Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

I went ahead and bought a board a couple hours ago that has a 30 day warranty so fingers crossed the cpu and the gpu aren't fried. The board shorts the adapter without anything installed so who knows what went up.

 

Good that you found one. How much did you pay for it?

My non-working M6700 came with a faulty board but I was able to save all of the components. Hopefully you can do the same, just attempt to boot with the bare minimum (CPU and a stick of RAM, no boot drive, other RAM, dedicated GPU, etc). If you have an external monitor with VGA and/or a USB keyboard then attempt to do so without the display and keyboard.

 

Spent $103 on the board and even better news the cpu and ram survived as I tested them in a spare W520.

 

Well I got so lucky and picked up a "tested" Quadro M4000M on eBay for $80. It was supposedly a Dell card and came with an identical x bracket to my K5000M. I ran into a problem with the card, though. Besides not being recognized as an M4000M the card has lines and seems to only have 3 or so gigs of VRAM, not the rated 4. Additionally, I can't seem to use the touchpad or trackpoint for navigation, granted this could be due to other issues. Does anyone have any ideas? Could it be mounting pressure or improper mounts, or a dirty connector, or just the wrong VBIOS?

 

Never had any such trouble with the Quadro M5000M (I've actually had two different M5000M's installed). Now it's normal for you to have to jump through some hoops to install the driver (INF mod required) but otherwise it should not have any strange behaviors, especially regarding touchpad/trackpoint control. Either you broke something when doing the card swap, or something is off with this card...

 

I was able to get the driver to install with the .inf mod but it still has horizontal line artifacts in both the BIOS and Windows. I tried swapping out thermal pads as the card was bending just slightly but doing so yielded no difference. I even turned the GPU heatsink screws back a quarter turn or so to see if mounting pressure was at play but same results. Seems like the GPU is just dead...

 

Lines on screen usually means GPU is about to die.

Return it as soon as possible and buy this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/203289900092

I'm using this one in my Precision and it's working like a charm.

 

Yeah, seems like it has to be a hardware problem if the problem exists outside of Windows. Have you confirmed that there is no issue if you swap your original card back in?

 

Usually on laptop, the GPU is the first culprit, I believe your gpu mosfet is shorted.

 

Old card still works fine, but I did get some major artifacting after a longer session. I think it might have been due to me reinstalling graphics drivers and not restarting my computer prior to this onslaught. I changed out the old thermal pads with equivalent blue pads but I doubt that it was due to a contact issue with the VRAM chips. I ran Cities:Skylines which maxes out my VRAM usage for 10 mins and got no issues. Regardless, I am probably going to look for a replacement card elsewhere.

Has anyone had any problems when buying cards from China/HK? I originally chose my cards because it was a US seller and they would *most likely* have less shipping problems than overseas.