Graphics Card upgrade for M6800 ?

Ran into a recent thread involving Alienware (Dell) 15/17 rigs with 980M also asking about why PCIe was running at 8x3. Comments suggested this behavior has little effect on GPU performance, that is, may not be the cause of my 980Ms low userbenchmark score.

3DMark Fire Strike test on the 980M scored 8200 which ranks just below a "Gaming PC" rating of about 9300. Anyone run Fire Strike on their Precisions?

 

That sounds about right. I had a 7900 with my 980M: https://www.3dmark.com/fs/18076349

 

I've been working a bit on getting Windows to boot on my m6800 w/ 1070m and started a thread to track progress: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/trials-and-tribulations-installing-a-1070-in-a-m6800.828000/

 

I'm looking to upgrade my M6800 from M6100 to 980m. I already have the "correct" heatsink. I was wondering, if I was to get a 980m that was originally used in another brand of laptop (like MSI, Clevo, etc), would it "just work" (optimus and all) in the M6800 or would I need to try and flash it with an Alienware 980m vbios?

 

Most other brand vBIOS for Maxwell cards work fine in the Precision M6700/M6800. HP is the only one that is consistently trouble. Optimus should work fine as well.
You will have to modify the INF file to get the driver for the 980M to work. (NVIDIA had released some drivers that didn't require this as discussed earlier in this thread, but they "fixed" it in the latest version.)

 

I'm fairly sure I'm about to win a P 5000 auction. I will be relying on this thread a lot at that point

 

where is this rom and where is the nvflash for linux?

 

The ROM is just a page or so before the post that you quoted... nvflash for Linux is easy to Google for...

 

I found the stuff. I'm getting a local pc shop to do the card swap when I get the card. (My neauro muscular situation has woresened since I did the 965m install) I'm hoping I can then use a linux mint usb to finish the process

 

The rom is in the post you just quoted. Click on the "updated vBIOS" which will link you to the post with the vBIOS. Alternatively, it is located below:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/graphics-card-upgrade-for-m6800.806352/page-14#post-10722470

As for nvflash for linux... i'll skip the Google searching steps.

https://www.techpowerup.com/download/nvidia-nvflash/

Click on the "Show more versions" and scroll down. Seems like NVIDIA NVFlash 5.278.0 was the last version for nvflash for linux. I'm not too sure which version I used. I need to have a look when I get home.