Graphics Card upgrade for M6800 ?

awesome! if i do a clean install to the new mSATA (before GPU & heatsink removal fun).. first i'd still have to remove both 2.5" SSD's, so the BIOS only shows the one boot drive. if i recall, one SSD pops right out (from the side), but the other i'll look at the /support/manuals. maybe i'll get lucky and there will be an unused heatsink in there.

 

You can disable the other drives from the BIOS, no need to remove them. I recommend only having one drive installed/enabled when installing Windows unless all of the drives are totally blank. (Sometimes it will try to put the bootloader on a different drive than your Windows install otherwise.) But in this system, the mSATA drive isn't treated any differently than the other drives, it will work fine for a Windows install / booting.

 

I have a 980M lying around with the Dell X-bracket. It was the card I used in my M6800 before I upgraded it to the P5000. I can sell it to you if you want or I'll be putting it up on fleabay soon. I think I still have the K4100M sitting around somewhere as well... Time to dig them out and sell the lot! Plus a few other bits and pieces.

As for steps of disassembly... well, you can't go wrong by following the servicing manual. It will tell you what you need to remove first before you can, say, reach the GPU card. You will find that it is mostly a one way street when disassembling the M6800. Assembling the M6800 is just the total reverse of the disassembling process.

If you are unsure of what cables, from the LED screen etc, go where later on just take pictures before you start taking them out. You can refer back to the pictures later on when assembling it back together and don't have to worry about getting the wrong antenna cable to the wrong spot etc.

Just be careful with the ribbon cables. The gold fingers at the end can be a bit fragile if not handled properly when trying to connect it back to the motherboard.

 

it's good to know BIOS can disable them. one of the 2.5" already has Win10, so once i install Redstone 1809 version to the mSATA, i can go back and reformat both drives for data. [i know this question doesn't belong here : ]- but before i enable them in BIOS, should i use that Mini-tool partition mgr to reformat? also, is it redundant to put thermal pads on 2.5" ssd?

 

I always use diskpart to wipe drives previously held Windows installs. Disk Management doesn't let you remove the EFI/boot partition.

(as administrator) diskpart.exe
list disk
select disk X (X = ID of the disk that you want to wipe from the list)
list partition
select partition X (X = lowest partition ID in the list)
delete partition override

Repeat last three steps until there are no partitions left, then use Disk Management to set up a new one for data.
This is fine to do from within Windows after you re-enable the disks in the BIOS. You can also do it from a command prompt in the Windows install media recovery tools. It would probably be "cleanest" to do this from the install media BEFORE you start your new Windows install, just to be extra sure you don't accidentally wipe the new install that you just set up.

I'm sure there's a faster way to do this, I think there is a command to wipe the disk without having to loop through each partition.

You don't need thermal pads on a SATA SSD. It's not going to be pushing throttling temperatures like an NVMe disk would.

 

I am interested in the 980M.. i have enough msgs to PM you, so i will do that later. thx DZ for this info and tip about pictures, it is most helpful.

 

My setup (Linux running as VM host for a Win10 guest with PCI passthrough of the 1070) was working pretty well. I finally got a chance to run some games through it and had some pretty good results. I haven't tuned the VM much but got results pretty similar to most of the benchmarks that I see for the mobile 1070. (Eg, Witcher 3: 60FPS on Ultra settings). I do get some CPU stuttering in some games, and other games, like AC: Origins are playable, but not as smooth. (About the same FPS as my 980M. The CPU bottlenecks pretty badly in the VM for some games. I get ~40FPS on benchmark with ultra settings, but the GPU is only running at 60% or so.) Pinning and isolating CPUs will probably help a ton.

It even worked alright on battery. The guest VM doesn't know it's running on battery, so it won't utilize any power management settings. The host doesn't see the GPU, but it does throttle the CPU down. This essentially bottlenecked the GPU into very low utilization so it used very little power anyway. I left Witcher 3 running for about an hour, and it basically drained the battery; about the same as my 980M, albeit at higher settings.

