Graphics Card upgrade for M6800 ?

used market is where you find good deal

 

That's in Europe tho, I'm in the US.

 

If you are in US, just get this card : https://www.ebay.com/itm/334072401097
or this one : https://www.ebay.com/itm/303979203995
You need to flash a special vbios (somewhere on this forum, didn't remember where) using a CH341A + 1.8v adaptater on the card before and it will run on your M6800.
I had a P4000 in my M6700 and it was running great, about 65W in game for 980M+++ performance.
Only downside is that you can't drive LVDS/VGA display using the card -> you need optimus. With eDP/HDMI/DP display there is no issue disabling optimus.

I wish we could have these type of price in EU...

 

Use the "make an offer" feature on eBay. You can often get a better deal than the listed price... sometimes by a considerable margin. I've gotten GPU cards at 60% of the listed price before. (Nothing to lose if they turn you down...)

 

I would if they had one.

 

A P4000 is only about 14% faster than a 980M in games, requires a bios that exists somewhere, and costs $40 more and has no way to display out of the video ports available on the laptop. I think I'll stick to the 980M, its more than fast enough for 1080p 60fps on the games I'll be playing on it and I'll be able to use it in the living room to put movies or stream anime up on the TV.

 

P4000 can totally display out of the laptop video ports. It's Tesla that can't. @TheQuentincc can get you the vBIOS, he used this card in his own M6700...

That said I'd stick with Maxwell myself, flexibility to turn Optimus off is nice to have. Too bad prices don't make any sense. I was just looking and I see that K5000M and M5000M are going for similar prices which is nuts.

 

Indeed the P4000 is about 15% faster in game on the higher settings, but it also does support more functionnality, it enable your laptop to run a lot cooler (70w at most in game while a 980M could eat up to 120w) and the failure rate is much much lower (for instance I never saw a dead P4000 while I have several dead 980M).

For sure the P4000 memory bandwidth hold it back so you have to push the settings up. But you can see that on very intense game, the P4000 is faster than any 980M : https://www.notebookcheck.net/GeForce-GTX-980M-vs-Quadro-P4000_5964_7666.247598.0.html
The P4000 can match the 1060 6GB mobile performance on high end title : https://www.notebookcheck.net/GeForce-GTX-1060-Mobile-vs-Quadro-P4000_7362_7666.247598.0.html

Sadly I can't find good reference review website that compare the P4000 vs the 980M or the GTX1060 in modern title... GPUboss, userbenchmark and so on aren't good reference.
You might need to ask people that own them what performance they get on newer title, I never had a 980M side to side to compare with my P4000 (that I sold 6 month ago).

But 230$ with open offer, that mean you could get it at 200$ or below is a great deal for such a card, the only downside is no VGA or LVDS output so Optimus need to be enabled OR if your screen is an eDP, you could do like me with my M6700, say "f*** VGA output" and run the P4000 with optimus disabled and get the best experience out of it.

 

So, I have access to a GTX 970M at work that I want to try and get working on my laptop just to get a better idea of how the process of making it compatible is. I'm pretty sure that it'll be the same steps for a GTX 980M since they're both Maxwell cards. Currently, I can get into windows and everything is displaying but the card won't take the latest drivers from Nvidia, which is expected. My laptop has the latest Dell bios for it, I think its A28 or something like that. Since I don't have an Nvidia heatsink, I'm just using a hyper 212 with a dab of thermal goop to keep it inplace.

What all do I need to make a maxwell gpu work in a M6800? I have the latest drivers from Nvidia, Windows 7 Sp1 is mostly upto date (I could do windows 10 but I prefer 7 since it has better compatability with some of the older games I play), and all the other drivers for the laptop are installed. I also got a beefed up 220w power brick since my laptop got shipped with a 90w power brick from the seller I got it from on ebay.

All I know about the 970m we have on hand is that it likely came out of a Clevo laptop. Weirdly, when I look on gpu-z, it says its from Dell so I don't know what to make of it.

 

You have to modify the NVIDIA driver INF file to accept the "unsupported" GPU+laptop combination. I only do this for Quadro cards so I can't provide easy/specific steps, however, the basic steps are listed here:
https://null-src.com/posts/nvidia-notebook-driver-inf-mod/post.php

GPU-Z will always show Dell if you have the card in a Dell laptop. Laptop GPU hardware IDs always show the system manufacturer in the subsystem field (it changes depending on what system you put it in) and that's all GPU-Z has to look at.