Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Thank you it worked... But somehow wushowhide isn't working properly... can't hide to avoid the annoying Windows update for future auto updates, before i could just hide or unhide, perhaps i might do in weeks a clean installation of Windows again to see if it works-

 

If you meant about Windows reverting driver to 2015 version, I could stop for it doing that with this.

 

Seems by default it won't look for any updates so i am ok for now i guess... Damn i didn't notice how the prices of these machines were going up... I just get mine in working condition on $100 with 8 GB ram and nothing more so i got the rest buying or adding from my old m4600.

I guess this is one of the cheapest "gaming" laptop out there, considering it still capable of running modern games and having more than 5 years old of hardware and easy maintenance only drawback would be it can't accept Pascal or beyond and well the annoying stuff for driver support. Meanwhile i have a desktop with a Firepro v3900 and have to get an old Firepro s7000 just to do the basic stuff. Was planning getting at least a cheapo RX but prices are far from my budget and funny part is that GTX 980M still cheaper than basic destktop GTX lol

Was thinking getting one GTX 980M but i guess the upgrade wouldn't be that much from my current GTX 970M

 

Yeah, now $100 is just the motherboard, lol. Mine has a corrupted bios for no reason and now I'm thinking if I'm actually going to buy a replacement. It's an awesome computer and stuff, but if this happened one time, it could happen again and there it goes $100 again.

GTX 980M is about 25 to 30% performance increase in comparison with 970M. It's a good difference, but if you are actually going to do an upgrade, Quadro P4000 would be a lot better and also cheaper ($200). You just need to find a way to flash EC vbios in it, since it's needed for boot anything.

But I think GTX 970M is a really good pair with this machine. It's not that expensive, it can play some games dropping some settings to low/med and it runs considerably cool. 6 GB of VRAM will be enough for years to come... not many years, though, but until there, you'll probably have money for something a lot better.

Yeah, lol. And I really appreciate people have no idea that laptops are actually a good way to enter in PC gaming in this cryptopocalipse. Let's hope it stays like that.

 

Wish Dell could give the necesary stuff to override the BIOS but i guess it won't happen, shame but i guess it would hold a couple of years more but i guess parts would be more harder to get in case of something going bad... i wish i could got the GTX 980M but when i bought the GTX 970M prices were around $300 meanwhile i got the GTX 970M by just $170 and just by around 30% wasn't very wise purchase, now i see that they are cheap even $200 or less but well i will hold mine till it dies.

But i guess it would be hard to get a worthy successor, most of the new ones are soldered stuff and mainly with 4GB of VRAM instead 6GB or more, and the good ones are very expensive lol, enough now that i am crying over GPUS that 3 months ago were cheap and now are with inflated prices smh

 

The only way to get a new laptop without soldered CPU are the ones with desktop CPUs. Having a desktop CPU seems to be a nice idea performance wise, but they are a lot power hungry than laptop ones, which means less battery life, probably destroying the whole purpose to have a laptop in first place. At least for me.

This also makes laptops with this upgradeability a lot more expensive than they should be.

I mean... sometimes I do the same mistake of looking for prices of stuff that I bought a while ago and I feel the same, lol. My mom bought a Pixel 3 for $599 a couple years ago and I was looking for prices for used models today... as cheap as $90. Yeah, she's using the phone for 2 years now, but it's a massive drop, it's almost impossible to don't think something like "couldn't I have waited a little longer?".

At the same time, it's a big relief if you got something before the pandemic, like my E6430 for $69 and Thinkpad T440p for $75. They got older, but they cost a lot more now. You win some and lose some, I guess.

 

Yeah that's true... I guess people is understanding the capabilities of the old Precision line and are just making getting them harder to get and making them expensive, not even to mention that m6800 are getting on the $600 prices while a year ago they were on $300.

But I guess m6800 over m6700 is not a big upgrade may be 10%

 

P4000 required a bios flash to work on M6700 interesting I have a usb flasher I used for a project ages ago, might give that a whirl with my LVDS M6700 thanks for the advice or I might just wait and sell it to buy something a bit newer.

 

Yea your best bet nowadays (*cough* since 2016) is to get an aftermarket GTX 900 series card, preferably a 970m or 980m (or the Quadro M4000M and M5000M for comparison). You could get away with M3000M but would be limited compared to the very equally priced M4000M/970m. I've seen them frequently in the U.S. for between $100-200, with the 980m's and M5000M's usually around $200-300. If you have a unit with a K5000M, you can overclock with a vBIOS (power limit only on M6700) or MSI Afterburner (with an extreme software limit on OC's). My K5000M essentially performs like a very good 1050 mobile 4GB or a decent desktop 1050. For comparison, without OC, the M5000M essentially performs the same as a 1650 but with 8GB of VRAM. This is extremely important, especially since I am already hitting VRAM limits in some titles @ a very high +660 MHz OC on my memory (2160 MHz effective). That would be the main selling point above the M4000M. If you won't need the VRAM, the M4000M is often half the price.

 

On another note, I would like to bring up an old question I have had for a while now but rarely seen on any forums. I am still unable to find any way to get the Bluetooth radio to not turn off with the wireless switch of the M6700 or M6800. I just want to satisfyingly turn off the WiFi without having to fiddle with the bluetooth settings. I've considered a) attempting to incorporate the M4600/6600 switch into the OS and b) hacking the driver to not disable bluetooth. However, I can't find a wireless switch driver on my M4600 (although this could be due to undisclosed .dlls or blindness on my part) and the current driver seems locked down by Dell, with little option to change anything regarding .dll's. If anyone has any ideas or a solution to this problem please reply to the post.