Experience with 680m on M6700, some useful info for the upgraders.

Heatsink is laptop specified so only the manufacturer has the parts. After some times they might be able to be found in after market like ebay. I got my heatsink from Dell too. It should be available world wide, although all parts are actually come from China (i think) and it takes a few weeks for delivery.

It depends greatly on the sales rep. If you are unlucky to meet a nut, then he/she probably won't even know what you are asking for; or pass over to other departments back and forth until the line drops off; or yes yes we will email you the quotation and then missing in action. I am real lucky to get the correct person at first trial and got the things i want.

I was not so lucky after that when i try to buy the 3G card DW5560 for M6700. All scenarios mentioned above i have gone through, and finally i gave up and bought from ebay. It is not so laptop specified so it is easy to find.

 

Is the x bracket the same? recommended bios version?

 

which x-bracket you mean? if original from nvidia k3000m/k4000m to gtx680m it is the same.
It is very hard to remove the ogininal x-bracket from the card without damaging the tiny chips around, at least i have tried but gave up on my AMD M6000. I don't want to risk damaging the card.

x-bracket from off-market is not compatible with Dell's heatsink original screws.

 

If you are looking to upgrade from a quadro gpu to a 680/780m make sure you use the x bracket from the quadro card. You can easily remove it if you apply some heat. Also you can reuse the heatsink even id the one for the k300/k4000m has different code from the one for the k5000m phisically they are the same. Id you come from an AMD card you can do a direct swap to a 7970m/8970m and if you want to go to a nvidia card you will need both the heatsink and xbracket. If you purchase your card from clevo do not use under no circumstance the xbracket that comes with the GPU because the screw holes are much taller and will result in the GPU die not making proper contact both the heat sink. Plus I think the screw also are different than the ones that are on the heat sink.

 

Well I don't mean to sound highfalutin, but I wouldn't call a change from a Quadro, especially not a 4000/5000 an "upgrade".

 

Going from a k4000m or k5000m you won't see much of a difference. But it's a different story from a k3000m. A 780m would also be an interesting thing. That would get you a 40% gaming performance bump from a k5000m

 

True, but you're talking apples and oranges. Like comparing a Corvette to an F-150: A Corvette is much faster but it can't tow a 1/2 ton of cargo. How well does your 780m perform in 3d applications?

 

i just finished my 680m swap. I scored an extra 400 points on pcmark from my k3000m.

one thing i noticed is that no one talks about the driver install. you need to make sure you get a custom inf file and replace the one that comes from nvidia, and you can use the drivers off the nvidia.com.

 

Why can't you do that normally? The drivers check both the OEM ID and the GPU ID?

 

I ran the nvidia check on the site, and it said i needed to get the drivers from the hardware manufacturer. GPUZ shows my card as a dell. Custom INF included my hardware ID, and the regular driver installed just fine after that.