Graphics Card upgrade for M6800 ?

a little background is necessary to explain this. i purchased a dell precision 7720 on craigslist for cheap because it had the wx4130 in it. i went on ebay and bought the p3000 from a seller claiming to have pulled it from an hp zbook system. i downloaded the techpowerup bios and put the card in the 7720. i then proceeded to flash it. i had some time last night and had the m6800 just laying around. its a much higher end model than the 7720 so i wanted to see if it would work.


Unfortunately because i am signing it with a trusted root certificate i generated myself, the data cant be validated, but it runs about average if not slightly below average by 1%. overall its a pretty good experience. the name being messed up is because i failed to add the name for the card properly to the inf file. but if you look up that device id you'll see it is in fact the quadro p3000. im currently running bios revision A25 and the vbios is https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/207406/207406.

 

OK. The vBIOS you have there is 08.04.2E.00.0B. That is not a Dell vBIOS (despite what it may say on the techpowerup page), that is actually relative to 08.04.2E.00.0D, the one working vBIOS we have for the Quadro P5000 in the Precision M6700/M6800. (I think that I heard that it is actually from some embedded system, not from a laptop?) Because .0D works with the P5000, It was previously speculated that this .0B P3000 vBIOS would also work, nice that we have confirmation, but not a surprise. Most likely, if you had flashed it with an actual vBIOS from a P3000 card that shipped in the 7720 (08.04.3A.XX.XX), it would not work; you would be getting BSOD at boot.

One could guess that there is also exists a vBIOS for the Quadro P4000 with version number 08.04.2E.00.0C that would work; no one has seen this one though.

 

okay i have a conundrum. the gpu worked with that vbios without a driver mod on the 7720. if thats the case then why does it work there AND on the m6800 with a driver mod. this is why we cant have nice things. people please label vbioses properly. plebs like me rely on yall to supply these things. anyways good to know that i'm an idiot. sorry if i just wasted everyone's time by posting this. i got so excited to have it working that i posted without having a full view of all the issues at hand.

 

Flashing a different vBIOS does not change the hardware device ID. The device ID is the only thing that matters for INF file compatibility. The card works in the 7720 without a mod because the P3000 originally shipped in the 7720 as a supported card, so it is listed in the INF file (still the case no matter which vBIOS you flash on).

Move the card from one system to another and you will see that the device ID reported in Device Manager changes. The "subsystem" part is supplied by the motherboard, not by the card. Whoever uploaded the vBIOS to TechPowerUp probably extracted it while the card was running in a Dell system. It retained the 1028 subsystem ID for "Dell". They didn't purposefully mis-label it, the automated upload/tagger thing just doesn't understand the nuance of how the device IDs work with laptop GPUs.

 

so then, last question and ill let yall get on with more important things. will this cause vbios cause any issues on the card long term? i know you cant know for sure, but i mean in theory could it cause damage? and if not could the card damage the laptop? it is 75watt vs the 100 watt k5100m i had before but who knows? anyways thanks for all the information. i feel much better informed.

 

I don't think that it could damage anything. Worst case, you have system stability issues. I had to ditch my P5000 and go back to M5000M in my M6700, because with the P5000, I was getting BSOD every few days. @DynamiteZerg has had a stable experience with the P5000 in the M6800 so I think you should be OK if everything is working good after a few days.

 

well, i will let yall know in a couple days if the stability of the system comes into question. i play alot of fallout 76, fortnite, minecraft, and kingdom come: deliverance. a couple of those at 1080p will stress the gpu heavily so i'll let you know if it starts to bsod like yours did. it may be that these are valid options for gpu upgrades on precision m6800s. honestly i wish someone else had the hardware to test as well to make sure i'm not crazy. fortunately my system has the nicer samsung vram so that should be nice.

 

I'll bet you will do just fine. With my 1070, I think a large part of the instability I was seeing was related to pushing the power limits of the MB, which eventually led to some VRMs failing. The 1070 was running ~120W whereas the stock GPUs (K3100/K4100/K5100) were limited to about 100W, IIRC. A P3000 is much more conservative.

In retrospect, I wish I would have tried underclocking/power limiting the GPU more.

 

Ok so for information the P4000 is about 50% faster than the P3000 by looking at the graphics firestrike score.
@lewis marx can you overclock or underclock or maybe tune the voltage ? decrease the core frequency of like 100MHz and compare the GPU clock before and after with GPU-Z sensor tab in GPU load
Can you also show the tab in GPU-Z -> Advanced -> Nvidia Bios ?
Thanks you

 

Unfortunately all three overclocking options in afterburner bounce to 0 after changing. If you know of a way to change that I am open to suggestions but for know it is what it is. It's been very stable. More so than I expected after all the horror stories. It would be awesome if I could get even a little overclock top make it run closer to the mobile 1060 it's supposedly based on. Overall I would definitely recommend if you have the lvds motherboard and 1080p or 900p screens.