Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

M4600/M6600 do not have a driver for the Wi-Fi switch. These systems predate Windows 8, which is when the requirement to have the physical switch use the OS to control "airplane mode" was introduced. So in these systems, the BIOS handles killing wireless connectivity and the OS is oblivious. (I think there's even settings in the BIOS for which functions should be controlled by the wireless switch.) The M6700 actually behaves the same as the M6600 for BIOS versions prior to A06.

Anyway, modifying the wireless switch driver isn't going to help you here either. All the driver does is communicate to Windows that the physical "airplane mode" switch has been activated, and then Windows itself handles shutting down Wi-Fi and Bluetooth accordingly.

 

I see what you were saying about the BIOS of the M4600...I do indeed have my switch preferences tweaked and it's reflected in the OS. But that is triggered by a software thing. I mean the command is sent by the BIOS to specific devices, but the implementation is software-based (if not by Dell then by Windows SDK). Seems like the switch driver is meant to emulate that, as it triggers an airplane mode state where you can't turn WiFi or Bluetooth back on without toggling the switch. I think that there must be some way to harness either, just I wouldn't know where else to check. Maybe looking at Event Viewer when triggering the switch...?

 

Regarding throwing a Tesla M6 in here, will it only work with a specific screen?

I'm currently running a 3740QM/K4000M w/ a 1080p TN panel (Which if memory serves is LVDS?) So from what I've heard it wont work??

I'm thinking of my options to get a little more oomph from this system. At the moment the GTX 980M/970M and M5000M are all basically the same price ($225-250 CAD) while the M4000M is around $100 and the Tesla M6 is $120.

So M4000M is the best bet from a cost performance perspective (and not losing external display), I'm just losing out on 4GB of ram vs the M5000M. Might just wait to see the M5000M go on sale.

Thoughts?

 

Tesla M6 will almost fully work in M6800 but can have card-specific issues in M6700. You can use any screen with the M6 but have to use Optimus (both the integrated and dedicated graphics). This is due to the M6 lacking any video outputs, instead opting for the PCIe bus. The card was originally meant to be used as a Blade server accelerator card with other acceleration uses but could be used via this method to drive 3D workloads. Also, some significant vBIOS and/or driver modding will be necessary to get the cards to work in Windows 10 and with the standard BIOS of the M6700. I would highly recommend reading back in the thread for recent upgrades or look at one of the original posts about M6 in M6600-M6800.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ted-switchable-graphics.835018/#post-11068201

I think it's far more practical to just go with a Quadro M4000M or M5000M or the 970/980m equivalent. They work out of the box and retain many features the previous cards did. Also, nearly all Pascal generation cards (10 series cards) will have some issues in M6700, the most major of which includes lack of LVDS (so you can't use LVDS laptop screens) and VGA. If you aren't hitting a VRAM bottleneck or know you won't be in constant need of >4 GB or VRAM, then going with the M4000M just makes sense. I have been dealing with this 4 vs 8 GB dilemma for many months now, but a simple solution is to just choose the reasonably priced option based on availability or maybe even on geography. Cards from China or Lithuania could be more costly to refund or sort out shipping problems, especially nowadays. I've seen U.S sellers on Ebay with $150 M4000Ms that may be a better buy than the $100 Chinese card I have been eyeing, all other factors being the same.

 

Thanks for this. I've decided I want to keep my video output and go with the M4000M since it is less than half of the price of the M500M. This will be the second GPU swap I've done on this laptop, so shouldn't be too bad.

I read earlier that people were using Liquid Metal for direct die cooling between the heatsinks and CPU/GPU. How has that been holding up? I've done it on a few systems (PS4 Pro, 4790k delidded). If the heatsinks really are copper I guess there should be no issues besides staining. I'd just hate to find out its an alloy and have the heatsink get eaten up.

 

All said and done go with the cheapest of those, 970m=m4000m, 980m=m5000m but the quadros are usually way higher, usually not always. Best to me is the 980m but they are harder to find, wouldn't trust a directly from china card, seems like QC would be way lower than when they were produced for alienware/hp etc so a used original one would be safest. But anything that was originally in a major brand laptop would be better QC but older of course than what they are currently pumping out in some random chinese factory.

 

I ended up getting an M4000M from eBay seller See-IC which ships out of Hong Kong. The USA part sellers charge ridiculous shipping costs to Canada (or just refuse to ship to Canada outright), so I'll take my chances with this. The K4000M I got out of china has run fine on a 30% overclock for 3 years without issue.

What size thermal pads come stock on these cards? I have the existing ones but I will probably swap out for some Thermalright Odysseys. Just need to know what size to use.

 

The M4000M would be a drop-in replacement for the K4000M, in terms of the thermal pads required, so you should be able to carry over the pads from your old card (or use same-sized ones). The Maxwell cards do have one extra VRM on the board compared to the Kepler cards so make sure that it gets covered by a pad.

 

Yeah I went from a k4000m ultra OC'd to a 970m to a 980m that was actually cheaper than the 970m. I just reused all the pads I had and covered any extra ones with some other pads of the same thickness I had from another build.

 

How big were your gains from k4000M OCd to 970M? I'm interested to see how much headroom my M4000M will have. Really just looking for more performance in a few games (I'm playing Monster hunter World in 720p 60fps on the K4000M.