Graphics Card upgrade for M6800 ?

I think there is a decent chance that macOS will boot without much hassle (like Linux does)... Or without much more hassle than you would normally have to go through to get it booting, anyway... Without the need for a vBIOS flash. Will be interested to hear about it.

 

No. 980M draws around 100W. P5000 and 1070 both draw more than 100W and seem to run into a power limit in the system. (P5000 in my M6700 reports occasional power throttling in GPU-Z, and also if you run it under high load, it caps the CPU speed... This didn't happen with the M5000M, which ran at max speed with no throttling and didn't interfere with the CPU speed. @JEAMN reported similar behavior with the 1070 in the M6800.)

 

I referenced a lot of the hackintosh/clover material when I was troubleshooting my 1070 setup. The biggest hurdle was that the system BIOS wasn't properly creating a required ACPI table (the FACS table). Clover didn't have a means of creating this table either, so trying to boot Windows from Clover would fail for the same reason. If that missing table doesn't trip up OSX, I'd bet it would work just fine (just like Linux).

Clover also supplies a number of kernel extensions to OSX to get it to boot and run correctly. It can't do that for Windows, which is why I basically resorted to writing my own hacks into memory before the OS gets a chance to boot.

 

Thanks again for the info, you've been very helpful. Based on this I think I will stick with my original 980m plan.

If you had a choice between an MSI 980m (pulled from a Dominator GT72 2QE) and a supposedly Dell 980m (not sure from what machine) for 20% more, which would you go with?

 

I don't know of any Dell machines that shipped with 980M other than the Allienware systems, and weren't they using soldered GPUs by that point? (Not sure.) Maybe they had it in an Inspiron Gaming laptop, but I don't think those use MXM either. Anyway. I think that MSI would be fine. Worst case, I think, you'll need to flash the vBIOS to something that the Precision will be more happy with, but I doubt that this will be necessary. (Usually, only HP vBIOS are giving us issues.)

Make sure that you have Optimus enabled before you install the new card, in case there are issues with the vBIOS, it should allow you to still use the system to check it out. If you get the driver loaded and card working then you can switch to Optimus disabled if you like. (You'll probably have to install the driver again after the switch.)

 

I'd go with the cheaper option. Brand has never seemed an issue unless it was hp sourced

 

MSI on the way! I'll report back with results. I'm running a dual boot Fedora linux and Windows 10 system.

 

You should be delighted. The experience should be just like my 965m....that took a half hour to get going including install and driver...... real world results will be very very good....I get like 80 fps in second life with ultra graphics settings......I rather envy you that initial delight you'll feel

 

I might need to get some thermal pads, my "correct" nvidia heatsink didn't come with any and I'm having trouble finding my "modded" nvidia heatsink w/ pads. What mm thickness do I need?

 

I'd be interested in this too as I'd like to have new pads put it in in my upcoming switch