But...

I decided to try flashing some different vBIOSes for the 1070 to see if I could get it to run natively in Win10. I flashed several different MSI bioses from TPU without any different results, so I expanded a bit. There are several different bios sizes (typically BIOS only, BIOS + UEFI, BIOS + UEFI + Expansion ROM, based on the results from the rom-parser here: https://github.com/awilliam/rom-parser) . My working BIOS was the latter.

I tried flashing a legacy only BIOS and that broke Linux as well as Win10. It started hanging as soon as the GUI started to load. Booting into recovery did the same. The boot hung as soon as it started making ACPI calls. I panicked a little but managed to get it to boot into a text console by completely disabling ACPI, and was able to reflash a working vBIOS.

I probably should have quit there. Instead, I thought "That's the worst that could happen and now I know how to fix it".

Well, the actual worst that could happen is this: I ran that ES P5000 vBIOS through that rom-parser and saw that it was BIOS+UEFI only, no expansion ROM. So I tracked down a 1070 vBIOS that was the same and flashed that, rebooted, get the Dell logo, can get into BIOS settings, but anything after that is just a black screen. Can't run diagnostics, can't see GRUB, can't see output for HDMI or DisplayPort. As far as I can tell, the system isn't even booting. I tried a bit to see if I could boot FreeDOS and throw a 'beep' in the autoexec.bat, just to see if it would boot, but I don't think it's even getting that far.

So at this point, I think I need to flash it with a programmer to fix it. I've already got a CH341A that I've used to flash coreboot and few other things in the past, but need to get a 1.8v adapter to work with pascal card.

(I did reinstall the 980M without a hitch)

 

Pretty sure these systems have a 100W physical cap on power that can be drawn from the battery. So, even if the OS can't tell that the system is on battery power, you will likely suffer GPU power throttling if you try to load both the CPU and GPU while on battery power. Since the battery is 97Wh then it would drain in an hour under a close-to-100W load.

Got some VM experts at work who have told me that it can be tough to get a multi-core system running a near max capacity in a VM. At least in VMware/ESXi land, it needs to be able to get a lock on all of the allocated cores simultaneously before execution can proceed on the guest, so the more cores that you allocate to the guest, the trickier it is to work in the scheduling along with the host background CPU activity. In some cases adding more cores to the guest can actually make it slower if you are pushing the max capacity of the host. All this to say: not surprised that you are having trouble fully saturating the CPU from inside the guest OS (but I imagine that you can get it pretty close with tweaking).

Sad news on the vBIOS. It sounds like your state is similar to how my M6700 was when I first tried the P5000 with the vBIOS that it came with. I could get into BIOS screens but couldn't proceed to boot anything, no matter what I tried. (I could get the onboard diagnostics to run though and amusingly it gave the GPU a pass.) At this point, not regretting my decision to shell out a little extra for the P5000, just because it has a known-working vBIOS (a bit of a lucky break there). Good luck, hope the flash programmer can rescue it...

Long shot but if you haven't tried it, go to boot settings in the BIOS, disable secure boot if you have that turned on, and enable "legacy option ROMs". I had custom/overclocked K5000M vBIOS I used a while back that wouldn't boot properly if that was not set.

 

that's why i thought it be safer to use a Partition mgr GUI i'm familiar with - never used Diskpart. though from what i see now, the new MiniTool program only allows that in the Pro version. regarding the "install media", that would be available on the USB boot? meaning before i do a clean install, it will allow the other drives to be wiped clean?

 

Yes. You can boot the Windows install media, and then select "Repair your computer" instead of "Install Windows", and somewhere in there is the option to get to a command prompt from which you can run diskpart. (You don't have to have an existing Windows install to "repair" in order to get to the command prompt.)

You'll want to make sure that the system is running in AHCI mode instead of RAID mode, otherwise, you won't be able to see the drives from the install media (until you load the Intel Rapid Storage driver).