Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Is the 980M a Dell branded card ? the vbios is Dell/alienware one ? might also be a G-sync card

 

Not sure, it's blue and has this vbios:

https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/178533/178533

also had a screenshot of the gpuz screen in previous post.

My guess is alienware/dell. It has all the similar stickers/placement on it as an old alienware 860m I have lying around. It works fine in the games I've tested so far w some hiccups in the borderlands 1 enhanced version(choppy 60fps+) but borderlands 2 goty original version works fine, so does fallout 4 goty. Optimus not too bad I guess it seems to work fine but I hate that I have way less resolution options in games bc of it, like only 1080p or way down to 1280 stuff. On this 900p, 1368 etc isn't that much of a difference and I turn on the aa etc but now I don't have those options. So I could live w it but just weird I can't turn off optimus and load the mod inf. w 053F1.

 

As a followup if anyone else has this problem in the future I think I found the answer here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/alienware-17-gtx-980m-optimus-issues-questions.773107/

Second post down. If I'm understanding it correctly it looks like when running win7 in legacy mode it's not possible to just use the discrete gpu. Bummer. Almost positive this is an alienware card.

 

Not sure how to fix your problem, but for limited resolutions in games, I can give you a fix. Run the Intel custom resolutions tool (C:\Windows\System32\CustomModeApp.exe) and add any resolution that you want to the list. They should also show up as options in game settings. I have to use this to get 720p or 768p to show available. I prefer to run the M5000M with Optimus on because I get some strange behaviors and stability issues when just running desktop apps from time to time if I am running with the dGPU only.

 

Hm had no idea that was there, I'll give it a try as that's really the main complaint I have about optimus. Otherwise seems to work fine in the majority of games and practical daily use, passmark now detects 3 gpu's now though, duplicate hd4000's and the 980m, not a big deal but it does gimp the card rating by a couple thousand points when I run it but firestrike is normal so who cares I guess. From what I understand if I went with win10 this stuff would go away but not wanting to do that currently. I'll try this out and report back thanks

 

As a followup it seems to work for the most part I still get a lot of bugginess using an external monitor with certain games, and most don't have a setting to choose which screen to output to which is a pain. Whichever screen I'm not using while gaming usually freezes up, optimus not the best. I'm using the latest drivers for both nvidia and the hd4000. I use the vga cable instead of hdmi bc back to back the darks using the hdmi on my external ips 1080 screen are washed out. Some games if I don't choose full screen it locks me to like 800x600 lol I think that's FO4. Nier is a pain but that's most likely the broken game.

 

Go the the Nvidia or the Intel HD control panel and change the HDMI output range to full instead of limited, thats what is killing the colours over HDMI, still dumb that it always defaults to limited range..

 

Hey I keep getting driver stopped responding messages and recovered, I already have it set to max performance and utilize high power gpu, I also did the registry change by adding a key to the graphics driver key. I'm utilizing optimus bc I have to no choice. The specific case is playing dying light ee w 436.48 win7 drivers modded inf for 980m, went back to them from 441 to see if it helps. I want to play on my external 22" monitor using vga, the game has no option to pick which display to output to so I set it to windowed and drag it over then set it back to full screen every time. 1600x900 no aa, high/med settings 60fps vsync. Played it for hours at a time but other times it just crashes and crashes. Would closing the lid so only ext monitor help? Any tips? Only thing I notice is that if another program has a popup or updates the laptop screen in any way it seems to crash then, so guessing optimus issue on the fly? Also I only have a few settings in nvidia control panel, not all of them this is true of all two of the modded inf drivers I use for the 980m so far.

 

Followup to above, I guess it is an optimus switching problem if the native screen has some popup or something. It's good once I get the game going and then tab it out to do something else for a bit. Usually just drag it over and now do a couple of things in the game menus to just get it up to speed rather than right back into the game, it stutters a bit at first but is good, did get another driver crash once so still not perfect guess just live w it, wish I could just disable optimus but not possible. Still odd that I don't have the full options in nvidia control panel, don't think I missed anything in the .inf file though.

 

Because no monitor is connected to the Nvidia outputs, both the internal and the VGA are being routed via the iGPU, does it change if you use the HDMI connector, or maybe displayport(if your laptop has one) to HDMI.