Graphics Card upgrade for M6800 ?

Hello everyone,

I've recently bought and M6800 with an Firepro M6100.
I would like to change it to a Nvidia or even AMD one, but more recent and with a bit more power.

If i go the Nvidia route what cards do you recomend?
I know i probably will have to buy the x-bracket and the nvidia cooler also.

Thanks

 

GeForce 980M is probably the best card that you can get that is easy to install. You'll need to get a heatsink that doesn't have the spacer at the "top" end of the card... The flat one. (Look on eBay at the two different types of NVIDIA heatsinks available for this system and hopefully that will make sense.) With the latest drivers, an INF modification is not needed to install the GeForce 980M... It's a total ready-to-go drop-in replacement.

The only better options are the GeForce 1070 or Quadro P5000, which have specs/performance in the same ballpark. Unfortunately, we don't quite have the GeForce 1070 working (vBIOS issues cause BSOD if you use it under Windows, but it does work with Linux). Quadro P5000 works if you flash a different vBIOS on it but that card is expensive, you'll have to trawl eBay and use the "make an offer" option and hope you can find a seller who will let it go for cheap. Both cards will only work with Optimus enabled if you have a LVDS display. Both cards require INF modification to load the driver.

I think you're going to need to pick up another system/motherboard and see if it has the same issue. If you're lucky, the new motherboard will accept the card and you'll be good. If it has the same problem, then, don't know what to tell you other than your P5000 appears to be bad...

 

Thanks @Aaron44126.
Really good insight on the upgrade. I will search for the heatsking and the 980m.
Not in a hurry so i can get a good deal.

 

While waiting for a 1.8v adapter for my programmer in order to flash my 1070 back into working order, I reverted back to my 980m. I've been trying to pass it through to my Win10 VM like I did with the 1070. I thought it would be interesting to compare VM performance between the 980m and 1070 as well.

But I've been completely unable to get it to pass through. The VM boots fine, but the driver fails to load with Code 43. That's a fairly common issue for people using VMs with Geforce cards and it usually boils down to 2 issues: 1) Tainted bios when starting the VM or 2) The drivers detect a VM and fail to load.

For #2, Nvidia is very aware of people using GeForce cards in VMs and wants people to purchase Tesla or Quadro cards instead, so the drivers actually have a check that tries to detect the hypervisor and fail the driver if it does. Qemu/KVM has some flags to disguise this and they worked fine with my 1070 but seem to fail for the 980m. So I'm left with #1.

It turns out that you can explicitly pass a vBIOS to use to initialize the GPU when you start up the VM. I wish I would have learned that earlier. I haven't found a vBIOS that works for the 980m in the VM yet, but this seems like a nifty and fairly low risk way to proofing out vBIOSes.

 

Try the driver before 372

 

Also, some (non satisfying) results with P5200 and GTX 1070
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-quadro-p5200m-and-gtx-1070m-on-m6700.827595/

 

Planning the 980M upgrade for my 6800. Have located a 980M card with vbios 84.04.22.00.12. Google says this is a Clevo vbios. Would this likely plug & play in 6800, without INF mod?

 

Got my 1.8V adapter for my programmer and got my 1070 flashed back into working order.

It actually was a bit of a pain at first. I have a T420 that I was using to flash. Under Linux, 'flashrom' wasn't recognizing the bios chip (Winbond 25Q40EW) so it wouldn't flash; I had to do it from Windows after tracking down some sketchy drivers and programmer app. Even then, I was getting corrupted results until I figured out that I needed to clear the whole eeprom before writing to it. At that point, everything was working smoothly. All was good for Linux and the VM. Back to a ACP_BIOS_ERROR for Windows.

So naturally the next step was to flash that p5000v3 quadro vbios to the chip and see what happens. . Having the hardware programmer is kind of like having a free pass

Surprisingly, I was able to boot into Windows just fine. I was able to mod the Geforce driver inf file and the driver installed just fine. Rebooted and.....the driver fails to load with a code 43. I suspect the mismatch between the vbios and the hardward ids was the root problem, but maybe my driver mod was in error? Has anybody gotten a Code 43 for a bad inf mod?

Rebooted into Linux and had similar issues. The nvidia xserver and driver/kernel modules seemed to load ok (which is promising), but the nvidia cli tools (nvflash, nvidia-smi, etc) wouldn't recognize the card anymore.

Along with a rom-parser, there is a rom fixer here: (https://github.com/awilliam/rom-parser) that lets you modified the vendor/device it in the rom. I might give that a shot on the p5000v3 bios and see if helps any.

 

TPU says it's a 10DE 13D7 so you probably won't need to mod the driver. (The recent drivers have a generic entry for all 13D7 cards).

 

Well, you are getting somewhere!