aftermarket panels (dead pixels and the like).

 

It's just one dot... I would live with it... Actually my M6700 arrived with a pale green dot

 

I'm sort of OCD about this sort of thing

 

I used to be. Life is better without

 

The "damage" appears to be a bit of dust/dirt stuck underneath the LCD layer, in between the LCD and the backlight. No idea how it got there, but it seemed to happen during one of my system disassemblies to get the hinge fixed. I tried sunctioning the area or knocking the panel edge in an attempt to move the dust around (hoping to get it to move outside of the viewable area) without success.

I received and installed a new panel, AUO B173HW02 V1. I checked it carefully and am pleased that it has no dead or stuck pixels, it appears to be never used (despite its 2012 manufacture date) and perfect. There was some residue from tape or something on the right side that I cleaned off easily enough. It is a bit "different" than the LG panel but I got used to it pretty quickly, I'm satisfied even though I think the LG is slightly better. The AUO panel has a bit more backlight bleed on the left and right sides, and I think blacks/very dark images are not presented as well, and I can see a little bit of vertical gridlines if a mostly white image is displayed. It seems to have rather good color and viewing angle (for a TN panel) though.

I'm playing around with the idea of installing a 4K panel, though, since a few other users have gotten it to work with the eDP port and "3D" eDP cable. I obtained one of these cables unintentionally with the back-panel that I purchased to salvage hinges from. Looks like some modding work is necessary to get a standard eDP panel to fit, not sure if I am up for that right now...

 

OCD alert...

After a couple of days of use, I decided to swap panels. AUO is out, LG is back in. The AUO is not terrible, but the LG is clearly superior.

I got rid of the dust/dirt inside by giving it a series of really good thwacks, banging the panel edge with the dust on the corner of a hard surface, in an attempt to get whatever it is to move outside of the visible area of the screen. I was shocked to find that it worked. The dust/dirt is gone (for now).

Before I did that, I ordered a Samsung 120Hz display, the one that originally shipped in this system and in the Alienware 17 R1 as the "3D" display option. (I already have the cable and back panel for it, which I picked up in a package just for the hinges since one of my hinges broke a few weeks ago now.) I'm intrigued to give it a try. It's on the way.

 

I've just scooped up an M6700 so that I can consolidate multiple machines via P2V and run them off of a single laptop. I've have a Samsung Evo 850 and 860 to one side for running VMs off of. The 3740QM should hopefully be ok, I just need to up the RAM to 32GB depending on what it already has in it when it arrives. I've also picked some AS5, not needed any for a while but thought that if I'm giving it a full service and checking the fans, I may as well replace the thermal compound while I'm in there.

My intention is to run Ubuntu off of the main drive with a couple of Win10 VMs, plus a Ubuntu desktop as my daily driver. All should run inside Ubuntu > Gnome Boxes off of the main one. I'm just wondering whether I should pickup a cheap mSata for this as it won't be doing much heavy lifting, just allocating resources to the VMs and maybe passing through the GPU [K5000M] for a bit of light gaming.

Everything will be over Wifi and I've no idea what card it currently has so I may up up looking at options as everything will be done over Wifi and it will need to be realiable and fast. Home router is an Asus AC3200 but I'll use it for bits of work on other peoples Wifi.

The chassis is covered in scratches though. I've had a scout around auction sites and found a few replacements but everything seems to have marks on so unless anyone knows any decent suppliers in the UK, I'm either going to be wrapping it in vinyl [which isn't too appealing as I'm not great at that kind of thing] or covering it in stickers which I also don't want to do.

I've also seen a few threads about replacing the panel with something that does 4k. Innovision and Sharp panels have been mentioned. I'm just wondering how drastic or how easy / hard the mods are to accomodate a 4k panel.

Any advice or suggestions are welcome

 

This is a pretty good machine for doing oddball upgrades.

@TheQuentincc can point you to some information regarding the 4K panel upgrade. It does require a "3D" eDP display cable ("3D" because it was used for the 120 Hz 3D panel that originally shipped in this machine) and some mods to the chassis. And an NVIDIA GPU (no eDP for AMD GPUs in this system).

I have a link in my signature regarding installing an M.2/NGFF Wi-Fi card in case you want to try 802.11ax. I believe that Intel Wi-Fi cards play nicely with Linux.

As for scratches, you should be able to find a new back panel on eBay, possibly with the 3D cable included as well (that's how I got mine just a couple of weeks ago). Search for "4YRK9".