Graphics Card upgrade for M6800 ?

I believe the heatsink is different for NVIDIA vs AMD cards. Anyway, the NVIDIA heatsink can be found for a few bucks on eBay.

Someone tried the Tesla M6 in the M6800.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/graphics-card-upgrade-for-m6800.806352/page-18#post-10800019
It worked but the HDMI port did not work. A DisplayPort->HDMI adapter did not work either. Tesla is designed for use in servers for compute purposes so external video connections may not be functional.
Otherwise, it is basically the same as a GeForce 980M or Quadro M5000M so it should work in the M6700, with INF mod. It should work (unless maybe if it has a HP vBIOS). GeForce 980M is the best bet, though, performance would be similar for non-professional applications (games, etc.) and it is a drop-in replacement with no INF modification needed.

 

So...

I didn't have any success resolving the ACPI_BIOS_ERROR when booting directly into Win10 yet, but since it worked so well under Linux, I figured I might as well try booting a VM with Win10 and pass the GPU directly through to the VM. Just step around the problem, so to speak.

Configuring VFIO and qemu was surprisingly straight forward. The M6800 supports all the necessary virtualization features, as well as MUXing for the MXM slot.

Installation of Windows was fine, NVidia driver installed failed until I modded .inf file (I just copied all the generic 13D7 lines to 1BA1 in the nv_dispi.inf file.) After that, the driver installed just fine. GPUz sees the card just fine. (Although dumping the bios did cause a BSOD)


I installed and ran the Unigine Valley benchmark:



So far, I think this is promising. Performance looks like it might be within 5-10% of the bare metal benchmarks for a 1070. I'm currently running the VM directly on an external monitor, not sure if it will work on the laptop screen. Streaming from the VM is an option, but there have also been a few people able to make it work by passing both GPUs through to the VM.

 

Finally received my M6800 today.

I'm using the M6800 to flash the "engineering sample" vBIOS onto a P5000, so that I can then use it in my M6700. I purchased a bare-minimum spec M6800 from eBay for this purpose only. (I will be selling it shortly.)

The M6800 did not come with any hard drive or SSD. It does have an optical drive. I burned a Linux Mint "live DVD" and confirmed that I could boot to the desktop. No problem with the Quadro K3100M installed, which is what this system came with.

I disassembled the M6800. My luck, it came with the "wrong" NVIDIA heatsink, with the spacer where the VRMs go. I installed the card anyway. The heatsink would not close "flush" so I don't think that I could completely reassemble the system, it would be poking out and make it difficult to install the palmrest and keyboard. But it seemed flush enough with the actual NVIDIA chip. I don't think that it is "thermally sound" but I figured that it should last long enough to boot and flash the vBIOS. I just plugged in enough stuff to get the system booting, I didn't fully reassemble it.

Linux Mint 19.1 would not boot with the P5000 installed. It made it further than the M6700 did, past the boot menu and the boot logo and even to the text-based login screen, which stays on the screen for just a moment. It seemed to die when it got to initializing the GUI part. I tried a few boot options to boot only to the terminal but was unsuccessful.

I went and downloaded an Ubuntu Server "alternate mode" ISO and burned that to DVD. I was able to boot that to a recovery terminal. I mounted the SD card which had nvflash and the vBIOS on it, and flashed the vBIOS. It reported success on the first attempt. After that, I confirmed that I could boot to Windows setup (no BSOD = success, I suppose).

Now, to disassemble both systems and get the card into my M6700, and see what happens. More to come...

Spoiler

 

Quadro P5000 working fine in the M6700. After the vBIOS flash, I moved it over, and it booted up into my existing Windows install and worked with no hassle. Optimus enabled. I'll make a detailed post about the installation and some benchmarks once I have some time to do some more testing, but things are looking totally good.

@JEAMN, you really should see if you can get a 1070 ES vBIOS from @RMSMajestic, it probably would totally solve the Windows BSOD issue.

 

I don't have any other special sources BTW, I just search TPU database for unverfied uploads given hardware ID. Another GTX 1070 vBIOS (QS card , from a miniPC) should work and I believe I have posted it somewhere.

 

Congratulations.Did you try the P5000 on the M6800 after the vbios update.?

 

It would be super nice if you repost the QS VBios.
Cheers

 

Not beyond checking to see if Windows setup would boot without BSOD, which it did. @DynamiteZerg has already confirmed that P5000 works in the M6800 with this vBIOS. Again, the system has no drives, not really itching to find one and set up a new Windows install when I’m not planning to keep it anyway.

 

Understood.

 

I added some photos/benchmarks/impressions on the M6700 P5000 upgrade in a new thread (it's for the M6700, not M6800 after all).
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/dell-precision-m6700-nvidia-quadro-p5000-gpu-upgrade.827403/